New Photos

As I mentioned in my last post, we haven't been taking as many pictures lately, but here are a few from the last month:

Dinner time expressions:

Helping mom with laundry:

New Videos

Last month, we took a lot more videos than pictures.  As Davis has gotten more mobile and vocal, the videos have captured him very well.

Here are some highlights from the videos linked below:

Playing with Domino:

Wresting with Bruce the Bear:

Getting ready to body slam Bruce:

Playing with Scarfs:

Here are the videos on YouTube:

• Davis plays peek-a-boo with a scarf
• Davis plays with Domino and mom
• Davis rolls around with Bruce the bear
• Davis plays with Domino

As of 8:30 pm Eastern, the videos are still processing so you may have to wait a while before they are available.

A belated list of developments

We've been busy here in the Naegle household.  John has been experimenting with new ways to streamline our meal preparations and so life has seemed a bit less chaotic during the week.  However, we like filling in less cooking time with more play time, so there still hasn't been much time for blogging.  There has been a lot of exciting new developments with Davis this last couple of weeks!

• Thursday when I picked Davis up from daycare he said ma-ma!
• Friday morning he took his first step!  
• He understands the word goodbye. Whenever you say goodbye he starts to wave.  The poor guy is going to be very confused about what it means though, since we're so excited to see him wave we say goodbye even if we aren't goodbye-ing.  (We're trying to limit it).
• There's a song he's trying to sing.  It goes 'deedle-dee-dee deedle dee dee'  etc. and whenever I sing him a verse he'll start saying 'dee dee dee dee'.
• He played peek-a-boo with us today! John will probably link to a video later.  For a while he's really enjoyed pulling scarfs off of our heads and today he kept putting the scarf on his head so we would pull it off...the results were amusing to say the least. 
• Davis is continually getting better at standing without support.  He now consistently lets go of whatever he used to pull himself up on and stands for a while before grabbing it again or sitting down.
• He's good at sharing!  We went to an indoor playground yesterday and he handed toys to other kids and last week he pulled out every toy from his basket and handed it to Dad.  
• He continues to be amazed with Domino and we continue to be amazed at Domino's extreme patience with Davis as he pulls his ears, tail, and feet and pets, smacks, and tackles him.  We do our best to control the interactions, but we have become quite comfortable with Domino's gentleness and calmness when it comes to Davis.  On the plus side, Davis is getting much better at petting Domino as opposed to just grabbing him.  Lilly continues to give Davis a wide berth.

Big questions about life stuff

I'll be graduating this May, which begs the question, what am I going to be doing starting in June?  I've been doing a lot of soul searching and a good deal of questioning other people who have already taken one of the paths I could take now.  I feel really confident at this point that indeed an academic career, in its purest form, is not for me.  I love doing the day-to-day nitty gritty science and technology stuff.  I hate writing about it. Well, for a bit writing about it is fun, but for the most part, not.  I'm definitely in the toughest part of my Ph.D. at this point in terms of that, the fun stuff is dwindling while the not-fun is picking up.  I am constantly finding myself thinking about new work and realize I don't have time for new work, it's time to finish the old work (although I am continually finding new work in the old work, it's a vicious cycle).

It's great that I have it narrowed down to industry or a research lab kind of position, but now we have to ask.. Where?  John and I would love to get back to Seattle, but the prospects for my kind of work are bleak.  There are a couple of options, but a couple doesn't seem secure enough for the long haul.  There are many in the Boston area and definitely some opportunities in San Fransisco.  San Fransisco is a whole lot closer to our families than Boston is, but it's in a region where John has never really been interested in living.  One thing our move to Boston has taught me is that we can really find things to do anywhere we live. Even though the skiing isn't great out here, cross-country isn't bad and bicycling is great! On the other hand, John and I are really feeling the desire to buy a house and John found tonight that it's 27% more expensive in San Francisco than it is here and there seems to be even greater sprawl there with regards to where companies are relative to homes (i.e. we could end up working a very long commute from where we live if we ended up finding jobs in different towns).  It's a lot to think about in a short amount of time.  My hope is to chip away at job applications a few at a time, focusing now on Seattle and starting in March, interviewing in Boston.

New Year's resolutions

It's always fun at the turn of the New Year to decide what it is that I would like to better about myself.  Someday, my resolution will involve doing that all year round, but that's not this year.  Instead I have three goals.

1. To drive more often.  By default, whenever we go somewhere in the car, John drives.  I want to make a concerted effort to drive at least half the time.
2. To conserve water while washing dishes.  I'm very bad at leaving the water running and could greatly reduce my water usage if I turned the water off while scrubbing.
   
3. To take one or more hobbies deeper.  I'm still deciding on developing some concrete goals for this.  This stems from the fact that I seem to make a hobby of collecting hobbies.  Here are all the things I have tried at various times in my life:

• Languages (in chronological order): Latin, Italian, Spanish, French.  
• Sports: cycling, triathlons, running, soccer, racquetball, tennis, volleyball, snowshoeing, cross-country skiing, downhill skiing, golf, rollerblading, ultimate frisbee,
  
• Outdoor activities: camping, backpacking, sailing, white water kayaking, sea kayaking, sculling
  
• Musical instruments: guitar, voice (ok..this consists entirely of one high school musical).
  
• Crafts: cheesemaking, food canning, cross-stitch, knitting, jewelry making, photography, wheel pottery, glass etching, creative writing
  
• Other: motorcycle riding

I think the hobbies I want to focus on are French and photography.  I'm still deciding what the exact goal will be for improving my French this year, but I think after I defend, I would like to join a conversational group and focus on the spoken aspects of the language.  For photography, I am picking up developing black and white film again and would like to enter a photograph in a competition.  A New England state fair of some kind would be ideal.  Below are a few pictures from my first roll of self-developed film in about 13 years!

 

 

New Photos

I added a few new photos to our picasa albums recently.  Here are a few highlights.

Bath time:

Cats in hats:

Walking on the ice at spy pond:

Walking on the bike trail on a warmer day:

Banging on pots with a spoon:

Playing peek-a-boo with mom:

Standing:

More standing:

No more standing:

Scarfs:

Davis Developments

Davis has shown visible signs of development in the last week that have been very exiciting.  These are just some of the obvious signs that he is developing and learning - I'm sure we are missing many more things that are going on.  He remains a super happy guy and loves to play and chase the cats.

Waving

Kristen mentioned waving in her earlier post, and he is continuing to wave and it seems as if he gets it. This morning he waved to Kristen when she dropped him off at day care, making a tough task a little better.   This evening, without prompting, he waved to Kristen as she left to go to a working mom's group.  We'll try to get a video at some point -- his waving is rideculousy cute.  Kristen tried to teach him elbow-elbow, wrist-wrist-wrist, but he seems to favor a full arm wave.

Standing

Davis has been standing a lot.  He doesn't stand up from sitting yet, but he pulls himself up on something (walls, toys, furniture, etc) and has been letting go frequently.  Usually he will pull himself up with one toy in his hand, find another toy while he is crusing then let go.  Our friends Jarasa and Dave suggested handing him toys while he is pulled up to motivate him to let go.  This has often worked to get him to let go.

He is standing a lot more often - from just once or twice this weekend for a few seconds, to dozens of times this week with a personal record of 24 seconds (I was counting, I'm a dork).  The cutest moment came when he was standing while holding a scarf in each hand and his mouth and waving his arms around.  I tried to get a picture, but I was a little late.  I did get a few more pictures of his free standing.

Standing:

Scarfs:

Perpetual motion

One of Davis' christmas toys has resulted in a quite unexpected discovery: a perpetual motion machine.  We've been playing with this toy for a while with Davis - we put the balls in and he smashes them with the mallet.  He has enjoyed the smashing, but on Monday, he figured out that he could put the balls back in as well as smash them out.  This resulted in 10 to 15 minutes of putting a ball in, picking up the hammer, smashing the ball, dropping the hammer and repeating.  I captured a video of a few minutes of this.  This was repeated last night with a great deal of enthusiasm.  Earlier, all of the smashing and putting the balls back were done with his left hand but today he smashed with one hand and put the balls back with the other.