Pete Sounds

Sir speaks!

"A good day for ducks"


Singing the Kipper theme song

A package from Oklahoma

Chris writes: An unknown lady in Oklahoma sent me, with no explanation, a copy of The Timewaster Letters, which turns out to be an absolutely cringingly hilarious collection of fake letters and their real responses. It's exactly the sort of thing that appeals to my sense of humor.

Either Mrs Lott knows me way better than I know her, or one of my friends put her up to this.

C'mon, fess up!

Wow, it takes pictures too

Just emptied out the digital camera and found some snaps from the summer. Here is the boy in Dad's car:

Yesterday it was beautiful outside. A perfect fall day. Peter fell asleep in the hammock with me and we stayed there for ages. Just before he woke up, his mom came with the camera. This was one of the happiest hours of my life.

These and more are posted on our picasa web albums page.

Summer pictures round-up

Daddy's been abusing the video camera a lot, so there are fewer pictures this summer. Still a lot, though, and we just uploaded a bunch. Sorry, we usually don't have time to select just the best ones.

The pictures below and more are available on the "all the kid pics" link which appears on the right.

Going to the Y

Here is a short video of a happy boy who is about to be taken to his favorite place, the pool at the YMCA. He's talking a lot these days.

Link to video

Garden of earthly delights

Chris types today.

We are managing to do a little more than just survive this summer, and it's been great. We installed a fence in the backyard to make space for Peter to play. . I feel very cpable now that I have mastered some basic operations with concrete. And we've done some gardening too

Our tomato plants have grown a lot, and have so far provided us with exactly one perfect, delicious tomato. Maybe we will get some more. The zucchinis were looking very promising, but then we learned the hard way that zucchinis need way less water than tomatoes do, so next year we will not be planting them next to each other. The eggplants have made a lot of foliage and a couple of very elegant-looking blossoms but so far no veg. Stay tuned for an update. Peppers are popping and herbs are healthy.

G has planted a lot of stuff for butterflies and hummingbirds, but I will let her blog about that the next time she has time to herself. Should be sometime before 2018.

I would like to post the video I made of "out" hummingbird. G hung the feeders and made homemade bird-juice, and carefully kept them topped up for weeks before we finally saw a hummingbird. But once it showed up, it stayed. Maybe with a partner. We see them every day now, prety much everytime we go outside to watch for a little bit.

Hummingbird visit from Chris D'Amato on Vimeo.

 

I made this video with our handy little Flip camera, attached to the feeder hanging bracket with a visegrip. Anybody know what kind of hummingbird this might be?

It seems like there are two of them in our yard, they look very similar. They like to perch on the twigs above the feeder, so we get to inspect them a lot more that I ever did before.

Somewhere I have great pictures of this amazing caterpillar that appeared on one of G's herbs, I will see if I can find it.

Meanwhile, I better get back to work. Expect to see more blog posts during the second half of the summer when I have schoolwork to do.

Peter's new train set

Peter has been enjoying Thomas and Friends cartoons, so we bought him a little wooden Thomas which instantly became his favorite toy. He would carry it everywhere and even took it to bed, and he spend a lot of time playing with trains and trucks on a little Matchbox playset someone gave him.

So the other day we found a train set on craigslist for him. This is a time-lapse video of how he spent the day.

He is absent from the video only when he was physically dragged off for naptime, meals, and socialization with his cousins Thomas and Molly who were visiting from North Carolina.

Peter's new train set from Chris D'Amato on Vimeo.

More babies

Andrew and Farah have some new pictures of Amelia up. She is adorable. Looks like most of Andrew's genes are recessive, thankfully.

She has been a very avid crawler, taking an early interest in one of her mom's favorite sports. They are lucky parents, track stars have very low equipment costs. That's what we are trying to steer Peter toward soccer.

A few words

You should visit (yes you) so we can all go to Fosterfields together. We know all the animals by name except the chickens. It's great. Yesterday Peter went and stood by the back door and said "cow" until his mother took him to the farm.

He's talking more and more, and mixing sounds with signs. Still working on the final consonants, so we are Ma and Da. His favorite nocturnal raptor is an Ow. He loves when he can say words correctly, like "boo-boo". And he will kiss your boo-boo for you if invited, with a little smooching noise.

And he has been signing some complex nouns, like bird+bath and the sign for chicken which is a bird, pecking. His mom sees a lot of sentences from him but I had my first the other day at the farm when he said "pigs, sleeping."

Roadtrek RV for sale to good home

Click to Play

A walkaround of our 1994 Roadtrek 190 Versatile

Peter vs the safety gate

Here is a short video showing the child being creative.

It was a great safety gate for a while.

Everything's coming up ... roses?

Wow, I have posted a lot of videos lately. The thing I hate about videos on the web is that you have to watch them in real time, you can't scan them quickly and ignore the boring parts, like you are doing with what I am writing right now.

Spring is here. Crocuses then daffodils then tulips came up all over our yard, which continues to be miraculous to me. The dracunculus vulgaris has also reappeared, much to the dismay of my lovely wife.

She's a great wife, so I tolerate her idiosyncracies, which include a dislike of cars that catch on fire even a little bit and an inexplicable antipathy to giant flowers that smell like rotten meat and attract hordes of flies during the hottest days of the summer.

So, if anyone would like to adopt little Draco please come to our house with a shovel and a bucket.

Free range chickens

We got a new toy, about which I will blog in the fullness of time, but in the meanwhile here is a short movie of Peter with chickens and some little girls. We went to Fosterfields yesterday and had a great time.

There are a bunch more clips from the day, which you can see if you follow the link to the google vid.

Sometimes you must love the internet

Several great Alan Watts lectures, animation produced by the South Park guys.

Nick plays KCRW!

With Lizz Wright on Morning Becomes Eclectic, one of our favorite music shows!

A day in the life

Here's a snippet that captures several hours of life in our living room on a typical weekday. I set the webcam to capture one frame every second then I ran them together using virtualdub. I removed a couple hours where nothing happened except for the cat walking through once in a while.

Oh man, I just got a great idea for the next version. Check back soon.

Sir Edmund Percival Hillary

Sir's climbing abilities are advancing. To his credit, he did ask for help getting down.

His favorite spoken word of the week is "Daddy."

His favorite signing word of the week is "cold." Chris and I were talking about cold at the dinner table and Peter jumps up and signs "the ice cream is cold" then runs to the window and signs "outside is cold." I gave him popsicles last weekend because he was cutting molars. Later in the week I was asking him if he wanted a cracker in the car and he said he wanted a popsicle. We don't know the sign for popsicle, so he pointed to the popsicle stick on the floor (alas, there are many things on the floor of my car) and signed cold. I knew exactly what he was talking about.

All of a sudden he started to ask to watch "Blues Clues" a lot! His request coincided with him actually playing Blues Clues. For those of you who don't know the show, the characters find a series of clues and try to figure out the answer to a puzzle. The first time I saw that he was "playing" was when they asked "which of these piles has 3 things?" Peter signs "the bananas" and the actor says "that's right, the bananas." I thought-- this must be a fluke. Maybe he just saw bananas on screen and signed that coincidently-- but the other piles were all things that he knew the signs for and when he signs just to say things that he recognizes, he'll sign the whole picture. Then I thought, well, he's seen this episode 100 time and he memorized the answer-- but then we got a new Blues Clues DVD from the library and the first time he watched it, they asked "which animal goes above and below the water?" and he signs, "the dolphin." I had no idea they could know all this at such a young age!

Yesterday, I wasn't planning to put him in baby-sitting at the Y -- but he saw the other kids playing with the toys and begged to go in. When I left, he ran off to make some pretend phone calls. I had no idea that pretend play started so early! When I came back to get him, he had made a friend. The sitters said this little boy was crying when his mom left him and Peter went to console him. They continued to play together the rest of the time. I ended up leaving him an extra half hour because he wanted to play with his friend. Sniff! He's growing up so fast!!

My Endorsement

I encourage you to ignore this and I hope you will feel free to disagree, but here it is:

I sent money to Barack Obama the other day. I want him to be the next president.

I don't think I know him very well, but I have never heard him say anything idiotic or reprehensible. I don't mean to damn him with faint praise, I think that's extraordinary these days.

He seems to match my priorities well:

I think the best way to deal with America's foreign problems is to stop making them worse. There are no meaningful foreign threats to the physical security of Americans that can't be fixed with honesty and intelligence.

I think that our top national priority should be to restore and promote America's "soft" infrastructure: an educated population, unafraid of penury, full of optimism and enthusiasm. Such an America would have nothing to fear from anyone or anything.

I want to be proud of America again.

no no no!

I've written before about Peter's spoken vocabulary. All of the words I listed before are "baby talk" words. Now he's said his first "real" word. I don't know how to describe the difference that I'm getting at-- but if you heard it, you'd know what I mean. Anyway, the word is: NO! He goes around the house demonstrating all the things he's not allowed to do saying no, no, no. He also says no to food he doesn't want to eat or activities he doesn't want to do. Sometimes he just says it because he knows he says it well and he's pleased with saying it. I'm trying to get him to say yes instead with little success.

He made his first sign language sentence this week. He pointed to the radiator and asked, "Hot?" then he went and touched it and said, "No. Cold."

Last week he clearly needed to go potty and I asked him if he wanted to go. He said no. Then I asked him where his potty was. He pointed to the guest room. I'm thinking that he's confused because there is no potty in the guest room. I tell him it not there. He tells me it is there. This continues a while and I drop it. Later I was in the guest room and I find that he'd hidden a bag of poopy diapers in the guest room. He knew.

bragging about my fella

They did an article about Chris' school in the local paper and featured Chris as a model teacher. Check it out!