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!

recommendation

We really love "Signing Time!"

It was created by the family of a deaf child. It has so much heart and wonderful music. Peter really enjoys it-- and actually, Chris & I do too. We found the whole series at our local library.

At first, only Chris & I were learning from the DVDs but after Peter had been signing for 3 months or so he started learning from the DVDs. I know this because lately he started signing a bunch of words that I never taught him. I can also tell a difference in the the way he watches. It's like you can see the wheels turning in his head.

I've started using some of the songs at the sing-a-long I lead at the library. Several moms said those are their kids favorite songs -- and I see them really learning the signs too.

milestone

Yesterday Peter made pee-pee in the potty for the first time. Today he made his first poopy in the potty. After he learned the sign for potty he started telling me that he had to go. My mom said that I should take that as a sign that he was ready for potty training. I borrowed a potty from a friend. The next time he told me he had to go I tried sitting him on the little potty-- he seemed afraid to sit on it, so I put it in a corner and let the whole thing go. Weeks later he pulls it out of the corner, sits on it and signs for me to undress him-- but when I came to take his clothes off he signs for me to take him upstairs to the grown up potty. I did. And he sat on it no problem-- but no pee pees came. Chris said he would have a hard time peeing in front of his Mom, so yesterday when Peter asked I let Chris take him to the bathroom and it worked! Today he was able to make it work with Mommy in attendance.

childproofing defeated

So, Thursday 29 November I go into the kitchen to see if we had marmalade, or if I needed to add it to my shopping list. I was in there less than a minute. I hear a squeal from the dining room that sounds a little too happy. I come back in and Peter is in the middle of the dining room table eating the salt. I'd never seen him climb before and instantly he is an expert.

Monday 3 December, I slammed the index finger of my dominant hand in the car door rendering it useless for a week. Wouldn't you know it? Peter proceeds to defeat almost every bit of baby proofing we've done that week. He easily climbs the barrier to get to the stairs. He climbs my accordion to get onto a side table that has an interesting antique lamp. And he's figured out how to pull climbable things over to unclimbable things so he can reach them.

Fortunately, he's pretty good at climbing down stairs and tall objects and he seems to remember which things I've told him are hot -- but still, he really can't be left alone now. And he's so fast. The same week as the salt incident he ran away from me at the pool and almost jumped into the deep end before I could get there.

He's starting to really get into books now. He really listens and signs all the words that he knows and asks about pictures of things that he doesn't know the words for. Hours of fun. Last week he asked me to read "Goodnight Moon" to him in the middle of the day. When we got to the part where you start to say goodnight to everything he started crying. He was inconsolable until I made it clear that he didn't really have to go to bed.

He's signing all the time now. He signs to ask for what he wants, when he sees an object he recognizes in real life or in a picture, and also when he hears a word he knows either in conversation or in a song. Chris and I were making a curry and looking for fish sauce at our local grocery. Peter starts signing "Fish" just to be part of the conversation. We like to watch Northern Exposure, which has a moose in the credits. Peter will start signing "Moose" now during the opening scene-- before the music has even started to let us know that he knows there is going to be a moose.

He's extremely verbal now. He'll make long streams of sounds-- like sentences. Sometimes the sounds sound like words. Sometime they don't. He is very good at imitating the musicality and flow of the way he hears people talk. It's very disconcerting to hear how he hears me and to see my gestural life mimicked.

Small creatures talking

We had a great weekend. Boy news first: I was on record as being dubious about the whole infant sign language thing, but I am a believer now. The kid talks all the time.

He talk about what he wants: eat and drink have been consistant for a while now, but he's starting to get more specific and increasing his vocabulary. In the kitchen this weekend, we saw him ask for a banana for the first time. He's was pointing but we kept not understanding, so he just made the sign for banana and our jaws dropped. It's not one of those signs you can easily misinterpret either, you hold up your index finger and make a peeling motion with your other hand. He said it clear as day.

He also likes to talk about what he sees, which mostly means lots of animal signs. Anything large and quadrupedal gets the horse sign, but that's not bad. The difference between horse, cow, donkey, and moose signs are pretty finicky. He came to visit my high school class on Friday and impressed everyone by correctly identifying the animals we found with google image search.

And to think that without sign language I might have no idea how much goes on in his head! I might not have known he could tell a cat from a dog, much less a picture of a dog from a picture of a horse! Credit to his mom, again, on this one.

So here's me, psychology grad, certified teacher, didn't know anything at all until this kid came along.

Yesterday Peter went to visit my folks while Grey and I went to see the Golden Compass. It was great! I found it much more emotionally involving than the rest of the epic fantasy type movies (Narnia, Star Wars, Hobbits, etc.) and I thought that the seditious themes were portrayed fairly true to the books. Any more overt and it would have been caricature, there is so much less room for imagination and subtlety in movies.

I'm writing a lot this morning because my lesson is coming hard, but at least I am getting something done, right?

Us, you, and your mailbox

I really love how a blog post lets you reach your friends in a way they can ignore without hurting your feelings. Here's another time I am relying on this feature.

If you are reading this, you are one of our friends. We want to send you one of our new Christmastime cards. We have probably lost your address. Can you help?

Would you consider filling in this obnoxious form to tell us where to send your card? It's completely private and will make it much less likely that we lose your address in the chaos of Chris's inbox.

Here is a picture of Peter from Halloween that I really like.

Things I learned this morning

My morning commute is often a time for reflection and contemplation, a quiet time on cruise control with coffee and a bagel.

But this morning I learned three new things:

1. There is at least one coyote living in Boonton, NJ

2. A Cadillac at 60mph can brake and maneuver more abrubtly than you might think

3. Coyotes are extremely nimble