Josh in the exersaucer

WHAT FUN!  He'll work away at the toys in front of him as if he were sitting at his office desk. Then he'll notice someone looking at him, get excited to have made contact, and start bouncing up and down happily.

It also turns out to be a great cure for constipation, if that's ever a danger. (Why don't they market these for adults? Just put a tv screen on it...)  When combined with antibiotics, which lead to somewhat loose stools, the result can be, well, expansive.

So glad he finished the antibiotics yesterday!

I love to compare photos from when Sam was Josh's age. Somewhere I have a great one from the exersaucer.  Here's a silent movie, in fact. In lieu of the photo I want, here's a fun one of a very young Sam:

High of 50 expected tomorrow. Fall's here. Wonder what everyone's planning for the weekend?

Isn't this artistic?

Recall our time with Jan and Laurel Decher at camp this past summer? Jan is an amateur photographer. This is a shot he took with one of his fancy cameras. Or a vintage camera. I am not sure. I am sure it looks really nice.

Shown are his younger daughter Isabel and Sam at the start of the Stone Valley trail in Colton.

That thing from the other day's post

Sam wrote a song. Here it is. The woman you see is his art teacher. He wanted to perform it for her as well.

Weekend update

• Lots of good hanging out at home and house cleaning
• Including a Sunday nap (see photo)
• Oh, and a Zoo trip. No, wait--playground instead, where a friendly mother & child let us fly their spare kite
• Shot a butane-filled plastic film canisters using my officemate John's potato cannon
• Chicago-style pizza for dinner Saturday night with chocolate-chip-banana muffins for dessert!
• Josh generally improving, but still under the weather

Loved the beautiful weather, and eating on the sun porch.

The past two nights Josh has gotten us up 2-3 times as he's woken up happily and cheerily and totally awake at times when the rest of God's creation slumbers, making joyful moist raspberries in the dark and kicking his legs. 

Need to get him to nap more during the day. He's reverting to some sort of native nocturnalism. 

What is that thing?

Sam at school.
Photo from the weekly school mailing

Not sure what the black & white things are! Big piano surrogates? Any guesses?

They are doing a science experiment in his class. They have several nominally identical plants. One gets water, light and heat. Three others are missing water or light or heat. (Yes, Sam assures me they have a light on all the time in the fridge for the cold one.) Different students are in charge of each plant.

Sam's in charge of the lightless one.

His is doing the best.

Apparently this is in part because the student in charge of the one without any deficits was forgetting to water it.

His teacher says it takes a while but it works out in the end. But she also points out there is no such thing as a smooth experiment which involves collaboration! Good to learn that early. :-)

Josh's got a bad respiratory thing. We (mostly Susan) use a nebulizer on him several times a day for albuterol. Very rattly cough. But cheerful for all that. And still determined to learn to crawl.

Have a great weekend!

Shady Pines? Whispering Acres?

Today Sam and Josh and I went to the Whispering Pines mini golf course up by Lake Ontario. (Susan thinks it sounds more like a retirement home than a mini-golf course.) Sam had never gone there, and was, as expected, in heaven. It has the distinction of being listed on the National Historic Site Registry as the first mini golf course in the U.S., dating back to 1930. Its web site points out that it was "built from cobblestone taken from the historic Erie Canal while the canal system was being built". (We are assuming they didn't just steal the stones from the construction site.)

It wasn't the best course we've been to, but it had its charms. It definitely had a different feel from modern courses. Rather than lots of fountains and mechanical obstructions it had a wealth of tunnels. It even had one completely unique hole in which the tee-off green is 30' away from the putting green, separated by nothing more than grass!

Josh, spectating in front of the windmill

If you get a hole in one on the 18th green you get a free game. Our second time around the attendant--busy doing his AP economics homework--let Sam do the last hole as many times as he wanted, since no one else was there. Amazingly, Sam got two holes in one! Given his unconventional putting style, this was no mean feat.

And Josh, in the baby bjorn the first time around and in my arms the second was a good sport about the whole thing. It was a good distraction from his head cold.


The day was rounded out by a our first trip to a Gelato place on the Erie canal in Fairport. Susan and Sam went, and were nice enough to bring me back some amaretto gelato. Delicious! One of the benefits, I suppose, of living in such an Italian city.

The distance shot

The gelato place on the canal

Laughing Josh

Ultimate Shadow Cat

Learned on the way in this morning that Alex (our late cat) once bit Sam and now Sam has cat powers, and not just those of Shadow Cat but also those of Ultimate Shadow Cat. (I can show you line pencil drawings of both of these if that helps. Sam assures me he made them up, so they are not the same as the Marvel character or the comic from Charlie & Lola.)

Sam and Ethan apparently are using these powers to solve mysteries. Sam wasn't at liberty to tell me much, but apparently the first clue they found in the current mystery at school is a fingerprint. Shh!! We'll learn more when we need to know more.

I asked if Sam is fighting crime and he said not yet, they're just practicing.

Then Sam added, "I have every kind of animal power--even okapi!"

Susan and I are still trying to figure out what okapi animal powers are. I think it's the ability to graze. Susan thinks it must be the power to wear clashing colors.

Have a good weekend!

Thoughts on internal gravity

Recently at bedtime Sam said to me, out of the blue,

Daddy, if you get fired can you become a magician? And can you please learn a levitation trick to teach me?

I was of course curious (has he been talking to my boss?) and probed a little. Turns out he really just wants to learn how a magician might levitate something, and the fastest way from A to B for him is apparently for me to quit my job, learn it myself, and teach him.

On the way in he to school this morning Sam told me gravity doesn't work inside our bodies.  He said, instead, that the body controls how food moves through it. And he used some other example about how things could in principle move up and come out one's nose.

His conclusion, in his words, Gravity is not the "best" force inside a body, as it's so weak.

He thought for a minute then said that love is a stronger force.  I asked where that operates and he said in our hearts.

Poet and budding scientist!

Pleasant Saturday. First day of music class for Sam this morning. And in the afternoon Sam and I went to Mendon and hiked a trail we'd never been on before.  Very pretty, and saw three deer, two horses, and Sam brought back an inchworm which he found hanging in the air from a thread and became enthralled with.

Josh during morning Rolling Time

Sam was eager to remember these things, so for a while he walked along, chanting, "horses, deer, inchworm, horses, deer inchworm..." Then he just asked me to remember it.

On the drive home we had to pause while a big turkey vulture abandoned a carcass by the side of the road to fly up on a power line. And while driving through downtown Pittsford we were delayed by a wedding at a church we passed. Sam found these both so interesting that as soon as we walked in the door he ran up to Susan and said, "I saw a turkey vulture and a wedding!"

"And now, for my next selection..."

(Matt Sweeney, high-school acquaintance of Susan's and now fb friend, commented, "Turkey vulture? Oh, Sam. The grown-up name for that is wedding photographer.")

 The hike was not a short one, and the trails in Mendon are poorly marked so we ended up back tracking for a while. We were slowed by Sam's desire to carry an inchworm who for his part wanted to crawl away. I got a little impatient when we had to hunt for the fallen worm while being swarmed by mosquitoes. But we kept ourselves moving by looking forward to coming home and baking cookies.

Sam with his new inchworm

For the hike I had Josh in the baby bjorn. He really enjoyed it--he loves watching trees and really appreciates any sort of scenery. I was even able to give him a bottle while we were hiking and he was looking around at nature. That's one flexible baby!

Spent the evening with the Hulls, Sam running around with Gabriel. A good day for all concerned!

That was Saturday. Sunday's highlight was probably sitting around with the Zinkand-Dills at the dining-room table coloring after dinner. Fun!

That's Josh's head in the foreground.
Sam's just stood 10' from a deer

Labor Day Vacation

We spent Labor Day weekend up at camp. What fun! Didn't rain until Monday, so we were able to spend an afternoon at the state-park beach on Sat. Sunday I took Sam on a kayak ride to the Black Lagoon. For those not familiar with it, it's a little inlet hidden inside another inlet, near the state park. The local kids like to decorate it with Hallowe'eny things.

There was a coffin, a big skeleton hanging from a tree, two ham bones hanging from strings (?), several rocks painted with day-glow colors and labeled "the eyes of the lagoon" and a number of spooky signs. We learned from someone Susan knows whose husband grew up not too far from there that this has been a tradition for at least on generation. I remember seeing it when I was in high school, and it reaches back before that.

Sam loved it, and asked to go around it a couple of times.

Also saw eight turtles in the Black Lagoon. So there.

Josh has started on rice cereal! For a long time he's appeared to watch us enviously while we eat solids, and now he's had a taste of the good life, and as Susan said, we've found one of his strengths!

He's also been quite happy bouncing up and down in the exer-saucer. Not crawling yet, but I am sure he's working on that. Josh absolutely loved looking at the water and the trees from the deck. On Sunday morning thunderstorms rumbled by on either side of us, giving us dark clouds and high winds but little actual rain. Josh and I stood out on the deck, and he was captivated by the meteorological drama.

The weekend included a fair amount of laying about as well (see photo). Sam had a fever for six days, sometimes quite high. This was hand-foot-mouth virus, which I keep thinking of as hoof-and-mouth disease, which it isn't. Poor guy was home and isolated for a long time. When he finally licked it, it was a relief to all.

For two weeks before Sam got sick he went each morning to a pottery class at the Art Gallery. He had a great time and produced some really neat stuff. While he was in class each morning Susan hung out in the gallery Atrium with a laptop and sometimes with Josh.

One last Samecdote: The other day Sam told Susan he could think faster than he could talk. (I am not sure he's aware this is untrue of many people, including teenagers and politicians.) Anyway, he immediately demonstrated it by saying "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" five times fast, and then standing, silently, looking intently at nothing, while he did the same thing in his head, even faster.

Five year olds are fun.

He started school, btw. First grade! A very smooth transition, so far. When asked yesterday what's different from kindergarten he told us about "math minutes", where you go through as many math problems as you can in a particular number of minutes. He was very proud to tell us that he was the only one in the class who didn't get any wrong--and he's the youngest! Of course, the older kids have multiplication and division and he just had addition, but it was a nice boost, and well done.