A couple weeks ago, we messed with the clocks and now sunset comes an hour earlier. It's basically dark at 5 PM now. But that's not what the title refers to. The title refers to the fact that I now have an 8 PM bedtime. So my "after work life" has been significantly abbreviated. For the first 4 months or so, Hannah was pretty good at falling asleep, and so we just kind of let her fall asleep at whatever time she started to show drowsiness (and in conjunction with a feeding). But as she is getting to the age where she's increasingly interested in the world around her, that method is starting to lead to over-tiredness and more challenges at night. So we're in the process of trying to build bedtime habits to help her understand that it's time to go to sleep, and start to encourage her body to wind down before it reaches over-tiredness. So we'll see how that goes over the next month or so.
Incidentally, the early bedtime is also necessary because I'm having early mornings. Despite my best efforts, I still struggle to convert her from sleeping in my arms to sleeping in the crib, and so I'm losing a lot of sleep to just holding her for a bit for her to settle down and reset so I can try again. Maybe it's the accumulation of lack of sleep, or maybe I really am sleeping a little bit less than I used to, but I do find myself feeling the fatigure a little more than I did before. I still feel like I'm getting better-than-average sleep for a 4-6 month old baby, and so I'll cut my complaining about it here.
Developmental milestones include baby laughter, which is happening with increased frequency, more frequent vocalizations (still monosyllabic), mobility by rolling belly to back a couple times in a row. She's also starting to reach for toys in front of her and shifting her body to get closer (pre-crawling moves). Her grip strength is improving, which I'm measuring by the level of pain from the baby pinches. Her most frequent spontaneous laughter (that I've observed) comes from when the cat comes close. I help her to pet him and that works mostly okay. But she has also really grabbed at the fur and made Thor unhappy more than once (no cat scratches yet). In my mind, I'm responsible when I'm helping her to scratch him, and he's responsible if he comes too close on his own accord. It works fine in principle.
She's getting big. It's exciting to see how her body now fills the space of the bassinet that used to feel so big compared to her. I'm also feeling her size when I go to pick her up. She's not quite twice her birth weight, but I'm no longer able to lift her up from any random position, and I need to work harder to adjust my body when she's on me. She's starting to develop some chubby thighs. They're nothing like the super-chonky thighs that some babies have, but given how long she is, I wouldn't really expect that from her.
We're doing our best to get out before the really cold winter weather starts to kick in. We walked a different part of the Wetlands Park the other day. I got out on a walk with friends (the first time taking Hannah out without Joan) a couple weeks ago. We took her to a pop up pumpkin patch thing (not really a pumpkin patch, but like a mini-carnaval thing that had a petting zoo, some rides, and a bunch of pumpkins scattered around). She's really enjoying being outside. Sometimes, I just sit in the back yard with her and she's perfectly content to look around at the trees and sky, and listen to the varioud sounds. We're still avoiding indoor spaces in public, but we've done a couple outdoor meals with friends.
The semester is in the final stretch. Just a few more weeks and then we wrap things up. I'm already starting to have some other projects come into focus, but I can't lose sight of what's going on now.
The MATH 125 course is closing off strong. I really like how the trajectory of the course has felt, and I'm especially enjoying these last few sections on competitive games. One thing about this course is that there really aren't course materials out there, and so I'm going to make some. This is nothing new for me, but this is the first time that I've felt like I've had a "passion project" course where I can literally put whatever I want into it. So far, the courses have basically been courses that are part of a well-defined pathway (precalculus and calculus or remedial mathematics) and so it was more about figuring out how I think it's best to present that stuff. But with this course, I'm just doing things that I think are fun and interesting. And so the ability to refine this over the coming years is kind of exciting. I'm going to be trying to set aside little bits of time over the next 9 months before I teach it again so that I've got a decent chunk of it available to them as a textbook instead of as just a pile of notes.
The MATH 181 course is also winding down. We have an exam tomorrow and then one last chapter to cover in the next several weeks. I think that if I were to do a hands-on Friday thing again in the future, I would make part of it an opportunity for students to present their solutions to each other. I'm finding that the textbook that we use probably has solutions posted on the internet, and so I'm seeing students write things that I know they wouldn't ever write on their own in their solutions. And I've asked students a few times about whatever it is that they're showing me only to find that they literally have no idea what's happening. And I think that making them present to the class might be the way I get past all of that.
For the physics course that I'm developing, I found a video for a video that has something in it that I want to do. I put it out there, and the other faculty are on board, so as long as we don't run into problems with it, we're going to try to built an egg cannon to fire eggs at somewhere around 300 miles per hour, and then have the students propose ways to catch them without breaking them. This will be a basis to talk about things like impulse and acceleration, and all sorts of things like that. (The new physics guy is also thinking about doing pumpkin chunking and building a trebuchet, so I'm in good company.) It reminds me of the cannon we built down in Mexico a number of years ago. The construction of the egg cannon is basically the same, except that instead of igniting an accelerant (we used Axe Body Spray, because it was middle schoolers and we knew they would have some), it's a pressurized chamber. I would love for this to be one of the things that students talk about for years after they've taken the course.
I've spent a lot of time trying to develop something to work with the institutional database to create something like an automatic advising form for the math students, and I've got a good starting point for something that could have a lot of potential for applications beyond math. It's not a particularly exciting thing from the outside, but I've been getting to really understand another aspect of what goes on in the background at the institutional level, and that's always interesting for me to experience.
As for the little stuff: Ukulele and piano are getting nonzero play time, but still not much. With Christmas season nearly here, I kind of feel like relearning some Christmas music. The Christmas tree went up this last weekend, which is the earliest that I've put it up. Thor is doing well. I don't really have an update on him because I can't think of anything that has changed. I'd say something about something else, but I can't think of anything else. So I guess I'm done.
