And what a month it has been.
Hannah's sleep overnight has gotten a little worse. There are times that she's up every hour. After watching some sleep materials, one thing that we're thinking about is whether she has reflux. The pediatrician wants to see how she does as she starts to eat solids (see below), but we've got that in the back of our minds in case she continues to struggle. To try to support overnight sleeping, we're trying to get more intentional about a nap schedule. It's not going terribly, but it's not great. We're having a hard time getting her to be consistent with going down, and sometimes she just fusses through the nap period (even though we've got the shades pulled, the lights off, and the hum of the air filter providing white noise). We have some materials on baby sleep that we're looking at, but it mostly seems that it's going to be some patience while we work with her to develop sleep skills.
Developmental milestones: We replaced the bassinet with a crib because she's so big. At her 6 month check, I think she weighed 16 pounds, 1 ounce. She's semi-crawling now. It's not what I would consider a full crawl, but it's getting really close. Although, apparently crawling isn't considered a developmental milestone anymore (according to the CDC) because there just isn't good data showing that this is attained at a consistent age, and some children skip it entirely. Hannah may end up being one of those.
She's also able to get herself to a sitting position on her own, and her sitting is pretty stable. There's still a little bit of wobble after a little while, but given how fast she's progressed to this point (it feels like just a week or so), there's no reason to think that she won't get there very soon. At just shy of six months, we started to introduce solids. It started with some banana, but she didn't really eat it. So we moved on to avocados, which seemed to work better for her. Maybe it's because she was better able to mush it around with her hands to get enough to stick for her to suck it off. In any event, after eating the avocado, her poop came out green, which I guess means that it made it into her mouth and through her system.
She hasn't transitioned into full babbling just yet. It's still just the non-repetitive monosyllabic vowel sounds. But we're starting to pick up some consonant sounds at the front end. She mades sounds that can be construed to be a "ma" or a "hey" but it's not clear that there's a true intent behind those sounds. I don't think I'm hearing intentional changes of pitch or anything like that, either. But from what I understand, that stuff should be coming soon.
We're still getting out to do family walks and such, but it's been harder for me to go on them since the sun goes down early and it gets chilly after that point. But now that I'm on break, I'll be able to go out a bit more often, and sometimes those will be daddy-daughter walks because Joan will have meetings or whatever that she's got to do in the middle of the day. I would like to believe that she's starting to take in the different locations a bit, and is getting curious about those things, but it's really hard to tell right now how much she's taking in. She sometimes has a very serious look on her face, but the narrative that I build around that is that she's just really focused on taking in information and that she just has that type of thinking face. She does have a playful smiling face when we're in the house, so it's not that she's always stoic or anything like that. And it doesn't read as fear to me. She doesn't seem upset in any way. The other interpretation I've had for it is boredom, but I just don't think that's the case.
Thanksgiving happened between the last post and this one. We didn't see any family or friends, but we did go on our own little adventure that morning. We decided to hit up a few Chinese bakeries and do a dan tat tour. So we stopped by 85 Degree, Diamond Bakery, Sunville Bakery, and the Las Vegas Baking Company and compared the various tarts. I took some brief notes on each, but I don't feel like trying to transcribe that information in detail. One was still warm from being baked, a couple were room tempearture, and one was cold from the refridgerator case. They varied in the level of custardiness, from being really eggy to being a really smooth custard. They were all sweet, but some were quite sweet. The doughs varied quite a bit, too. One was more like a pie dough, while another was very flaky. My memories of dan tats were from familly gatherings when we were growing up, when a relative would bring them in from Chinatown. Those were typically very flaky, to the point that you could see the layers of dough separating slightly as you looked around the edges, and I definitely remember them being sweet. Sometimes we would bake them in the toaster oven before eating them, though we would also eat them at room temperature. And so it wasn't that we were chasing that standard, but it was really just the point of reference that I had going into it. I would have eaten any of them if they were put in front of me, and I would definitely be interested in going back and trying something like that again. (But not pineapple buns! I remember being very disappointed as a kid when I discovered that pineapple buns had no pineapple. Maybe the next trip will be savory. Char siu baos?)
The semester has come to a close. I just got my last set of papers graded yesterday and submitted my grades. I don't know that I have a ton to say about my classes this semester that I haven't already said. I'm really looking forward to continuing to flesh out the MATH 125 materials. That's really my big takeaway.
The work on next semester's classes has already started, and it's going to be interesting to see how well I'm able to put things together while at home with the baby. In the past, I'd have a semi-regular work schedule of going in to work or working on things from home, but I didn't used to have another person to have to care for. And Joan has a bunch of her own work stuff to do, so I need to give her the time and space for that. The good news is that none of the classes this semester will be new, and I have other materials to build on.
Complete College America had its annual gathering in Las Vegas this year, so a bunch of people from our campus went. Unfortunately, I found most of the talks to be pretty dull and uninteresting. The only one that I thought was interesting was the panel of Nevada college presidents, and that was more to just see/hear some of the vision for the state and some ideas that are floating around. So I spent a lot of time at the conference just thinking about other projects that I had in mind. But that's how it goes sometimes.
Our campus hosted the West Coast Number Theory Conference, which is our first time hosting a conference at that level. I wasn't involved in the planning or anything, so I was just able to show up for a few talks and see what was going on. The conference was only about 35 people, which is big enough to have good variety, but small enough to still feel informal and casual. They had a "problem session" period where people would pose problems, and I was able to bring up the bad cancellation problem (16/64 = 1/4, which is obtained by cancelling the 6s -- now find more examples and generalize), which made me officially part of the record. Not that this was the goal, but it just felt like a fun problem to share. I also attended a "proof" of the Collatz conjecture that definitely wasn't, and I guess this conference has had its share of people claiming to have big proofs of things that ended up being mostly junk. But the group wasn't harsh or anything, and there was at least an attempt to help the person see that their proof was circular. There was also a person who is a retired academic that was involved in some sort of trust that was thinking about trying to make a math movie to make math (specifically number theory) a more attractive field of study. I don't know if it's going to go anywhere, but if there's a math movie that shows up in the next five to seven years about a dancer that learns number theory, I will be able to say that I knew about it way in advance.
And I would be remiss if I failed to mention the shooting at UNLV. There was no threat to our campus, but we were still shut down for a day and a half after the incident out of an abundance of caution. It happened the second-to-last week of the semester, which threw off a bunch of exam and project scheduling for all sorts of classes. I know some folks that were in lock down, and there were also some students that mentioned that they had siblings and friends that were locked down. When it all started, we (faculty, staff, students) were getting messages through various outlets, from emails to text messages to pop-ups on our computers. I happened to see some news coverage of it before we shut things down, so I was not in as much of a shock when the announcement to evacuate campus came through. But there was a sort of weird sense leaving campus that reminded me of when the bomb threat came through in the summer, except that there were far more people on campus than when that happened last summer. Leaving campus was very orderly, and there's not really much for that happened for me. I'm certain it would have been very different if it happened on our campus, because even as close as this was to us, it still feels like it happened "over there" instead of "right here" to me.
Other stuff: Thor is doing well. Both Hannah and I are getting a little bit of piano time right now, which is fun. I haven't picked up the ukulele in the last month, and it's exactly that type of inconsistency that makes it hard to actually learn anything. But that's okay. We're looking forward to spending a little bit of time with some folks in the next couple weeks through the Christmas season. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
