All of a sudden, there are 6 weeks left until the end of the semester. And that means summer is approaching. And that means I need to enjoy the good weather now, because it's not going to be long before it goes away.
Hannah just crossed the 9 month mark. She's moved to standing on her own, but hasn't quite started the pre-walking things like scootching along furniture. She mostly just gets up on her feet and then either slowly squats back down or just falls on her butt. But all of this is still progress, which is a good thing.
She's starting to get more social opportunities, too, and Joan is really the one doing the heavy lifting on that. There have been lots of walks and trips to the park, and those sometimes involve interactions with neighbors (and sometimes strangers), where Hannah has the opportunity to be the center of attention. There is also a baby music/activity class where Hannah gets to see other babies up close. She's also learning some of the more traditional social behaviors, like high-fives, waving, and blowing kisses.
She's been eating solids since late January, and we recently moved from just fruits and veggies into meat. So far, she seems to enjoy all things related to eating, and I don't know why it triggers my "proud dad" senses, but it does.
She's still not sleeping through the night, but we also still have not tried to do any sleep training. So her naps continue to be contact naps, and we continue picking her up when she cries at night. At some point, she'll move into her own room, and that will feel a lot different, and mayne that's wher we'll implement the training.
Other tidbits: She still has no teeth, which also means no toothbrshing. She is still just babbling, but she's continuing to do it more frequently and has also learned thtat she can screetch at us to maus guess at she wnats from us. She measured in the 97th percentile for length at her last well check. She's going to have a birthday party in the Bay Area in June, and that will be her first road trip.
Work stuff is continuing to roll along. The 3D printing course has crossed over from learning basic skills to applying them in projects, which means that both the teaching and grading is much easier right now. The trigonometry course just finished their second exam, leaving only about 6 sections before we get into the final exam and final project. And the calculus course also just finsihed their second exam, and that class just has two short chapters before we get to the end.
My summer is also coming into view. I'm applying for a no-cost textbook initiative, which is basically a support program to help develop a course to use open educational resources and lower the expense of college for our studdents. I'm hoping to be able to work on that with the current physics faculty member and try to find ways to maybe create links between the two courses and have some joint adventures (such as the egg cannon thing I mentioned a few months ago). We're having a meeting later this week to try to flesh it out a bit for the application process, and we'll see where that goes.
I haven't been making as much progress on the MATH 125 textbook in the last month as I had hoped. It's really just coming down to not having enough time. Instead, I've been focusing my time on the Riemann sum videos. I've got the first two put together, and I've started into the third. I think it's going to be five videos long, so I'm almost halfway done. I don't know if I'll have this finished before the end of the semester, but it should be somewhat close.
A quick overview of other campus projects: I am planning to present the new statistics minor to Faculty Senate. I don't anticipate any pushback at this point, but you never know. I'm waiting for feedback on the PTG (Progress Towards Graduation) project, but that one is scheduled to be picked up in the summer. I may also be working on a Raspberry Pi display for one of our rooms to help indicate the level of accessibility. I'll probably say more about that when it's actually moving forward.
I think I had my first "I don't know how I hurt that" injury. One morning, I woke up with and my wrists hurt. My best guess is that I strained it playing with Hannah, possibly twisting it at a funny angle as she wriggled around in my arms. Or something. I really don't know. Anyway, it's been about a week and every morning it is just a little stiff and painful, and then throughout the day it will hurt a little bit here and there.
I've also (mostly) finished the garage shelving project. I have no idea if I mentioned this anytime in the last couple months, but I've been improving our garage organization by adding some shelves built from 2x4s, and that's going to help us store things a little more efficiently and make better use of the space. The shelves are done, and now it's a matter of going through the stuff, organizing it, and also getting rid of things. I'll likely end up doing a little more building for my random cardboard/PVC pipe/wood crafts. But I really want to get to that before we get too close to summer and it starts to get uncomfortably warm.
I've got a meeting in a little bit, and I'd rather wrap this up than postpone finishing it until later. A tiny bit of piano and ukulele have been played. We got all of our paperwork to the tax person. I want to try planting things in the planter box again. The paint is peeling off of a part of Joan's car, and I'm going to try to fix that myself for $100 instead of paying $1000 for it do be done professionally. I hope to not end up paying $1100.
