Today, Hannah is about one week short of her 11th month. Plans for a birthday celebration with the extended families in the Bay Area are in the works. I'll post all about it after it happens.
In the last month, Hannah got her first tooth and second tooth. The first tooth is her front left bottom tooth. It's standing quite proud at this point. The second tooth is just breaking the surface on her bottom left front. With her new teeth, she's learning the skill of biting. Joan gets bit a lot more than I do, but I've gotten a couple nips on my arm or shoulder when I'm holding her. She doesn't seem to be biting out of frustration or anger. It's almost like she's just exploring the world and biting and watching our reactions. Joan has caught some sort of pattern with her that indicates she's about to bite, but I haven't seen it yet. We need to identify a pediatric dentist and start establishing some sort of tooth brushing pattern.
She's not walking independently yet, but she's gotten quite good at walking with support. Typically, this has meant that she's walking with her walking toy. But the other day, we were at the park and she was pushing her stroller around in circles in the grass. So it seems likely that she has the physical strength required to walk, and all she needs to do is start to try to walk to begin to develop her balance. But at this point, she hasn't really shown any inclination towards independent walking. She will stand up comfortably, but when it's time to move she will just get down and crawl to where she wants to go. It's probably just a matter of time before she makes the decision to walk.
We still haven't had a full night of sleep, but she's starting to extend her sleep periods. In the last week, she's had a few stretches of 3 hours or more, which has been quite nice. She's also getting some good contact naps during the day. Now that I'm almost off for the summer*, we can start trying to get her to do non-contact naps and see if we can help her continue to make that sleep transition. (*Of course I still have work to do! But I have almost no scheduled meetings or anything.) We're still trying to figure out how exactly to set things up for that. Our first attempts have been to take her mattress out of the crib and put it on the floor. It's a lot easier to put her on the mattress when you don't have to lower her a couple feet over the side of the crib and down to the mattress. We put some pillows around it because when she wakes up she tends to sit up suddenly and if there's nothing to lean against she'll just fall over.
She's continuing to be exposed to more foods. I'm not going to try to dig up the notes for when things have happened, but she now has had rice, bread, blueberries, strawberries, eggs, black beans, broccoli, butter, baby puffs, banana, avocado, avocado oil, ground beef, ground turkey, apple, pear, carrot, and maybe a couple other things that I'm not immediately remembering. We haven't done tree nuts yet, which is something that we'll need to stop putting off. And we also haven't done fish and shellfish. So far, she eats pretty much everything (though she's turned down bread a couple times) and no known food allergies so far.
She is a quick study. We have video of her opening her closed-but-not-locked baby gate. She also watched me put socks on one night, and then tried to put socks on her own feet. She failed, but it was cute. She kind of straightened out the sock and laid it down on the floor, and then put her leg on top of it. Then she kind of shook her head because she could tell it wasn't right, but she didn't know how to fix it. But she hasn't shown as much interest in socks after those first few times. She still likes to play the piano. I tried getting her to play the ukulele, but she just tugged on the strings in a way that made me worried she would break them. So maybe we'll come back to that later.
She outgrew her 12-month pajamas at around 10.5 months. One night, I noticed that her big toe had pushed through the pajama feet, and in a couple days it was most of her toes. So I basically just tore open the end of the foot and now her feet push all the way through like it's a non-footed pajama. We're probably going to have to revamp her wardrobe ahead of schedule.
I visited the doctor for my annual physical (several months late). He told me that my wrist condition is called "De Quervain's tenosynovitis", which is also known as "Mother's Thumb", and that it almost certainly was from playing with Hannah. Basically, I was doing a lot of lifting motions with the wrist as the fulcrum and that messed it up. There's no particular cure for it other than rest and altering how I handle the baby, and maybe some pain medications if it gets bad. That's good, because that's pretty much what I've been trying to do. I've actually retrained Hannah to be picked up differently in the last month. I put my right arm out and she puts both arms over the top of my forearm, and then I can lift her up without engaging my wrist. I'm still working on figuring out how to manipulate her at night when she's asleep. Sometimes I'm successful at doing it without pain, but other times it hurts a lot.
Campus stuff is in a good spot right now. Everything is turned in and the grades are submitted. I don't have a lot to say about this semester at this point. The classes went well enough, I think. I'll be getting the student evaluations in another few days to either confirm or deny my impression of what I think the students thought of me.
At the end of the week, I'm going to close out the hunt for the telescope. Our security footage only goes back a certain amount of time, and I checked as far back as I could with no luck. But I still enjoyed the process of writing the visualization scripts and maybe I'll find some other use for that.
I've got a project that has been kind of start and stop since the start of the academic year, which is trying to create a helpful automated report for students to help them know what their next steps are as they move towards graduation. (I can't remember what I've said about this in the past.) It's currently called PTG (Progress Towards Graduation) and it may be taking a big step forward in the next few weeks. We've got some people who are interested in seeing it work at scale, and so we're going to start trying to pilot some systems and things to see if we can make it all come together. I don't have a lot more to say about that right now, but I might be able to say more as things get off the ground.
I'm trying really hard to do my prep work for the Fall as early as possible. I'm doing some rearranging and rewriting of the materials for ART 240 (3D Modeling for 3D Printing). In the past, I've put my notes into a PDF and just went off of those, but I think it's time for me to put it all on Canvas pages. I also want to use the TechDraw feature of FreeCAD to make better images of things that I want the students to make. I don't think it will take that long to do this, but I've been burned by bad estimates before so I'm not taking any chances. I'm just going to crank out all of the pages as soon as I can and get them ready to import into the course template whenever it's ready in the Fall.
The next target will be making some minor updates to the MATH 127 (Trigonometry) and MATH 283 (Multivariable Calculus) courses. Both courses have a full set of videos that I've made, and so I'll be going with a fully-flipped classroom in both settings. I still need to find more and better ways to engage students in the material within the context of the classroom, so that will be rolling around in my head this summer.
Then I'll need to focus on my MATH 125 materials. Right now, the enrollment is zero, but I think we did a better job of communicating about this class to the advisors and are really trying to push certain majors towards it. I have a good outline for the materials, and it's just a matter of trying to translate most of it into a book structure. If I needed to, I could do the whole class on the same set of notes as last time, and so this is more about putting structure and organization to ideas that already exist, not creating those ideas.
Finally, I need to compile some notes and things for the VIS 115 course. I am set up to do an online textbook structure, but it will be okay for that "book" to be a collection of links and things, rather than an actual book. This is going to be mostly about making sure I have all of the resources I need. Of course, I'd definitely like to take that to a book structure sooner rather than later, but I've got a lot going on this summer and I'm not sure that I'll make it all the way through everything.
Around the house, things are continuing to move along. We're talking about ways to reoganize the living room a bit as Hannah gets increasingly mobile and bipedal. We really want to have a safe area in the living room that's big enough for her to move around in. The play pen that we have is starting to feel a little small, and I think it's upsetting to Hannah that she's on one side of the barrier and we're on the other. So we're trying to think about how we can partition the living room to make a space large enough for us to hang out in that doesn't have a bunch of cords and other things that make the space less safe.
The planter box is mostly bare right now. I have one cluster of basil that seems to have survived the transplantation, so we'll see how that grows. I might try another batch at some point, but I'm afraid to start now because then I'd be transplanting into the summer heat, and I know that's going to be tough on the plants. So in the back of my mind, I'm trying to target an early Fall move. I might throw down some more dwarf sunflower seeds and just see what happens. Maybe I'll look into a vegetable or something for the fall as well.
Last thoughts: Thor is getting very comfortable with Hannah, and Hannah is getting very comfortable with Thor. This is both good and bad. It's good because it's good for all the creatures in the house to be comfortable with all the other creatures. It's bad because Hannah doesn't quite have "gentle" figured out yet. She's still grabbing at Thor's tail and grabbing chunks of cat hair from his body. But it's really nice that when she's asleep, he'll sometimes rub his head on her feet and curl up close to her. I successfully consolidated by scrap wood pile into a small section of the garage. Now my next project for that corner is to organize it and figure out how to tidy it up a bit more. I also have to go through and reorganize the garage in general, but it may be too close to summer to really want to do that. I have a painted board that I want to use to start marking Hannah's height (or length, I guess, while she's not yet standing). I have the measurements from her doctors visits. I just need cut off a couple feet from the end (it's an 8-foot board) and mark it up. And then maybe figure out where it's going to live, and how exactly I want to store it. At the moment that I'm typing this sentence and finishing this post, she's asleep on me.
