About a month ago, the highs were still in the 90s. Currently they're in the low 60s. We usually get a little bit more time in the sweet spot of those 70 degree days. Not that we typically got a lot of them, but it's usually more than this. Oh well.
Hannah's vocabulary continues to grow. She's now got the opposite pairs of up and down (which she will sometimes say randomly while raising and lowering a toy, or climbing up and down from the couch, or whatever) and hot/cold (during baths she points to the red and blue marks next to the shower handle). She's starting to develop her food vocabulary, though that's a work in progress. Avocado comes out a just "ah-cado", blueberry is something like "bu-wee", and banana is the classic-sounding "nana."
She's always been a music-oriented kid, and that's coming out more and more. We have a Spotify playlist of Parry Gripp songs that I've been playing for her since pretty much the beginning (these are also songs that I unironically enjoy), and she has definitely learned quite a few of them. When certain songs come on, she will start saying words associated with it, or making relevant hand motions. Some of the fun ones for me have been "Now Is the Time for Our Vocal Exercises" (she puts her lips together and goes "brrrr"), "Oh Hai" (she says "hi" and waves her hand), "Waffle City" (she does a wa-wa-wa sound), and there's probably a half dozen others.
She got another month of swim lessons, but this time at the Multigen Center. I wasn't able to do any of them because of the timing with work stuff, but it sounds like she and Joan have had a great time. Pretty much every day, she says "pool" at some point, suggesting that she wants to go or is at least thinking about the past experiences. I think we're set up to have her take another set of lessons again starting up in another couple weeks. But she's continuing to build her confidence in the water and is just generally developing those (pre-)swimming skills. (The pool at the Multigen Center is apparently not as heated as the pool at the other swim place, because she often pairs up "pool" with "cold.")
We took a day at the Las Vegas Farm, and she got her first experience with live farm animals. There were goats, horses, pigs, chickens, peacocks, steer, and llamas (or alpacas... I don't remember). There were probably other animals, but I'm not going to try to look that up and get all of them. She really enjoyed watching the animals eat the straw that we fed them. I mostly remember that she just wanted to go everywhere on her own and felt very confident and free to do that. (One of us was always right behind her, of course.)
We also got in a day at Spings Preserve. This is the season where they have their butterfly habitat open, and that was probably the highlight of the trip. While we were in there, we were fortunate enough to get pictures and a video of a butterfly landing on the back of her arm. This has become a type of story that she tells. Her hand motion for butterfly is kind of like a one-hand wing flapping, and sometimes she says "b-why." Then she points at her arm. I usually say "A buttefly landed on your arm?" or "Yes, a butterfly did land on your arm." She also has a sleep sack with butterflies on it, which she will sometimes point at first, and then tell the story of the butterfly on her arm.
She's not sleeping through the night, but we are getting a pretty consistent start to her sleep between 8 and 8:30 with usually one nap (though she does two naps sometimes). It's getting harder to move her from the bed back to the crib, partly because she's just getting bigger and heavier, but she also has an instinct to reach for Joan when we start to move her. I'm mostly convinced that she's not even awake half the time when she does that, but that reaching motion shifts her body weight and makes her harder to maneuver, and that can lead to her waking up. It's not that she can't go back to sleep on her own, as I've seen her wake up, sit up for a minute, lie back down, and go back to sleep. But other times she wakes up and asks for "mom" and gets upset if she doesn't get to be close to her. I know that she'll figure it out eventually, so it's just a matter of time.
Other Hannah things: We think she's going to get another pair of teeth soon, but that's just a speculation. She recently got a tent and a balance bike, both of which she's thoroughly enjoying. She continues to enjoy seeing people at the store and the park, and continues to be pretty comfortable engaging with them. Overall, she just continues to grow and develop.
Campus stuff is going well. The ART 240 course is doing a bunch of projects, which makes the time pretty casual. MATH 127 has their exam in a couple days and then they'll be at their final project. And MATH 283 and MATH 125 are winding themselves down.
I'm making good progress on the conceptual physics course. I'm still not where I ought to be at this point, but I'm at a decent place. The idea phase is over and I'm mostly spending my time fleshing out the content that I've decided to cover, and making up the labs. I'm mostly through the kinematics section and then will be moving on to statics before looping back to some more optics stuff.
I'm teaching ART 240 again next semester, and I'm going to make some quick live-to-tape videos to walk through a few exercises. I did a written step-by-step guide, but students found it to be a little bit confusing. The problem is that there's a whole lot different menus and things to look at, and it's just hard to follow along with text. So I'll probably spend a few hours doing this after the end of the semester. That's the primary change I'm going to need to make for that class.
My last class next semester will be MATH 182, and I've taught that one a few times already, so it's in pretty good shape. I will want to revamp slightly to follow the model I'm using for MATH 283 this semester, which means giving students the responsibility to present stuff during class, have problem sessions, and also create note sheets that I'll be lecturing from.
The .NET project got previewed by a few folks, and the concept seems to be solid. There's still a ton of work to do in terms of making it usable, but at least the foundation is mostly there. I was spending some time today going back over the SQL to try to hunt down some new information that might lead to a better organizational scheme, and I'm going to have to let those ideas simmer for a bit to see exactly how I want to do that. I think I've got some good ideas, and so it's just a matter of coding it up to see how it goes.
We're mostly ready for the Nevada Math competition to come to campus. The last hurdle is with the events team, to get their approval to run it at not cost, otherwise it's something like $700 for each contest to use two classrooms, which is just too much (and we don't have any funding for it). This is one of those things that feels like it should clear, but you never know.
The living room walls are full of white squares. We're getting ready to paint to some form of white, and we're comparing different whites. Joan is much better at this than I am, since they all seem basically the same to me even though I cognitively understand they are not. We've got a quote for the work, but we have to settle on the color and then figure out how exactly we're going to do it since it's going to stink up the house with paint fumes for a few days. So we're still working it out.
There's also a bit more furniture that's coming in. Joan is continuing to make good progress on her quest to make the space maximally nice for everyone, with a place for Hannah's toys to be put away and places for us to store things. She's also working on trying to make the office feel a little cozier. I've got a couple things I still need to do to help that one along, including remembering to get a bunch of stuff to the curb for bulk pickup this Saturday.
We'll be having Thanksgiving with Joan's cousin this year, which should be fun. It will be Hannah's first extended-family Thanksgiving since last year we were just at home. We haven't really been talking it up with her or anything, but that's okay. I kind of miss the days of having 3-4 Thanksgivings among different friend groups and family, but I think those days are kind of gone for now.
We also haven't really been talking up Christmas just yet. But Joan did win a wooden advent calendar thing at one of her church groups, so that will get us into that type of space.
Miscellaneous other things: Thor is doing well. Nothing specific to report there. I haven't really played the piano, but I'm getting a little bit of ukulele time in. And by that, I mean a minute or with Hannah before she puts a book or something else in my hands and we switch activities. We haven't made it back to church in a bit, but it's on our list of things we're trying to do. Joan did a great job with Christmas cards, and so we'll be very much on top of that this year. I've still got plans for working on the garage at some point. The shelves are made and I've got boxes to put things in, and so it's mostly a game of organization. There's probably more stuff, because there always is, but I'm done with this one.
