Time is doing that thing again where it keeps on moving forward.
A lot has happened in the last 6 weeks. We had the appointment with the allergist for Hannah, and they strongly suspect it was the Amoxicillin. But they aren't certified to test for it directly (at least, not yet... it's apparently in the works), so we don't have a confirmation for it. But they did decide that it might be good to do some testing for other allergens, just to start eliminating other possibilities. So we had to take Hannah in to do a blood draw so that they could do those tests. She did very well with it, with a special thanks to Miss Rachel and YouTube for providing a distraction while I held her tight to keep her from moving and the two phlebotomists did their thing.
The blood test came back with some positives that were a bit confusing. The test said that she was allergic to cats, milk, wheat, and maybe one or two more things. I found this really odd because those are all things that she has had regular exposure to, and we have not seen any other types of allergic reactions other than the big one. But Joan was able to talk to the allergist and they said that the false positive rate of the test is high enough that for those items (because of the level of exposure) were probably in that category. They did say that the cat allergy may be real, and that she may respond differently to different cats. So Thor is not going to have to be rehomed since she's not having allergic reactions, but we should still be aware if she's around other cats in case she does have a reaction to them. Allergies are weird.
Hannah is continuing to develop well. Her communication skills continue to get stronger, as her vocabulary expands. She speaks in the third person often (but not always), which is oddly cute and very normal (techically called "illeism", according to the internet). I guess the theory is something about how pronouns are confusing because the object they refer to is dependent upon context, but names are fixed references. That sort of makes sense, but she does understand that "Hannah's dada" is not the same as someone else's "dada" so there's some understanding of relational referencing present. So I don't know, and it doesn't matter to me enough to look more deeply into it.
She's getting better at communicating her wants by being clear when the thing she wanted didn't happen. Her most common sentence pairing goes something like, "Hannah didn't want X. Hannah wanted Y!" For example, it can be simple noun pairs, like with her stuffed animals (ie, X = "bunny" and Y = "llama"). But then there are more complex versions like X = "dada to sit on the chair" and Y = "dada to sit on the floor". The X and Y pairs seem to be endless.
Her balance is getting better. She's jumping and skipping and running with fewer incidents of falling down (though certainly still nonzero). She's climbing up on everything and is becoming increasingly confident, which is both good and bad. Confidence is good, but confidently attempting to throw yourself off of things is not. She has had a few bonks, but nothing serious. I know this is developmentally normal and appropriate, and it's kind of amusing that we this learning beahvior of hurting ourselves ended up being successful from an evolutionary perspective. This is how creatures become more robust, I guess.
I think she's really starting to feel her emotions strongly. She's starting to have some minor meltdowns over small things ("Hannah didn't want dada to cut the banana!"), which she really wasn't having before. I don't know if I fully understand how this all fits with the child development stuff, but I think it's that she's starting to have "real" preferences for how things ought to be, and that she's not really able to handle the emotions associated with things not being that way. But I feel as though she has had preferences in the past, and didn't have this type of meltdown. So maybe it's more of the sense that things "ought to be" a certain way, like developing a type of right/wrong thought pattern or something. But again, I don't really know this stuff, so it's just me reflecting on my n=1 sample size.
Hannah had her second birthday party last weekend at a place called "Wigglin' Out." It's this indoor play area for young children that has a ball pit, costumes, cars, slides, and a bunch of other stuff. There were something like 30 people there in total, with a dozen or so kids plus parents and some other adults. It was Hello Kitty themed, and she has referred to it her "kitty cat birthday." As a side note, we have never really pushed Hello Kitty in her direction. I think her first exposure to it was just a Hello Kitty cup that someone gave us (maybe Christmas? I don't remember...). I don't know what sort of subliminal marketing voodoo happened from there, but somehow that sunk into the part of her brain where she started looking for Hello Kitty stuff, and pointing it out when she saw it on other kids shirts or wherever, and it became a thing. It's not like we watch a lot of TV and she would have a lot of additional exposure to it. And the same thing is true of Elmo and the other Sesame Street characters. Somehow, she naturally gravitated towards those things, and now we've been sucked into it.
Other little things: We went to a little farm called McKee Ranch. It was a nice visit, but I'm not sure it's a place I would want to visit again. It's not as structured of an environment as I would want (not nearly as good as the Las Vegas Farm/Barn Buddies Rescue). She can count to ten, but she sometimes gets stuck. She likes to count her steps, and will do "one step, two steps, three steps, four steps, three steps, four steps..." We're getting some swim time again, but this summer we're skipping the classes and just doing open swim time at city pool. Joan spent some time with a former child swim instructor to learn some tips for how to help Hannah develop her skills, and so we're just going with that and general pool play. She's defeating our household safety measures. We had somewhat recently installed safety locks on the doors in the kitchen, and she has already figured out how to press down on the hook to open the doors/drawers. So just as with the baby gates, our hope is that there's at least some psychological element that will slow her down a little bit when she's getting into things she shouldn't.
I've been aiming to get into the office once a week, and I've been able to hold pretty close to that. There's a lot of little things I've got going on that I need to keep moving forward with. The curveball for this summer is that one of our math faculty is leaving us for CSN, but they're going from a lecturer position to a tenure track one, so that move makes sense. We're still trying to fill the holes that were left behind in our Fall teaching schedule, and we'll figure out Spring and the various projects that will need to be picked up when the Fall rolls around. Among the things I'm keeping an eye on is our Statistics minor, as he was slated to teach our higher level courses in 2026. I have a feeling that it's going to fall on me to cover it, so I'm starting to do some review in that area to try to get ready.
My fall schedule for this year is safe from changes, and I'm about 90% done with my prep because these are classes that I've taught recently. The changes to the ART 240 course have been completed, and that was really the big project for me in this area. Most of the remaining work will just be setting up the course webpages, and I'll probably hit those in late July or early August. The STEAM class is coming up in a few weeks, and so I'm starting to focus on that a bit. I will have (basically) 8 3-hour blocks with the students. I had to scale back my bridge ambitions and just do a 10 cm bridge. The problem is that printing larger bridges, while it could theoretically be done, would take too long for the time that I have. The 10 cm bridges can be done 1-2 hours, and that gives me enough time to print them for the class so that we can test them on the last day. I've compiled most of resources that I want them to have for the class, so it's just a matter of putting them together on a Canvas page. I should have that done by the end of next week.
The PTG project is on hold while the leadership works through some data policy stuff. I've already talked with our main institutional data person, and he understands what my goals are, so this will probably be a good test for whatever process they create. But that puts this in a holding pattern.
I've got another video series on Sudoku that I might be able to post in the Fall. This is actually content for my MATH 125 course (which may not run this year), but it's also a good stand-alone topic. The channel is approaching 2000 subscribers, but I'm not sure that I'll have anything useful to say when I reach that level. So I'll probably let it go by without saying anything and maybe think about a 2500 update or something like that.
We've taken our next step in the living room. And by we, I mean that Joan found a dining room table that works great with the space, and so we're finally able to have dinner as a family around the table instead of having dinner at the kitchen island. This, of course, introduces a whole new level of complexity with Hannah. She's no longer wanting to sit in her high chair, so she's at the table. And by "at the table" I mean that she starts there but has the freedom to get up and down as she chooses. So sometimes, she just decides she's done (or otherwise gets distracted from eating), and she can just walk away. I don't think we've really figured out what we want to do about that yet because I don't think we want to have to fight with her to keep her at the table. But in related positive news, this does mean that having people over for food will be a little more comfortable. The next step is to replace the couch, and that may happen soon (again, because Joan is working on that).
My sights are set on more updates to the garage and trying to set up some sort of garden in the back yard. The garage is a lot better after I put in the shelves, but it's still not quite where I want it to be. I need a place to hide the spare wood and spare cardboard so that it's not all over the place. I currently have a ladder hanging horizontally on the back wall of the garage. I need to get that vertical to reclaim some wall space, and then get some taller spaces plus smaller shelf spaces to put things on. There are a couple options at IKEA that look good enough (BRIMNES 2-door wardrobe, KLEPPSTAD 3-door wardrobe), but I need to really think about the measurements and wait until it's not 110 degrees to get into the garage and work on it.
With the garden stuff, I planted a zucchini seed and a squash seed in Hannah's planter box, and both have sprouted. I don't know if they'll survive the summer or produce any vegetables for us to eat. But at this point, it's on a watering timer and nature will just do whatever it does. Joan and I have talked about trying to do this for a while, and now that Hannah is two years old (which is old enough to kind of start to understand and appreciate this sort of thing), it's perhaps time we start moving on it. We have enough space and a water line that runs all the way around the back yard, so it's just a matter of getting a plan together.
We've got our family travel more or less set up for this summer. We went to see Joan's cousin back in May, and there are some other ones coming up. I'll probably have more to say later. But for now, I'll just leave it open-ended like this.
Other things: I got about 5 minutes of trying to actually play the piano in, and then maybe another 20 minutes of goofing around with Hannah. Better than nothing, I guess. The dermatologist thinks I have a mild type of psoriasis. If you look at pictures on the internet, it looks nothing like that. But it responded to a cream designed for psoriasis, and so I guess this is a thing for me now. There's so much I could say about the political landscape on so many different levels, but I don't have the time to write another 15-20 paragraphs of stuff. Both domestically and globally, things are getting weird in a way that can go badly, and there are a lot of things that I don't think people are paying enough attention to. Also, there's another 7-10 paragraphs on how a certain subset of US Christians are looking and sounding a lot like the sort of people that Bonhoeffer talked about in "On Stupidity" in his letters from prison, and how "not so with you" speaks directly against the posture of power that they are taking.
