Nora’s eyes were looking particularly beautiful the yesterday, so I broke out the close-up lenses for a photography session (again). The term close-up is really very apt, as this is really what she looks like when you nuzzle up to her face. After a few shots, I decided to turn the camera on myself, to see the contrast between old eyes and young eyes.
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If monkeys ever developed a system of crime fighting, or if we hadn’t lost our opposable big toe, their fingerprint database would need toeprints as well. Otherwise the killers would just use their feet to hold the murder weapon.
The above was conceived while watching my daughter grasp her own feet together like Mr. Burns does with his hands. I always think, “Exxxxcellent…” when she does it.
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Back in April, my friend sgazzetti sent me an invite to particpate in a new social networking site I’d never heard of, called Aardvark [vark.com]. I’ve been using it for several months now, and I must say that I’m very impressed and fascinated. Aardvark is a question-answering engine that uses its users to answer the questions of other users. It functions on several principles…
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Just a couple photos to share that shows how excellent my parenting is.
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On a recent walk around town with my wife and daughter, we were walking by a house we’ve walked by dozens of times (only dozens because it’s not our on our normal route), and I stopped dead in my tracks. There was nothing unique about the object I had spotted; I have seen thousands of them before. But the location of the object on the planet was extraordinary. There is a house in Colindres, Spain, with a US Mail postal box.
At the time, I didn’t have my camera with me, so I’ve since made two trips past the house to acquire the photos you see below.
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On Saturday we went to a very small arts and crafts fair that was being put on in the church plaza, a block from our house. They had the usual assortment of jewelry, noise-making toys, untested medicinal grasses, and some animals. At about 13:00, we got a call from my in-laws saying that the five days since they’d seen Nora had been too much, and that they were coming to visit us. After lunch, we went for a family walk together.
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Sitting up is hard to do. It takes a level of balance and coordination that doesn’t normally arrive until the fifth month. Today is Nora’s four month birthday and she, well, isn’t a very good sitter. But she’s so doggone cute when she tries, that I had to take some video. I present to you, The Sitting Olympics, Nora vs. Gravity…
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Recently my blogrollmate, Sharon, pointed me to this fascinating article, which you should read all the way through, entitled How Does Language Shape The Way We Think?. It highlights something I’ve noticed in my lingual trek into Spanish: that to properly speak another language, you must change the way you see the world. Because of the organic way that languages have formed, the constructs of various languages inherently contain extra information that is missing from other languages, information that is not thought about by non-speakers. It’s mastering these new understanding of the world around you that are the hardest part of learning another language.
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Previously on The Activity Mat Chronicles…
You are about to witness what Nora does all day between the eating and the pooping. She’s always been a fan of the supine position, preferring it to any inclined sitting position. And with her recent interest in physical objects, both looking at them and, to a somewhat lesser extent, manipulate them, she’s been enjoying the stimulus provided by her activity mat. She’s also a big fan of pulling her dress up to her mouth and sucking on it. Her dresses spend most of the day soaking wet from slobber. We joke that we should buy her cheap dresses and really elegant underwear, because it’s the underwear that’s most visible.
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