Erik’s Blog

Nora was exceedingly well behaved this morning. When she woke up at 6:47 AM with a mild cry, I got up and explained to her that, due to the slight tilt of the Earth’s rotational axis in relation to its orbital plane, we have a season, summer, in which the sun comes up very early and sets very late, and that just because the sun was already up and that Mommy had just left for work, it was, in fact, according to the definitions set forth in the household rulebook, still officially Night Time and that she should go back to sleep. She and I both went back to bed until 9:00 AM.

I carried her downstairs, put on her shoes – good traction is very important at this stage of her ambulatory development – and left her in the living room to play with some toys while I went to the kitchen to prepare her morning bottle and orange juice. Before the 45 seconds on the microwave were up, she had crawled into the kitchen with me. Soon I had her breakfast ready and we returned to the sofa for alimentary administration.
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Well, Nora, you keep getting more and more interesting to be around. You have no trouble whatsoever pulling yourself up to standing on almost anything, but you still lack the ability to stand up from a sitting position pushing off only the floor.

Sometimes you surprise me, like when your grocery store friend, Tona, recently asked you, “¿Dónde está la nariz?” and you pointed to your nose. I immediately asked you, “Where is your nose?” and you gestured correctly again. But you either forget things or choose not to do them. You’ve completely stopped saying your first word, Up. And your rhinolocation trick happens so rarely that seems an awful lot like chance.
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We continue to encourage Nora to play with her iPad. She definitely like the sounds it makes; her favorite is the oinking pig, which she likes to dance to. While she clearly understands that she needs to touch the screen, but she tends to be too quick in her pokes, and her actions either result in dragging the icons around or the icon she’s going for is simply not triggered because her touch is so fast. At the moment, the iPad remains a “noise box” to her, but I have little doubt she will learn to control it within the next year. And then it’s just a matter of time before the Pentagon gets hacked.
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Sometimes it seems like parenting is one big series decisions about trading comfort for safety. My child is tall and lanky, so it has taken her forever to reach the magical 9 kg threshold in which the car seat manufacturers say she can face forward in the vehicle. In her rear-facing seat, she looks, and is, horribly uncomfortable. As her tall and lanky father who takes a couple transatlantic flights a year, I sympathize. My daughter, her mother, and I have all been looking forward to when we can flip her around to face forwards.
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My father has an excellent story about reading an editorial in Creative Computing magazine once about how children could comprehend and do useful things on personal computers. The author of the article had a four year old that knew about games and how to use the keyboard, etc. My father wrote another editorial letter for the magazine, about me, that went roughly like this:
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The volume of space in our house defined by the phrase “out of reach of children” is shrinking quickly. While still a couple months from walking on her own, I believe, Nora has greatly improved her in-walker mobility. She can now move forward, backward, and turn with ease. The result is that she can get to just about anywhere where we don’t have a rug, and reach most things in the bottom ninety centimeters of the house. This includes many drawers and cabinets. Yesterday she was with me in the kitchen as I was doing the dishes. She watched intently as I opened a drawer to put a utensil in. Two seconds later she had her hand on the handle and was opening the drawer, pulling things out. We need to install some safety latches, stat! We bought drawer latches the other day, and the woman who sold them to us told us that it was absolutely paramount that the child never sees how to operate the latch, otherwise they’re useless.
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Nora, the weekend that is now ending was our first one back in Spain after recovering from jet lag. We had no company (your aunt visited Thursday and Friday), and we were looking forward to a nice rest. On Saturday we went to the closest mall, in Santander, to pick up a few items and research car seats for you. We learned that you still need to gain a few kilos before we can face you forward in the car, no matter how cramped you are facing backwards. I’m not sure if it was the experience of seeing so many people around you in the food court, but you didn’t want any of your vegetable puree for lunch or the yogurt either. You were only hungry when Mommy and Daddy were eating bread. And your cookies. During our trip to the States, you trained us to give you cookies pretty much non-stop when you’re in your now-crumb-covered stroller. When you finish one, you spin around, reach out your hand and screech. It was cute the first dozen times.
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Last weekend I was all alone. Marga and Nora went to visit Marga’s parents in her hometown. While they were there, they went to some sort of festival where migas were served. Migas is a dish of fried bread crumbs, normally with some fried garlic, peppers or bacon mixed in. It’s delicious! Apparently Nora enjoyed some migas as well. She also tried some rosquillas, which are like Spanish doughnuts. What follows are some pictures my sister-in-law sent me of Nora’s activities over the weekend.
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Nora, for these first ten months, you have always been sort of lazy, choosing the path that involves the least amount of work. When it was time for you to breast feed, you opted to have the milk extracted for you and, first syringed drop by drop into your mouth, and eventually placed in a bottle. At the moment you’re at least a month behind your contemporaries (our friends’ early 2009 babies) in the area of locomotion. It probably hasn’t helped your progress that you have never liked being on your stomach. Especially ever since you learned to roll over, we barely even have time to snap back-fastening your pajamas closed sometimes.

In my search to rationalize your shortcomings, I’ve come up with a theory:
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For pretty much all of December my wife’s family has been pressuring us to leave Nora with them for Santo Tomás (December 22), a huge festival in their town of Mondragon involving special seasonal foods, getting dressed up in traditional Basque clothing, traditional Basque music and dancing, and a crafts and livestock market. The main reason they wanted her was to dress her up in some traditional Basque clothes. Some part of our human brain finds it incredibly adorable to dress up a small child (or chimpanzee) in clothes we associate more with adult humans.
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