Eliza’s sickness continues. With her, a sick day is one long rollercoaster. She feels ok, then plays, gets tired, gets grumpy, then wants to rest. You hold her for awhile, then she’s rested, and feels ok, and wants to play.
Rinse, repeat.
Since we’re not taking her out this weekend, the day became a “what can we play with” day. She’s bored out of her mind with her regular toys, so today we played with balloons. She seemed mildly interested.
Eliza was having a banner week at daycare, practicing for her transition (Monday) to the toddler room. She loves it over with the “big kids,” and seemed to be extremely happy with the idea of moving up.
Then, bam! Sick yet again. I think she had three healthy days? Maybe four. Now she’s got a horrible cough, runny nose, and is very contagious.
We are sooooo over this whole winter thing.
While I have been far too quiet here on PatRec, I have been writing bits and pieces elsewhere. I just had a post go up over on ALA TechSource on Netbooks. Go take a look!
I’m also trying to catch up from being behind on my upcoming book on Mobile Technology and Libraries. So if PatRec remains a little quiet for the next couple of months, well…that’s why. 🙂
Hobbies: pretending to feed people, pets, stuffed animals, dolls, even pictures of people in books; pretending to cook; playing on playgrounds; looking at books and magazines; pretending to write; putting stickers on paper; learning new words; looking at photos of people she knows; talking to Pop and Nana on the phone
Favorite toys: bowl/spoon combo; pens, pencils, crayons; shape sorter; Little People school bus; anything she’s not supposed to play with (like mommy’s underwear and the toilet scrubbing brush)
Favorite books: her newest one by Matthew Van Fleet (Cats); any book that has Elmo in it; any book with animals
Favorite foods: cheese of any kind; yogurt; bananas; chicken noodle soup; mandarin oranges
Favorite music: she is currently in an Elvis Costello phrase and demands to hear the song “Radio Radio” at least once a day; also enjoys anything by Laurie Berkner (from Jack’s Big Music Show on Noggin)
Just a quick note to follow up on my previous post about Pseudoscience and vaccines. While I’m certainly not going to suggest that we take our medical advice from our legal system, it looks like the latter at least got the former right this time.
Special court rejects autism-vaccine theory
The three federal judges who convincingly rejected the theory that vaccines cause autism delivered a devastating blow to crank science today. The battle will go on in the blogs and in the courts. But the most important arena has always been the space between the ears of parents who are deciding whether it’s safe to vaccinate their kids. This decision could do a heap of good by stemming the tide of vaccine-shunning that has led to outbreaks of preventable disease.
…“Petitioners’ theories of causation were speculative and unpersuasive,” wrote Special Master Denise Vowell in the case of Colten Snyder v. HHS. “To conclude that Colten’s condition was the result of his MMR vaccine, an objective observer would have to emulate Lewis Carroll’s White Queen and be able to believe six impossible (or at least highly improbable) things before breakfast.”
While I don’t think for a moment that this will stop the crank beliefs revolving around autism and vaccinations (science is still not our friend in the US; witness that in a recent poll only 4 in 10 American’s say that they believe in the Theory of Evolution, a fact that makes me want to claw my own eyes out) it does make me happy that the legal system won’t be participating in further arguments around this (non-)controversy.
She learns to say new words almost every day. This week, she added “boots” and “apple” to her vocabulary, as well as another classmate’s name, Addy. She can also say “bite,” when she wants a bite of something, which I forgot to put in the list below. Yesterday, she repeated “hummus” when I asked her if she wanted it for dinner, and she also repeated every single syllable of the phrase “cracker with cheese.” No kidding. Her best “sentence” to date has been: “Cookie …más (more in Spanish)…peese (please)”? She said this on her own, with no prompting.
The amazing thing she did yesterday: we were looking at a book, she pointed to a picture of a man, and I told her “farmer.” She immediately started singing “e-i-e-i-oh” (from the song “Old McDonald”).
Yet another story: Indiana (our dog) was in Eliza’s way the other day and I said, “Indy, go lie down. Go to bed.” Eliza looked at Indy and said “Night night!”
This kid blows my mind. She is not quite 14 months old.
Best story of the week: Betsy was in Eliza’s room with her, reading books. Our two cats, Cola and Hootie, came in to see what was going on, but we don’t usually let them in Ellie’s room. So Betsy says “Get out, cats!” and chases them out.
Eliza takes a beat, stands up, walks over to her stuffed animals. Picks up her stuffed animal cat, walks to the door, and throws it into the hall.
She’s far too smart for her own good.
This week, ebooks were all over the tech news, and there were at least two huge announcements. Well, one announcement, and one not-so-secret launch coming Monday.
The announcement was the Google Book mobile service, which gives users access to 1.5 million books from the Google Book scanning project OCR’d and formatted for mobile screens, like those of the G1 and the iPhone. In one fell swoop, Google has made these platforms the home of the largest electronic book library in the world…the Amazon Kindle store currently has 230,000 books, while Project Gutenberg has just over 100,000.
The upcoming announcement is that almost certainly on Monday, Amazon will announce the Kindle version 2. Leaked photos make the v2 look sleeker, more updated, and with much better physical form-factor. What I’m most excited about is the possibility of v.2 of the software, which better UI and possibly more features. As long, of course, as the software is ported back to the original hardware.
Are these the things that will finally push ebooks firmly into the public consciousness? Time will tell, but I can hope.
For posterity’s sake, and because I love lists, and because I’m procrastinating my work…here is a list of Eliza’s current vocabulary. I think we’re up to around 40 or 50 “words.” And these are just the ones she uses consistently and with real meaning. There are other words she has said a couple of times, but I didn’t count them because they’re not in the regular rotation (yet).
People: Mommy, Daddy, Pop, Nana, Ally (friend at daycare)
Animals: cat, duck, fish, bat, bee, mouse, “Tiggy” (her fave stuffed tiger)
Objects: ball, bowl, box, hat, seat, baby (for dolls), keys
Body parts: Nose, knee
Meal time: eat, más (“more” in Spanish), cracker, cookie, cheese, juice, water (wa-wa)
Social words: Hi, bye-bye, night-night, please (“peese”), no, uh-oh, tickle, ow (for ouch)
Verbs: eat (already listed above), write, cook
Other: bath, socks, shoes, “e” (what she calls all letters)
She can also do lots of animal sounds: meow, moo, hoo hoo (owl), ssss (snake), growing for tiger/lion/monster, quack, tweet (for bird), etc.
I’ve heard her say a couple of times: bubble, Addy (another friend from daycare), jacket, tick tock (for clock), cup. Jason swears he has heard her say “music.” I think we’re heading to explosion territory where we’re going to start losing count.
Just watch this!
Oh, wait a minute:
Maybe not.
