We are in the new house - details to follow.

I was at LaserMotive today for an important test, and partway through the day I received a text message via Elizabeth from Dorothy:

You’re as pretty as a sapphire

The kid has her similes down pat, that’s for sure.

There have been so many things in Howard’s development that we’ve wanted to write about, but between LaserMotive, moving house, and dealing with kids, life has been so totally overwhelming. Here’s what comes to mind at the moment; maybe we’ll get a chance to write more details in a few weeks.

Howard took his first step and then two steps perhaps a month ago. About a week ago, he quickly started taking a half-dozen or more steps, and now he’ll walk a good long distance and even turn corners.

We haven’t been as regular in teaching sign language to Howard as we were with Dorothy, but he’s starting to get the hang of it. He will regularly do “more” and maybe “food” and he does a couple of other things that aren’t signs we’re teaching him; they seem mostly to be ways of blowing kisses.

Howard LOVES books, especially flipping the pages. For at least a couple of months, he would grab a board book, bring it to you, and then throw it in your lap. If you didn’t pick it up right away, he’d grab it and then hit you with it. Subtle, I know.

He really loves being held upside down and tossed around by Daddy (and now by Grandpa, as well, who’s been visiting and helping us out for the last month).

Finally, the boy is really freaking big. Huge. His 1 year check-up is next week (closer to when he’ll be 13 months old) so we don’t know his exact weight, but I’m guessing somewhere around 28 pounds or so.

I just signed a wire transfer request for our down payment. We sign the mortgage documents tomorrow morning. If all goes as planned, we should get the keys on Friday afternoon. We have packers coming on Tuesday, movers on Wednesday, and unpackers on Thursday of next week.

Our mortgage is approved! (pending some kind of independent review of the appraisal, but we don’t expect a problem with that) The new house is about half a mile from Tom’s lab, in a very nice neighborhood. I don’t know yet exactly when closing will be, but it should be pretty soon. We are currently scheduled to move on July 7th, but it may shift to earlier depending on the exact closing date and on availability of the movers and packers.

The end of the current bedtime routine for Dorothy is for one of us to sing her two or three songs and turn out the light. She always asks me to sing the same three songs - “Ten Little Indians” (with Indian girls instead of boys), “Frere Jacques” (in French and English), and the ABC song (in dog language). That last means that I sing “woof woof woof woof” for the whole song, except at the end where I’m supposed to sing “next time won’t you ‘woof’ with me.” In the last few days, she’s been asking for different animals - tiger language, cat language, monkey language, etc.

Last night, she asked for me to sing it in giraffe language.

I pointed out that giraffes don’t talk - no dice, she still insisted on giraffe language. I tried humming it, which made her so angry that she couldn’t even yell, so she got out of bed and jumped up and down (at this point, the bedtime routine is definitely not achieving its object of winding down for sleep). I asked her to tell me what giraffe language sounded like, but she refused. She finally said I should pick another language, since I was so terribly cruel as to refuse to invent a silent language for her, but when I started singing “tweet tweet tweet,” she got out of bed and jumped up and down again. We finally compromised on dinosaur language, which is apparently a close relative of tiger language: “Roar, roar, roar, roar…”

Today I pumped milk at work for what was probably the last time. On Monday, Howard will start transitioning to a new classroom at school, where he won’t be drinking from bottles. We started him on cow’s milk from a cup a couple of weeks ago, and he likes it just fine. I’ll probably still nurse him at bedtime for a little while, although I’ve also been giving him a bottle of cow’s milk then for the last week, and he seems to sleep longer when I do.

I still have one little four-ounce bag of milk in the freezer, as well as a six-ounce one that I pumped after I had a gadolinium injection for an MRI in June, that I intended to throw out but stuck in the freezer instead in case of desperate need. Other than that, I used up my entire stash. I didn’t have to supplement until the last couple of weeks, and I didn’t have to do very much then - his daycare bottles were about 2/3 breast milk and 1/3 cow’s milk.

A few statistics from Trixie Tracker: All told, during the past year, I spent over 13,000 minutes pumping - over 216 hours, or nine solid days. I have produced 81,660 milliliters of milk - 86.3 quarts. That’s in addition to over 350 hours of nursing - over two solid weeks. My stash peaked at almost eight quarts, and slowly dwindled down to the half-cup I have left. I didn’t implement inventory control for a few weeks after I started, but my last numbered bottle was #698 (starting from #1). During the last year, I have spent 6.5% of my time producing milk (nursing or pumping) - about an hour and a half a day.

I will miss nursing when we’re done. It will be nice to get the time and the control over my body back, but it’s been a special kind of closeness, too. At least I know that I grew a big, strong, healthy baby.

Happy Birthday, Howard! One year ago, you were born! And now look at you!

So in addition to zapping mosquitoes with lasers, I get to do other cool stuff at the Intellectual Ventures Lab (click that link for our newly-opened lab blog). This past Monday, we had the official public unveiling of the lab with WA Senator Maria Cantwell, which has generated some press coverage, including at the Seattle Times, Xconomy, and TechFlash.

As part of the unveiling, we decided that cutting a big ribbon wasn’t techie enough. So I, along with some coworkers, engineered an exploding ribbon, which was “detonated” by the senator pushing a big red button. The bottom of page 2 of the Xconomy story has a great photo of the ribbon bursting into flames. (You can even see me in my white lab coat in the background.) Getting that ribbon finalized (including making sure the ribbon itself wouldn’t catch fire after the “poof” of flames) was how I spent my Memorial Day. Elizabeth was kind enough to also help out, and the kids got to hang around the lab and witness some test runs of the ball-o-fire.

Keep an eye on the IV Lab blog for more info on what we’re doing there!

Yes, it’s been a long time since I’ve put kid photos online. And now, just in time for Howard’s birthday is a set from right before Dorothy’s birthday.

…does not necessarily come out. Especially when you’re growing at a hellacious pace. I think that must explain what’s going on with Howard.

Within the past month, Howard has been known to eat over a quarter pound of chicken in one sitting. And it’s not a rare event — he will regularly eat an amazing amount. For example, at breakfast (after having nursed within the previous hour or two), he’ll eat a quarter of a sausage patty, a handful of apple bits and/or one sixth of an asian pear, plus a half piece of bread, along with milk or water. Or for dinner, he’ll eat an entire mini-banana plus a good helping of chicken. Not much if you’re an adult, but it sure looks like a ton compared to, say, a jar of baby food.

The funny part is at school. Apparently if they’re feeding some of the other babies in Howard’s room and it’s not his turn to eat, they need to put him in a play area around the corner so that he can’t see the ones being fed, otherwise he will make a huge ruckus about wanting food.

I don’t see his diapers during the day, but when he first wakes up, I’m often surprised at how little is in the diaper, at least compared to what I’d expect for his age. (And before you write in, there are no indications that he’s having any sort of digestive etc. problems.) And he doesn’t look like he’s retaining water or anything. I think he’s just devoting so much of what he consumes towards making more Howard. His one-year check-up won’t be for a few weeks yet, so we don’t know what he weighs right now. But subjectively, he’s about a ton.

Sorry for the dearth of posts lately - when I’m averaging less than 5 hours of sleep per night, posting to the blog definitely falls down the priority list. But there have been a bunch of articles that overlap my thoughts on inflation and deflation, which is something of great concern to me, not only for investing purposes, but also for buying a house.
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