Smile, Like You've Got Nothing to Prove

There are a bunch of important milestones that you think about as a parent. And there are just as many reasons for monitoring those milestones. For health, for development, for bragging rights; all of these come into play at one time or another.

But for me, for a while at least, the biggest milestone I was looking forward to was this: the smile. It's selfish, I know. For the first couple of weeks, infants aren't much more than living luggage. Feed 'em, clothe 'em, change 'em, rock 'em to sleep. The whole cycle is very one-sided. But a smile, that's a two-way exchange. She does that, and she's giving something back to mom and dad.

So when she first started smiling a few weeks ago, I was thrilled. Babies are often cute, and they don't come much cuter than Little G, but when that smile comes, it just amps the cuteness up to 11.

Trouble is, now I want to share that cuteness. And smiles, wonderful though they may be, are fleeting. By the time you get a camera switched on and ready to go, boom, no more smiles. And so began the quest to capture the elusive smile. It was a very long quest.

Here's an early attempt.
Yeah, nothing. I swear, she was smiling a second before I took this shot.

Then there are the times she's smiling, but then gets immediately distracted, sometimes by the camera itself.
Hey! What's that? Not a smile.
The cute factor is upped by the cowlick, but still no smile. Then we got a little closer. This is more of a smirk.
Finally, this Saturday, I noticed that the smiles weren't so fleeting. Each one lasted a little bit longer. Voilà! Just before we left the house to go to the Wanamaker (Macy's) light show.
And no, the search for a smile doesn't account for my 3-week silence here on the blog. But I hope a bunch of pictures absolve me a little bit.

She Can Hear Music

Though I am by no means an expert on pop music, I am, as noted elsewhere, a fan. And though I realize she's not getting much out of it from a musical perspective, I really enjoy exposing Little G to different kinds of music. A few weeks ago, when I was just trying to keep her calm for a few minutes at a time while Hollie took a few minutes to herself, it was dancing in the living room along to various mixes I had already put together in iTunes.

Lately, as she's become more focused and responsive, I've been been using my iPhone's speaker to play music while I'm changing her clothes or diaper. She really enjoys laying on her changing table anyway, so I hope she connects that positive feeling with the music I play while she's there.

While my recent Twitter updates haven't reflected this, most of the music I'm playing is by female artists. It wasn't conscious initially, but I'm doing it more and more on purpose. Again, I know she can't grasp it now, but I'm hoping that on some level I can musically inoculate her against the crappy, sometimes offensively bad, pop music she's bound to encounter in the future. I'd like her to know that for every Katy Perry out there, there's a Regina Spektor. For every Avril Lavigne, a Sleater-Kinney. For every Taylor Swift, a Marketa Irglova. It's not that there isn't a place for disposable pop in everyone's life, it's just that you can have your fun without sacrificing spectacular vocals, killer lyrics, and fine craftsmanship.

It's like the difference between a fast food meal and one prepared at home. One uses crappy ingredients to produce something that's appealing in the short term, but doesn't provide lasting nutritional value. Yeah, it tastes good, and it'll get you through the day, but if you try to eat it for every meal, you're not doing yourself any favors. The other is produced with care, from high-quality ingredients (at least the way I do it), and not only tastes great, but provides a balanced, attractive meal that you'll want to experience again and again.

Yeah. Horrible and great pop music is just like that.

As it pertains to girl groups, some of my bias certainly comes along with who I perceive as better role models, sure. Both groups trade in risque themes, but what makes a group like The Pipettes better role models (in my opinion) than The Pussycat Dolls is that the "girl power" theme that runs through the music isn't just a put on. The Pussycat Dolls use sex appeal solely as a means to sell music. The might produce a good hook for a single, but there's no real empowerment to their music. The Pipettes, on the other hand, might wear short skirts and sing about one-night stands, but they let the lyrics do the heavy lifting. Nary a stripper pole to be found at a Pipettes show. (This particular argument is a bit early in the forming, since once Little G can understand lyrics, I'm going to steer her as far from all of this as I can.)

Anyway, I'm an optimist, so I'll just go on acting like I'm making a difference until Little G is actually capable of telling me to lay off. I'm going to cook and serve well-balanced and tasty meals, and I'm going to serve up quality pop music. What she does with these lessons, that's ultimately up to her.

As long as it gets her dancing like this, I can't say that it much matters.

Which, incidentally, was in response to She & Him covering The Beach Boys "I Can Hear Music."

Revenge of the Word Nerd

Yeah, yeah, I've got a 2-month old daughter and I'm writing a post about word geekery. Sometimes you need hobbies!

So yesterday I heard a story on NPR about the Oxford English Dictionary. Scintillating stuff, let me tell you. And I'm not being sarcastic; I really liked the story.

You hear every year about new words that get into the dictionary. Most of these are related to pop culture or technology. I remember a couple of years ago when "Doh!" was added, and "blog" made the list not too long ago.

But for every word that gets added, there are some that fall out of favor and get dropped from the dictionary. It's not a one-to-one ratio, but it happens. And it's totally understandable. The Oxford English Dictionary contains more than 600,000 words. I've heard different numbers, but the average English speaker uses 1200-2000 words on a regular basis, and typically, that's about 10 percent of the words he understands. So you figure that the average person only knows about 200,000 words. (In case you're wondering, I have no idea where I fall. I wouldn't even know how to figure it out. That would be one heck of a vocab test.)

No wonder then, that the dictionary drops a few now and again. But where do these words go (Aside from the latest edition of Balderdash)? I hate to see knowledge of any kind just fall away. Luckily, folks marketing the Oxford English Dictionary in Kuala Lumpur aren't the sort of people to just let that happen. Thus, www.savethewords.org was born. They put together a list of these out-of-date and disappearing words, just so no one forgets their small contributions to the language. I'm a little late to the party on this, as geekdad linked to it last August, but it's worth pointing out nonetheless.

And so, while I'm not an inveteratist, neither do I wish to be considered a foppotee. So I will engage in no further quibbleism and get right to the point.

Do your duty to the English language and adopt one or more of these obscure, but sometimes awesomely insane, words. I'm taking frutescent and pessundate, because I like describing things as similar to shrubbery and very strong verbs.

Words may go out of style, but being a smart aleck never will.

This is Halloween! (Halloween, Halloween!)

I love Halloween. Love it. I can't say that I've gotten dressed up each of my 30 years on this planet, but if I had to guess, I'd say costumes figured in at least 2/3 of my All Hallow's Eves. The first costume I remember is Beast Man from He-man and the Masters of the Universe. You'd have to ask my mom why I chose this costume, because Beast Man was far from my favorite character. Maybe there was a sale? Let me know in the comments, Mom.

Anyway, I think I was 5, and I remember that I put on the costume and burst in on my younger brother while he was getting a bath. This would make him 18 months old, if I'm getting the year correct. The following sequence of events likely happened within the space of 30 seconds:
Matthew: (bursts through bathroom door) Raaawr!
Brett: (in bathtub) Aaaaaaaaaaeeeeeeeeeeee!
Mom: Matthew! Get out of the bathroom!
Matthew: But Mom, I just wanted to show him my costume!
Brett: AAAA! Waaaaah!
Mom: Get out!
Matthew: (stomps out the door)

Just so you get the picture, this is what I burst through the door wearing:
It is kind of terrifying. I don't really blame my mom or brother for their reactions.

After that year, I hit the typical costume beats of a boy in the '80s and '90s. Skeleton, grim reaper, pirate, vampire. In high school I painted my face like The Crow at least one year, maybe two. If this hasn't been made clear yet, I should point it out: I was not cool.

I'm still not, so it should come as no surprise that long before Little G was actually born, I was planning her first Halloween costume. Thankfully, Hollie likes costumes at least as much as I do, if not more. (You should see the RiffRaff and Magenta we pulled off in college.) So since Little G was due on September 23, well in advance of Halloween, Hollie and I knew we would have to come up with something awesome. Now, when I say we, I really have to include my mom, since whatever DIY thing we came up with would likely require her sewing skills.

Some ridiculous ideas I had:

1: Chest burster from Alien, which would've required a makeover of her stroller to look like John Hurt, with his chest situated at her seat.
2: Tiny princess Leia, but bounty hunter or Endor version.
3. Baby Naomi Wildman from Star Trek: Voyager.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

So what did we end up with? I'll show you.
Tada!

You got it, right?

I mean, come on, it's obvious.

No? Need some help?

How about now?
Aw man. I love Halloween.

Geek: Know Your History

As the recent addition of a header to this blog makes clear, the G I'm solving for is geek, which is to say, me. As a statement of purpose, figuring out one's own life and the living thereof is maybe a bit self indulgent, but what blog isn't self-indulgent to some extent?

But before you can figure out where you're going, it's useful to learn where you've been. If not "you" in the specific sense, then "you" in the cultural sense. To that end, I present a brief history of geeks courtesy of a geeky marketing firm, Flowtown (hat tip to Janette for sending this to me):
It's a big picture, so make sure to click on it to blow it up.

It's a little reductive, and really doesn't give you any idea how we got from Geek who bites head off chickens to Geek who is essentially a nerd to Geek who is obsessive about any one of a number of cultures. But it's a neat way to think about how we identify ourselves as geeks these days.

To dig deeper into how that happened, I recommend American Nerd: The Story of My People. The author, Benjamin Nugent, spends a great deal of time parsing the evolution of geeks, nerds and dweebs from the mid-20th century onward. He focuses on a few geek subcultures, including gaming, LARPing, and speech and debate teams, largely because those were the activities he enjoyed as a kid. Nugent does mention the circus freak geeks, and how the term essentially meant "outcast" for a very long time. My dad initially balked at the notion of my self-identification as a geek, mostly because the word had that pejorative connotation throughout his childhood.

But if you think about a geek as someone who is simply passionate about a particular thing, then my dad would be hard-pressed not to identify as a Lincoln Geek, a wood Geek, or even a word Geek. (He did get pretty excited about I Write Like when I blogged about it in July.)

And passion is the important thing. Whether it's my cousin obsessing over the latest episode of Glee, my brother tinkering over mini-robots in his bedroom, or my wife gushing over old recordings of Sweeney Todd and My Fair Lady, it's that passion I want to pass on to my daughter.

So this is directed at you, Little G. There's a great big world with a whole lot of history and culture waiting for you. Find something to love and make it yours. (Although if you could pick something other than whoever follows in Justin Bieber's footsteps, your dad would appreciate it.)

Weeee! Charts! And Sleep!

Given that I was too busy posting pictures of my daughter in exploratory Star Trek mode on Monday, I didn't get the chance to engage in my favorite kind of post: data analysis.

On Monday, Little G went to the doctor for her 5-week check up. For the record, she was 36 days old at that check up. She received her second Hep-B vaccination, and got another weight and length measurement. At that time, she clocked in at 9 lbs, 3 oz and 22 inches. That's a gain of a whopping 2 lbs 2 oz since we brought her home, and 1 lb 6 oz since her last weigh-in, which explains why picking up her car seat has gotten progressively more difficult.

Here's a helpful chart to show where she is compared to the average:

I used www.infantchart.com to generate this, and though it's hard distinguish between the lines that early on the chart, she sits comfortably around the 42nd percentile. Solidly average. It also means she's been gaining weight at an average of 1.15 oz per day since her last weigh in. If that holds true, she's probably at 9 lbs 5.3 oz today.

As for length, the same site lets me check that, too.
Provided that 22 inches is an accurate measurement (which means she's either grown 1.5 inches since we brought her home, or somebody has been careless with the tape measure at some point along the way), that puts her around the 68th percentile. Not too shabby either.

In other milestone news, Little G has "slept through the night" two nights in a row. I use quotation marks because "night," in this case, is relative. Monday night we were able to put her down at midnight and she slept until 5:30 am. Last night she went down a little after 11 pm and slept until 5 am. It's not a full night's rest in my book, but it's a good stretch, and it's happening at night rather than mid-morning, so I'll take it.

Unfortunately, Hollie has a really bad chest cold, and it kept her up until 2 in the morning, so she wasn't able to take full advantage last night. We're hoping that gets better soon. The small amount of sleep she's been getting hasn't made getting better any easier.

I should mention that Little G is still not sleeping in her crib, as sleeping flat just seems to upset her. We read great reviews of this rocker/sleeper, and it seemed to be what she needed. We swaddle her tightly so she can't smack herself in the face, and this keeps her legs bunched up in a comfortable way while keeping her torso tilted. We got it on Sunday, and it's worked great 2 out of 3 nights so far. Of course, I'm probably jinxing Little G's sleep routine by bringing any of this up, but I hope this behavior continues.

General housekeeping notes: I've started a Twitter feed for the blog, which you can see in the right column. Follow me, if you're so inclined, and you'll see things like what we're listening to during daddy/daughter dance time, what shows I'm using to stay awake while trying to put her to sleep, and general miscellany about being a geeky dad. Even if you don't have a twitter account, you can bookmark and visit http://twitter.com/SolvingForG to see what I'm posting, or just visit the blog and read the last few tweets.

Lastly, if you're a regular reader, what sort of things are you interested in hearing about? I won't promise to post fewer charts, but if there's something I'm not mentioning that you'd like to see, let me know and I'll do my best to oblige, within reason. Respond in the comments below, or on Facebook. Thanks!

Generations

Life... the First Frontier.
These are the voyages of Little G. Her continuing mission:
To explore strange new worlds
To seek out new life and new civilizations
To boldly go where no one has gone before.

Picture all that being said aloud by Patrick Stewart. It's quite grand, don't you think? I'm partial to his narration, although I think I prefer the women's chorus singing the musical theme from the original series.

I should point out: this is not her Halloween costume. This is just your average weekend outfit. The real costume will be revealed in due course, and is sufficiently geeky.

In the meantime, here are more pictures!

Boldly yawning where no baby has yawned before!

Boldly navigating sales at Old Navy in her stroller, or as I like to call it, the runabout. (It works if you think of the house as DS9, and the car as The Defiant... ah forget it. This analogy has gone too far.)

She can't take much more of this, Captain!