The Mederos
Rough time
Published August 24, 2009
Martin’s had a rough couple of weeks. Since turning 3, he’s started sleeping through the night in his own bed, fully weaned (NOT his choice, sadly), and started working on transitioning to a new class at school. We think this has all added up to not enough parent time and too much independence at once.
As a result, we’ve seen an increase in hitting, kicking, and tantrums. This weekend we tried to focus on lots of good snuggle time, but drop-off in the new class was still very, very rough this morning. It’s so hard to watch him be upset with his world and not know how to help him get oriented again! Here’s hoping he settles into a new routine soon!
Terrible Threes
Published July 25, 2009
Martin will turn three shortly and we seem to have hit upon what I imagine folks refer to as the “terrible twos”. I’ve also been given uplifting advice such as “two wasn’t nearly as bad as three… oh and wait till they get to four.”
In keeping with the theme of Maritn’s use of language, I thought would survey his top ten most commonly used language constructions for conveying frustration:
- “BAH!”
- “I don’t like that plan.” or “That is not my plan.”
- “What is going on with you guys?” (One of many phrases that Martin has heard from one of his parents and turned around to use against us.)
- “I’m very very mad!”
- “Go Away!” (Usually followed by, “I need my space.”)
- “I wanted to be FIRST. Hmph!”
- “But I can do it ALL. BY. MYSEEEELLFFF.”
- Hitting the nearest person, animal or object.
- “You did [X] and I do not like that because I do not like [X].”
- (random sniffing and grunts to convey a mixture of anger & saddness)
Several of these are often used in combination and the order is somewhat random though “BAH!” tends to come first.
I’m not suggesting that any of these are unique to our child and in fact many of the key terms used, particularly “space” and “plan”, come from his preschool’s lexicon.
This can’t get any easier.
Published July 21, 2009
Shawn had a big birthday last week (cough30cough) and we were eligible for new phones this week, so we now have a fancy pair of iPhones in our house. Hopefully having Internet everywhere makes these posts too easy .not to make. I have the wordpress part figured out and I have a camera, so as soon as I know how to upload pics with our password stuff on them we’ll be set!
Martin’s on his first of two swimming trips of the day. He’s in the wading pool with dad now and we head to the community center for mom & me lessons tonight. He loves the water and is convinced he’s already an expert with nothing left to learn. We aren’t quite as sure he’s ready for solo diving board adventures as he is!
The Future of LINK Light Rail
Published July 18, 2009
I woke the family up early in the morning, 5:18am to be exact, and shifted us into high gear to make the Link light rail inaugural train ride.
This one trip emphasized the need for light rail before we even made it to the ribbon cutting ceremony.
- We walked over a bus top and arrived 10 minutes earlier to take the 6:26am south bound 358 bus. It never showed up. Instead we got on the 6:41am bus that, thankfully, did arrive on time.
- Arriving at Union station at 7am (exactly when we SoundTransit asked us to be there), we rushed through to find the shuttle bus that would take us to the ribbon cutting ceremony at Mt. Baker station.
- The shuttle bus got lost and nearly ended up stuck in a neighborhood with small streets when it tried to turn around.
Never-the-less we did make it in time to listen to some back-patting speeches and then board the first trains open to the public. We had an option of taking a north-bound (Downtown Seattle) or south-bound (Tukwila) train, and I had decided earlier in the week that I wanted to ride to the south terminus and then back to downtown. The entire trip was great: the stations, tracks, & trains appear to be well built.
One thing that dawned on my wife and I during the speeches was that our son would never know a Seattle without light rail. Additionally, as he reaches voting age a number of SoundTransit Link extensions to the existing system will be finished and Seattle will have to vote on when & where to continue this great project — so I hope today will instill a bit of excitement about mass transit for him. Hopefully when he mails in his future voting ballot, he’ll remember his cranky old father reminding him that “it wasn’t always this easy, you use to have to take 3 buses to get from there to here.”
More Martin phrase fun
Published January 14, 2009
Martin’s latest word fun fest involves his desired location in relation to a specific person.
A new favorite of ours is:
Pick me down
A variation of “pick me up” of course. Awesome.
Also interesting is his use of:
sit on my lap
What he really means is, “Let me sit on your lap”.
Martin Tests Word Order and Other Randomness
Published December 6, 2008
Martin’s figured out he can swap words around within a sentence and that doing so might provoke a different outcome.
Sometimes it doesn’t work.
I want not go outside
moments later…
I not want go outside
Besides testing his world with language, Martin has many phrases (often used in a socially unacceptable ways) that tend to get a chuckle.
We’ll often be on a busy bus headed home from a long day when Martin will point at someone and say:
I want that guy get off bus.
He enjoys when people get off the bus because the door opens and the floor/ceiling lights come on. Still, these moments make you blush. Last week he at least asked someone to sit next to us.
Along the “that guy” lines, there are a number of inquisitive phrases he uses with either males or females. The pattern is usually: (WH-word) "that guy" (verb)?
What that guy do/doing?
Where that guy go/going?
Martin also has a pretty direct approach to asking for stuff:
Hey mommy/daddy read this!
Hey mommy/daddy eat this!
Hey mommy/daddy play trains in my room!
It is a fun time to be a parent.
Hanging Out with The WhatWG Cabal
Published October 23, 2008
I’m at the W3C TPAC, in Mandelieu, France, doing my small part to keep the web moving forward. It is always said that the best part of any conference is the non-standard face-to-face meetings: hallway chats, chance encounters, lunches, and dinners. I’ve been doing my best to take advantage of these moments, like hanging out with a mixture of Opera employees and some of the more active WhatWG members:
In the photo left to right: Me, Arve Bersvendsen, Lachlan Hunt*, Ian Hickson*, Anne van Kesteren*, and Geoffrey Sneddon*. Photo taken by Kai Hendry.
* Evil Cabal Member
Too much of our work happens over the internet (IRC, email, blogs, wikis, etc), for obvious reasons, and meeting in-person at least once a year gives you a chance to attach something more tangible to the experience. We each have our own “quirks mode” that is difficult to understand in a medium like email unless you’ve caught of the mannerisms, facial expressions, vocalizations, etc before hand.
Ian Hickson Gives an HTML 5 Google Tech Talk
Published September 26, 2008
A good overview of the “demoable” bits of HTML 5 (it is hard or too boring to demo lots of the parsing, dom consistency, error handling changes).
There are a few scattered pictures up to …
Published September 4, 2008
There are a few scattered pictures up tonight:
- A few leftovers from a week ago
- This week’s pictures are also up!
- And, finally, here’s a sneak-peak at next week
Things are going well here. My mom’s in town (hi mom!), making her our first Florida visitor to Seattle. Marty’s super excited to have is “Bamma” visiting him, and had a very happy day with her today.
It’s been a couple of weeks now, so I feel like I can mention that Shawn’s been able to put Martin to bed at night without too much trouble pretty regularly. It’s so refreshing to get up after bedtime stories and leave the room once in a while! Hopefully this eventually leads to sleeping longer at night, too…two years of sleepless nights is enough for me, thanks much!
Video: Martin Learns to Climb the Playground Step Ladder
Published August 30, 2008
Martin has been itching to climb anything he can find at the playgrounds near our house. Last week he finally figured out the rope ladder, video after the cut.