  2008
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January 10
2008
Welcome to the World, Nephew Matthew Scott! Kim's sister has entered the production pool!
- Date:
- Thursday, January 10, 2008
- Time:
- 5:42 p. m.
- Weight:
- 6 lb. 7 oz.
- Length:
- 19.5 in.
January 25-27
2008
February 7
2008
The Northwestern psych department has this ongoing project called the Project on Children's Thinking. They have volunteer children come in to take simple tests, and Xavier had the opportunity to take a pattern-matching test. They put a card on the table that had a simple pattern of animals on it, usually two of the same animal touching or three of the same animal, say one cat and two kittens, arranged in some geometrically regular pattern. Then he was asked to turn the card over. Surprise! There's a sticker on the back! Next the researcher showed him 2 more cards (laid out next to the original card); one showed a different animal in the same set of poses as the first card, and the other showed random animals in random placement, ONE of which was the same as the animals on the first card. (This is what it looked like.) He was asked which new card he thought might also have a surprise behind it. Younger children almost always pick the card that has the same critter on it. It's not until they're a bit older -- around 4 or so -- that they can perceive the pattern. Grade school kids almost always pick the matching pattern.
He had SO much fun! He sat down in the little kid-sized chair, and when the researcher sat down across from him and told him they were going to play a game, he got all serious and hitched up his little chair and crossed his little hands and was all businesslike, ready to work. Then she showed him the first card, and he studied it all serious; "Yes, that's a picture of two pigs kissing. No question, those are pigs. Yes." BUT, when he flipped the card over, he exploded! The sticker on the back of every card is different, and he made the study take twice as long as it needed to by describing in detail what each sticker was and how that object works in real life. "That's an AIRPLANE! It goes up and it flies like this and it goes around and it goes down and it lands over here and it goes here and it goes over here and it flies!" The researcher was laughing so hard she almost fell out of her chair. (The whole thing was recorded, and they very kindly agreed to send me a copy of the video.)
When they were finished, Arizona wanted to have a turn (he had come along with us. We had lunch with Mom on the way, and he was home sick because he'd had a fever the day before.) Arizona did one set of cards and, before the girl could grab them, he had turned them all over. You see, the secondary cards didn't have ANY stickers, because you're not supposed to KNOW which ones have the surprise. If you did, you'd learn the pattern, and then they'd be studying pattern learning and retention, instead of pattern perception. You could see him thinking, "This is kinda dumb; where's the surprise?" Regardless, they both got prizes from the Magic Drawers of Cheap Trinkets, AND they both got t-shirts! When I saw all the stuff they were giving away, I said, "Wow! You guys got funding!" I'm not sure how they took that.
We also had a less exciting but still moderately remarkable event happen that night. For the past few days it had been raining, then on Wednesday we got 6 inches of heavy, wet snow. The wet roads plus the wet snow plus the suddenly plummeting temperatures resulted in an inch-thick layer of ice under the snowpack. And since the rain had a chance to work its way down into the cracks in the roadbed, the ice sheet was FIRMLY attached to the ground. Even the big snowplows couldn't get it all up in one pass, and for days the roads all had chunks of ice stuck down all over the place.
Well, I can usually get the snow off of the driveway -- by hand, mind you, I won't pay upwards of $700 for a machine that's just a giant screw attached to a simple lawn mower engine -- in just under 30 minutes. It took me 2 days of HEAVY work, around 6 hours, to chip out all of that ice. (It's a compulsion. Once I start a project, I have to finish it ALL THE WAY. It takes a LOT to make me give it up or do only part of it. When you shovel the drive, you're supposed to see the driveway, not a layer of ice.) I did half of it on Wednesday, and after we got back from the study I tackled the other half. I got so sick of it that I decided I needed something pleasant nearby to keep my spirits up, so I dragged out the firepit. We had a little campfire in the driveway while I scraped and chipped. When I finished with the ice, I brought out my camp mug and mess kit, and the boys and I had cocoa and tea made on a campfire. The firepit melted a big circle of frost on the ground. Zona borrowed some of my cold weather gear, too.
April 24-27
2008
June 13-15
2008
I've been so excited about camping since I started up last November that I got Kim and the boys to agree to come out to a local site this June, just after school ended for the summer. We went to Chain O'Lakes State Park, up by Grass Lake, for three days of car camping.
It's interesting to see how car camping and backpacking differ. Since the car is doing the heavy work, you can take all SORTS of neat stuff. We had lots of cast iron cookware, and lots of extra snacks, and lots of fresh cooking ingredients like real eggs and real milk. And a hatchet for chopping wood, and wood (can't cut your own at this park) and chairs and plates and silverware... just everything. We kept all the food cold by tossing it in a cooler with a chunk of dry ice. Let me tell ya, dry ice keeps things COLD. We put all the refrigeratable stuff in a warm cooler with the dry ice, and an hour and a half later, when we got to the camp site, they were frozen solid. Have you ever peeled a frozen egg? It's weird.
July 21
2008
Arizona and I started taking parent/child karate today. We're studying with the Illinois Shotokan Karate Club, which is an independent school that only accepts students through their local park districts, which means they don't have to maintain thier own dojo, since they use various park district facilities. (They DO have their own dojo, but that's beside the point.)
June 29 to
July 16
2008
After accidentally evicting a caterpillar during our summer yard cleanup, we decided to try our hand at raising it into a butterfly. Arizona had raised a caterpillar as a first grade project, and Joel was terribly disappointed that he did not get to see the butterfly, so we jumped at the chance to do it again as a family project.
Thanks to the miracle that is the internet we were able to identify our caterpillar as a Black Swallowtail and figure out what it would eat (parsley and carrot greens). Unable to ascertain the gender of the caterpillar, we named it "Fred," after a character in the TV show Angel who goes through her own metamorphosis in the final season. Yes, I'm a geek.
We found the caterpillar in our driveway after clearing away the day's cuttings on 6/29/2008. Joel built an awesome little environment in an old empty aquarium with several of the cuttings from the bush where Fred was living before our weekend gardening. Also a carrot, some fresh dill, and a live potted parsley, all favorites of the breed.
On July 2, 2008, I got home from work to discover that Fred had become a chrysalis (pupated, says Arizona). For almost two weeks there was very little change and I worried that we'd done something wrong. Joel and the boys went to Kentucky to visit his folks and I promised to take pictures if anything changed. Late one evening, I noticed that I could see a pattern of orange dots on black through the skin of the pupa, and sure enough, we had a butterfly the next morning, July 14, 2008. Throughout the day the butterfly dried out it's wings, and a little more internet research revealed her to be a Winifred, rather than a Frederick. The double row of yellow marks and blue on the rear wings mark her as female. A male would have a single, solid yellow stripe and no blue. Since the boys were in Kentucky, I mixed up some hummingbird nectar to keep her healthy until they got home the next day. The cats were fascinated everytime she fluttered her wings.
On July 16, Joel carried the aquarium out to our vegetable garden so that Fred could find the carrots as a good place to lay eggs. As soon as the lid was lifted, she took off into the sky, happy to be free. She moved so fast, I didn't get a picture of the release, but fortunately we were all there to see it.
July 24-26
2008
joe camp
August 6
2008
August 12
2008
trapped mouse
July 18
2008
WeeM 33
November 7-10
2008
