Matt Brubeck

It's been a while since I posted a personal update here. Sarah and Eleanor and I have been in a nice routine for a while now, so it usually feels like there's nothing new to report. Unlike last year, we haven't moved or changed jobs (or changed jobs again). Eleanor is now in the long steady climb through toddlerhood, so her milestones and breakthroughs are not as frequent as they were. But over a year, things do add up.

Eleanor turned three last month. This fall she started going to a nearby co-op preschool, four hours a week. She chatters constantly, and likes singing and rhyming. She has started drawing specific things, like people, flowers, and cookies. She likes taking baths but not having her hair washed. For Halloween Eleanor was a monkey and I was the man with the yellow hat. (Sarah was a firefighter, which also fit the Curious George theme.) She enjoys sharing her Halloween candy with us.

Eleanor still spends one day a week at my mom's house while Sarah and I are at work. When Sarah's school started this September, I moved to a four-day work week so I can stay home with Eleanor on Sarah's other work day. This continues a pattern: When Eleanor was born, I worked four-day weeks for a few months at Amazon after Sarah went back to work; before that at GoTech I worked four-day weeks to spend more time on side projects.

I'm still working at Kiha and we're still in stealth mode. The work itself has changed quite a bit, not surprisingly. I feel much more productive than just one or two years ago, thanks to improved sleep at home and a focus on habit- and skill-building at work. I've also started doing more studying and programming outside of work again. My recent side project Compleat got a nice reception on Hacker News and Reddit a couple of weeks ago. I did put a lot of work into that write-up, hoping for more people to read and share it.

That was also the first post at my new weblog. I'll post programming-related articles there instead of LiveJournal or my old Advogato diary, so please subscribe if you want to know what I'm working on. Or if you are subscribed to Planet Matt then you'll see my blog posts along with all my other feeds.

Congratulations to photon0912 & cubetime on their new baby! Also, belated congratulations to patrissimo & choiceful, kuddliphish & maxemulien, olstad, chanusa, kimdons, anahas & mr_minconbop, and 2gouda4u & thegreatgonz; and early congratulations to aardvark428 & omega697 and katiemouse & schempp. Not to mention any others I've forgotten or who aren't on my LiveJournal friends page.

With a dozen or so young'uns by my count, is it too early to start planning for our do-it-yourself Mudd Gen.2 summer camp? Maybe modeled after demolition camp? (We could give it a clever name like "Baby Boom" or "Population Explosion" or "Let's Blow Some Stuff Up, Wooo!")

Oh, yeah! I work at Kiha with bellwethr now. It's nice.

I had a month off between jobs. I spent some time interviewing at several companies, served on a jury (criminal trial; drug possession, crack cocaine; guilty), and spent a lot of time playing with Eleanor and doing work around the house.

Eleanor is talking more every day. She chooses to wear pink almost all the time (despite our best efforts to give her clothes in lots of different colors). She plays make-believe games with her toys. She still wants to spend about half of each day reading books. Her favorite place to go is the grocery store.

Every year my family goes camping at Penrose Point with a group of other families that we've known since I was in daycare with them. We reserve the group camp site for two nights, drive in with our tents and coolers and Coleman stoves, and spend most of our time relaxing at the beach or around the campfire. On the second evening we have a party—usually with a theme and costumes. This has been going on for something like 26 years now. Sarah and I skipped last year's trip because we weren't ready to take the baby with us, so this year was our first time camping with Eleanor.

Eleanor was thrilled beyond words with the entire trip. She'd love to spend every hour of every day playing outside, but we normally have to bring her back inside after a couple hours for pesky things like food or sleeping. So camping was like paradise for her. She spent hours playing in the dirt and wading in the lagoon, and thought that eating and sleeping outside were highly amusing. It also helped that we had grandparents and other friends around to keep her entertained when Sarah and I got tired.

Oh, and our Dr Horrible costumes were a hit at the "Musicals" theme party.

One of Eleanor's latest developments is playing pretend. It's interesting because unlike her other skills, she started it without really being taught or shown how. Also, it's cute: She carries around empty food containers and "feeds" Sarah and me, or has her stuffed animals eat from them. She "opens" doors inside the house with her toy keyring (note these are doors without keyholes). And most recently, she holds her stuffed animals by the hands and has them "help" pick up laundry or toys.

Sarah and I are spending our free time hunting for houses in West Seattle. Not much to write about yet, but our favorite from last weekend's tour was this house with an amazing yard and nice basement. This weekend we're touring more homes, including this one with a nice floor plan and good location.

Eleanor knows her colors now, although the only ones she signs are white, black, red, orange, yellow, brown, and green. Her favorite color is orange. She's a huge fan of any orange cats we meet outside—especially the two we captured on video last month, which she asks to see again and again.

Eleanor has always gone through cycles of good and bad sleeping. She's never slept through the night consistently, but she'll have approximately two-week periods where she manages it most nights, followed by a few weeks of more frequent waking. The worst periods are during teething, which recently started for all four of her canines. Now that she's older, she's also resisting sleep more actively in the evenings, and we've had to get more draconian about bedtime routines. No Cry has served us somewhat well up to this point, but we might need to give Dr. Ferber a try soon. I'm not enjoying this new phase.

During the day she's an absolute delight, fortunately. She is experimenting with sounds, and has expanded her spoken vocabulary to five words: mama, dada, baba ("baby"), wawa ("water"), and dowa ("door", we decided—she's still working on this one). She can walk five blocks to get to the park, and she (usually) likes helping with household chores. She also likes visiting our housemates, who will very graciously entertain her for a few minutes to give me and Sarah a little rest.

By watching and listening to what we say, Eleanor has decided she knows signs for two words we never taught her: For pear she makes the sign for bear, and for flour she makes the sign for flower.

Well, it looks like we have a white Christmas after all. Seattle is very pretty in the snow. We had a long morning of opening presents and visiting. Eleanor loves her new ride-on dump truck and toy telephone. She hasn't even gotten to all of the other new toys and books yet.

The XO has also been a big hit. I'm most impressed with the TamTam suite of music activities, which includes an analog synth lab, a multi-track composer, a drum/loop sequencer, and "TamTamMini," which just turns the keyboard into an electronic piano. Eleanor loves using TamTamMini to make animal and car sounds. I've mostly used the Browse, Write, and Read activities, and experimented with the collaboration features using Tom Hoffman's public Jabber server.

Eleanor is now walking confidently, eating constantly, and reading tons of board books. New baby sign words: airplane, bird, baby, ball, book, car, dad, library, eat, water, pants, shirt, sleep, swing, tortoise (Eleanor likes going upstairs to visit John's pet tortoise.)

It's almost a month since Eleanor celebrated her first birthday. She still doesn't say any words consistently, but she has suddenly expanded her baby sign vocabulary from two words ("milk" and "outside") to many (hat, light, cat, frog, dog, flower). Many of the words are things from her favorite board books. Eleanor will happily spend an hour sitting with a stack of books, choosing one after the other for us to read to her.

Eleanor is working on walking. She hasn't tried to take any steps alone, but she pulls up on everything, and likes racing around hanging onto my hands or her walker.

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I'm very excited about the new Amazon MP3 store. I downloaded some Jason Webley tracks, the new M.I.A., and My Piroshky by Optimus Rhyme. (Other good artists like MC Lars and Frontalot are available too, but I'm trying to buy local, organic nerdcore.) I'm also tempted by the latest New Pornographers album, and the House M.D. soundtrack, of all things.

In related music video news, I know some of you will like the It is Pitch Dark video by MC Frontalot. And my less roguelike-oriented, more dance-oriented friends should enjoy the Walk the Walk Dance video by Emily of "Code Monkey Dance" fame. Finally, random Swedish electroclash video.

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I think that this might be my new hard question for especially good interview candidates. But first I need to prove that I can solve it myself. No spoilers, please - I'm still coding a solution to see if it works.

July was an exciting month! Eleanor is crawling, pulling up to walk, cutting teeth, finding new sounds to babble, eating grown-up foods, and feeding herself. I'm glad I took my last three weeks of family leave so I was around for all of it. The trip to Maryland was fun, despite the seemingly-inevitable flight delays. We also had some fun back in Seattle, going out to a restaurant and to the aquarium, and playing at home.

While she still doesn't want to be far from us for long, Eleanor will now crawl around her room or play with her toys while Sarah or I watch from nearby. This is enjoyable, except for Eleanor's energetic devotion to grabbing and eating things she shouldn't. Baby-proofing is proceeding in fits and starts, and our main exercise now is stopping her from eating, shredding, or bonking into things around the house.

Until recently, Eleanor's food was limited to fruits and vegetables. (Because she has a tendency toward itchy skin, her doctor was worried about food allergies.) We took my grandparents to an Ethiopian restaurant in Silver Springs, and Eleanor managed to snag a piece of injera and eat it. She liked it so much, we let her keep going. At her nine-month checkup, the doctor gave the green light to most other foods. (Nuts, honey, egg whites, and most seafood are still to be avoided for now.) Eleanor has now eaten yogurt, bread, goat cheese, chicken, polynesian rice, hard-boiled egg yolk, and probably more that I'm forgetting. We're trying to feed her the same foods that we eat, although most of our food is still too hard for her to chew and swallow without being minced or blended. Eleanor loves food, and almost everything we give her disappears down her mouth as fast as she can manage. Sarah and I have been eating well too, thanks to the new Phinney Farmer's Market on Friday. New favorite food: beets!

Tomorrow I go back to work. And I still need to catch up on my photography class and schedule a dentist appointment and optometrist appointment and car service and scooter service...

Eleanor has achieved forward motion. Until about a week ago, she was only able to scoot backwards. Now she can charge forward on hands and knees like a tiny bull, and is also learning to pull up to a standing position. She is very satisfied with her new independence. (Video here.)

We're off to the airport in one hour for a red-eye to the East coast. Wish us luck!

Since Sarah went back to work in January, I've been using my saved-up vacation days to stay home with Eleanor every Monday. (My mom has been watching Eleanor each Wednesday, Sarah's other work day.) Tomorrow is the last of those vacation days; I run out of paid time off just in time for Sarah's summer vacation to start.

In July, when I take my last three weeks of unpaid FMLA leave (I took nine weeks last autumn), we're flying to Maryland to visit Eleanor's great-grandparents in the D.C. and Baltimore areas.

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Eleanor used crayons to make me a card for Fathers' Day (with help from her mom). She's learning to feed herself, sit up on her own, and make new sounds. She's still not very close to crawling, but she's working on it.

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I'm having fun taking pictures with my little pencam. The $6 dance pad hasn't arrived yet. Two weeks left to order yours! (via triath)

Solid food is fun.

Photos from month 6.

Eleanor turns six months old in a few hours (at 1:04 AM). This means she gets to try her first solid food—but I think that can wait at least until morning.

Even at two months I said she was the most hyperactive baby I'd seen. Now she never stops moving except to sleep (which she does better some weeks than others).

Eleanor did extremely well on her first plane trip, to my grandfather's memorial service in St. Louis. That's good, because she'll be visiting three great-grandparents on the East coast this summer.

Eleanor's current favorite games are rolling over, and dancing.

Photos from month 5.

Some people say that becoming a parent made them softer or more conservative. It seems instead to be radicalizing me.

I've always been ambivalent about feminists: I agreed with the basic problems they fight against, but questioned their assumptions and tactics. One of the things I found puzzling was the constant nitpicking of women's depictions in every category of art and entertainment. Are we really building a better society for women by writing papers deconstructing gender roles in Star Wars Episode I?

Now that I have a daughter, this exercise seems less academic. I'm becoming increasingly aware that as she grows up, friends on the playground will tell her that girls can't play the same games as boys; that many teachers will probably give her less attention and have lower expectations of her in math and science; and that she will be surrounded by movies, TV, and songs in which girls never play certain roles. Obviously I want to do what I can to correct this. I can provide alternate messages, but I can't turn off the culture that surrounds her outside our home.

So I was encouraged to find Packaging Girlhood (via Bitch). This book is not perfect (I think it descends too far into nitpicking, especially of specific books like Harry Potter), but it does have a lot of good ideas. It goes beyond whining, and gives plenty of concrete suggestions. One of the best points is that pre-teens and teens love to be worldly and cynical; just give them the right ideas and they'll enjoy picking apart their own marketing and entertainment.

I recommend this book to parents of girls or boys—as long as you're willing to wade through the repetitive complaints to get to the good ideas.

Photos from month 4.

Just after Eleanor turned four months old, we moved her crib from our bedroom to the nursery (which is right next door). With both doors open, we can still hear her cries just fine, but we no longer wake each other up at night by tossing and turning. All three of us are sleeping a bit better now.

Eleanor has mastered the use of her hands, and is now interested in standing up. She'll stand for quite a while on the couch, holding herself up on the back of the couch. She's also getting better at holding her head up while on her tummy, though she still dislikes it and apparently would love to skip crawling in favor of walking.

Late again: Photos from month 3.

Picture-taking (and LJ-posting) has slowed down a bit now that Sarah and I are both working. Sarah works Mondays and Wednesdays. I'm using a bunch of saved-up vacation days to stay home with Eleanor on Mondays; my mom is babysitting on Wednesdays.

Eleanor has recently discoved how to grab and hold things. This has broadened her culinary horizons to include toys, clothing, books, and my arm.

Better late than never: Photos from month 2.

Eleanor sleeps well at night, screams only a little while each day, and is the most hyperactive 2-month-old we have ever seen. Her hair has reached anime proportions.

I have now changed over 200 diapers. Good news: Eleanor is no longer keeping me up until 1:00 AM every night!

Photos from one month.