Ann vs. Jason

By Jason

Sunday was Athena’s birthday, so it’s time to post cute birthday photos and take stock of her progress thus far. I feel a little bad because I haven’t had time to put together a spreadsheet or anything, but this completely random list of accomplishments will have to do.

In one year, Athena has:

• Learned to walk and run;
• Walked five blocks straight without a break;
• Figured out how to turn on the dishwasher;
• Figured out how to turn on the stove;
• Figured out how to open the baby locks that we put on the stove;
• Climbed over the play yard fence;
• Learned at least five words, including “Hi,” “Bye,” “Mama,” “Dada,” and “No” (pronounced “nuh-nuh-nuh”);
• Printed out an essay she wrote on mama’s iBook;
• Recognized incoming Skype webcam calls;
• Muted the webcam about 100 times;
• Discovered that she can drag large items around the house and use them to climb up to reach things she’s not allowed to play with;
• Started singing, though she can’t really carry a tune.

Now for some photos.

Because I spent a lot of money on a fancy DSLR camera, I feel that I should be able to do all the portrait photos of Athena myself. This is almost always a fiasco, because Athena doesn’t like to stay in place for any amount of time, but I’ve come up with a few rules for success in child photography:

• You have to have more than one chance to take photos. Setting aside one day to take the official N month photo is setting yourself up for disaster.
• Limiting the photo session to a certain time period is unrealistic and will just lead to frustration.
• Putting a dress on a baby raises the cuteness factor but lowers the chance of actually getting a good photo by 50 percent.
• You need more light.
• The fewer photographers, the better. Everyone wants to take their own photos, but this leads to family pictures where everyone’s eyes are looking in different directions.
• Put the shutter on continuous. Pick the one frame out of 5 that isn’t blurry.

We went to Google for our first attempt at 1-year photos Saturday morning. I figured it would be a good spot because of the ample light and primary color walls, and it worked out fairly well. The hardest part was getting Athena to keep from running off.

Here you can see Athena deciding to rearrange the studio:

Ann and Athena:

The family photos didn’t turn out as well as I had hoped. This is always the hardest for me to do, since I have to run back and forth between the camera and the scene.

We got some of the best photos of the day when we put Athena on the piano. She loved it.

Ann picked out a really nice dress for Athena:

We tried to get some photos outside in the sun but Athena has discovered how fun it is to run away from dad when he has the camera.

On Saturday we went to Ahan and Julie’s house for a combination baby shower and going away party. They are moving to Oregon. We stayed the night so we could hang out on Athena’s birthday.

Athena was a lot less enthusiastic about unwrapping presents than we expected. She was very precise:

Ann and I got her a toy laptop since she’s always trying to type on our computers. Here you can see her demonstrating it to everyone:

It’s for ages 3 to 5, so it’s not surprising that she hasn’t figured out all the features yet. She really likes the startup music so she spends most of her time opening and closing the laptop.

No first birthday is complete without a messy cake:

Between her normal easting issues and her dislike of sweet, sugary foods, we didn’t think she would be too excited about the cupcake.

Do they make salty, non-sweet birthday cake?

She did give it a try:

But soon decided that it should be backhanded to the floor:

Why so serious, Athena?

The other big news is the emergence of not one, not two, but three teeth almost simultaneously! If you look really closely you can see them in the photo:

This is a really cute photo:

Saying goodbye to Uncle Ahan and Aunt Julie:

Next up: Thanksgiving trip to Cleveland.

By Jason

Halloween is kind of a big deal at Google. Almost everyone dresses up, with geek points awarded for elaborate costumes, internet in-jokes, and shameless puns. This was a particularly important Halloween, being Athena’s first. So we faced a challenge: to come up with clever costumes for the three of us without doing anything offensive enough to get me fired.

Given all the work I’ve been doing lately to warn people about internet scams, we decided to be a whole scam family:

Ann is the deposed Nigerian prince looking for a trustworthy American friend with a bank account number, Athena is Falcon the Balloon Boy, and I am the make-money-at-home Google money tree.

Here’s a better picture of Athena’s costume:

We ended up ditching the cardboard box portion of the costume while at Google, since she spent most of the time either eating it or trying to take it off. It turns out that all you really need to do is tie a silver ufo-style balloon to a little kid and just about everybody recognizes the balloon boy. She was a big hit. Athena loved the crowds and all the attention – she ran around in the grass, balloon trailing, as everyone doted on her.

I’m posting this photo only to note that you can see Larry wandering by in an airplane costume in the background. Athena’s first celebrity sighting.

Here’s a photo of some of my coworkers on the search quality team, with Shane, Nelson, Wysz, myself, Rowyn, Sandy, Alissa, Koklynn, in the back row and Reid, Sophia, Tom and Rahul in front. Both Nelson and Reid were dressed as Max from Where the Wild Things Are. The giant banana in Nelson’s arms is actually his dog, Henry. Wysz is dressed as a chef in one of our cafes, though he had a hard time coming up with a costume this year.

Here’s a photo of our vocational-gender-stereotype-busting support engineering team, including Merry (as a 1-up mushroom), Rowyn, Sandy and myself.

Halloween was fun. We didn’t do any trick-or-treating with Athena, our apartment building wasn’t doing it and we don’t really know anyone in the neighborhood to show her off to. Next year I’m sure we will – because by next year, she’ll have a child’s all-consuming desire to acquire candy.

As always, I’ve got more photos in Flickr.

Some other happenings we’ve missed in our blogging tardiness:

1. Rachel, one of my high-school era friends, came to the Bay Area for work and spent a couple days hanging out with us and playing with Athena.

2. Athena is walking incredibly long distances. She can now easily handle several blocks at a time – the only reason we have to hold her hand to to keep her from running into traffic. Here’s proof, taken on Castro Street in Mountain View:

3. We hung out with Ahan and Julie, who are moving to Oregon and having a baby soon. Here’s a pic of Athena helping to take apart Julie’s lego building:

4. Andy flew in for a Google Summer of Code mentor conference and we got to hang out a bit. He regaled us with tales of what happens when you collect a bunch of super nerdy computer scientists together. Let’s just say that if anyone ever starts a conversation with, “did I ever tell you about the programming language I invented…” you should run.

This photo didn’t turn out very well but I’m including it as proof that Andy was near a baby and neither burst into flame:

It’s hard to believe Andy and Michelle’s wedding was over a year ago, or that Athena is almost a year old. We’ll have more posts coming soon… I think Ann wants to write a bit about what we’re doing to get Athena to eat better, all the talking she’s doing, and we have a Thanksgiving trip coming up soon as well.

By Jason

Picking up from last post, the last night my parents were in town my brother flew in from Boston. It was nice having everyone together, if just for a little while. Athena is pretty attached to her Uncle Ryan, no doubt anticipating all the shenanigans he will let her get into in the future.

We took Athena to the park again and had some fun on the swings and jungle gym.

I love this shot on the slide, the motion blur makes it look like they were really moving:

Athena exhibiting unusual strength:

She really is strikingly strong, especially since she is so skinny. She’s also very clever, and likes to get into things. Her favorite tricks at the time were turning on the dishwasher and turning on the burners of the stove. Along with some fun toys, Ryan picked up knob covers so our kid wouldn’t burn our house down. He’s very helpful:

I love this picture on the slide:

Other than playing with Athena, my brother’s other objective while visiting California was to eat at In-N-Out Burger as much as possible. If you haven’t been out the west coast, In-N-Out is probably the best fast food burger chain in the area. I think he managed to have it two or three times, which is pretty impressive for a long weekend.

Because he was only here for a little while, we didn’t have any ambitious travel plans, but we did go to see San Andreas Lake. Fun fact: San Andreas Lake is a reservoir built right on top of the San Andreas Fault. There’s an earthen dam built right across the fault. No kidding:

We took a nice walk down to the dam and through the surrounding park:

And then we jumped up and down as hard as we could to see if we could cause an earthquake.

No luck. I’d like to think that somewhere there’s an freshman geology major monitoring the seismometers for his work-study who was mildly startled.

Unfortunately that was our only trip, since Ryan and I both caught Athena’s cold the next day. The virus limited itself to a runny nose in Athena’s system but hit the two of us like a pandemic, all we wanted to do was sleep. Luckily Ryan did get some more quality time in with Athena before he had to head out.

The weather was actually pretty crummy the whole weekend, and Ryan had the misfortune of trying to fly out during “The Storm.” His flight was delayed by hours.

We’ve got one more post to catch up on and then we’ll write about Athena’s first Halloween.