Ann vs. Jason

By Jason

I’m getting some fun video clips of Athena with my phone, so here’s another video-heavy post.

The weather never gets really bad in our part of California so despite the extra rain we’ve had lately we’ve been able to head to the park on weekends. Here’s more swinging, and a few escape attempts:

From Jan and Feb 2010

This is a video I’ve been meaning to get for a while – Athena is an extremely good climber (a bit more on that later, too). At the playground she regularly finds her way up on things that older kids don’t dare to attempt. Here you can watch her make it all the way to the top of the slides with Ann just spotting:

With one of us at top to keep her from jumping off and one at the bottom to prevent tumbles, Athena can even go down the slide by herself:

Here’s Athena playing with her toy laptop. She used to just mash the keys, but now she’s much more particular about what she presses. The lcd screen has a really poor viewing angle so she’s picking it up so she can see. I tried to show her how to change the angle but according to her it must be opened all the way.

Her favorites are the letter D, which elicits an excited “Duck!”, and the letter M, which shows a mouse for Athena to “squeak” at.

The weekend before last we went to Cupertino Square Mall and I let Ann do some shopping while I chased Athena around. Her first obsession was the escalators, so we rode them up and down about 10 times before I was able to carry her far enough away that she forgot how to get back to them. It was at that point she found the coin-op rides, obsession number 2. Her favorite was the bulldozer, clearly superior in her eyes to the pony, corvette, and spaceship. Personally I thought the spaceship was pretty cool. I plunked down the $0.50 for the ride but She really seemed to enjoy it more when it wasn’t running:

Later we ran up and down a big ramp to JC Penny until the little decathlete was exhausted. She was pretty well-behaved in the store when we went to meet back up with Ann, even handing me some fallen clothes hangers to hang back up.

The other new thing in our little girl’s life is class at The Little Gym. She and the other “birdies”, the youngest group, meet every Saturday morning for activities to build their coordination, listening, physical confidence, and independence. She has no problem with the latter two – she can always be found pushing on the door to get into the gym before class starts and spends most of the class running around the space and climbing on things. Ann and I were a little worried about it in the first class, but the teacher made a point of saying that any kids wandering around exploring on their own should be encouraged and that she would start participating more as she saw us doing the activities. She does love two of the activities, the big parachute and the bubble machine.

I don’t have any video from the gym uploaded yet, I’ll have to get some. Athena absolutely loves it. Last week she scaled a climbing wall, again with Ann just spotting. It was inclined, and only maybe five feet of climbing, but still – she’s only 14 months.

One more story I have to share, apologies if you’ve already heard this one in person but it really is remarkable. Periodically in her feats of daring-do Athena will fall off of something and get hurt before Ann or I can get to her. At that point (after making sure she’s alright and whatnot) we generally take the attractive nuisance away so she won’t be tempted to make another attempt.

Athena has figured this out. So now, when she falls off of something, the first thing she does is check to see if Ann and I are watching. If we are, she wills herself not to cry, pacing around the room with this “I’m okay, nothings wrong!!” look on her face. She’s not suppressing crocodile tears – I saw her take a face plant off one of the small stools and it must have really hurt. Since I had run over to try to catch her she gritted her teeth and just refused to cry about it.

What kind of 14-month-old kid does this? Athena is extremely strong-willed, in everything, whether it’s scaling furniture or refusing to eat. It’s fantastic but also terrifying, especially when she decides she doesn’t want milk for days on end. We’ve been very consistent in ignoring tempter tantrums so she hasn’t started throwing a lot of them, thank goodness, but I’m a little afraid my kid is already tougher than me.

One thing I know for sure, is this kid has quite a life ahead of her. No one’s going to stop her.

One last fun picture:

From Jan and Feb 2010

By Jason

Ever since I got my Nexus One I’ve been taking a lot more little video clips of Athena. Although I’ve uploaded some of them to YouTube and Ann and I have shared some on Facebook, I haven’t been very good at posting them here.

This post will catch everyone up with Athena’s latest video hits. I tend to like photography better than video but it’s hard to show Athena’s new fascination with her own shadow with a still frame:

It’s also much harder to see how our little girl has developed such advanced etiquette and table manners for a 1-year-old without a video like this one:

In all seriousness, Athena is very quick to pick up cause and effect. If she sees Ann and I do something a few times she’s usually ready to give it a go herself – she knows how to turn the TV on and off, always wants to press elevator buttons, and she knows how keys work (even if she’s still not tall enough to use them):

You might remember how much Athena enjoys the swings at the playground. Although she’s still very thin, Athena is growing taller quickly, and she’s finally tall enough to ride in the toddler swing all by herself:

She’s also constantly escalating her feats of acrobatism. It’s hard to believe that we’ve had her play yard disassembled since July last year, when she climbed over the top of it. At this point every object in the house must be knocked over and scaled:

That one is actually pretty mild compared to some of her climbs, I’m afraid to put video of it on the web. I’m also saving a few recent videos for the next update because this one is already getting long.

As for what we’ve been up to lately, last week we went to the world-famous Monterey Bay Aquarium with Sandy and her cousin Nivi. I wanted to go to the Sausalito Cetacean Institute instead but this was a good second choice.

From Monterey Bay Aquarium

From Monterey Bay Aquarium

We were excited to see Athena’s reaction to all the big fish and bright colors, and she really had a ball. It’s very hard to get photos inside the aquarium because of the low light – you notice the few I managed to get are very grainy from the high ISO setting I had to use.

From Monterey Bay Aquarium

Here’s Athena standing inside a concave part of a multi-story tank – it almost looks like she’s in the tank.

From Monterey Bay Aquarium

Here’s Athena showing me the river exhibit. We can add the word “fish” to her vocab list, and this time I know I’m not selectively hearing it because another dad there heard it too.

From Monterey Bay Aquarium

The aquarium has a lot of interactive, touchable exhibits for kids. Here’s Athena playing in the touchpool, before she started trying to drink the water and Ann had to put her back down.

From Monterey Bay Aquarium

A fun photo under a crashing artificial tide:

From Monterey Bay Aquarium

Athena also had some fun running around outside on the deck chasing pigeons:

From Monterey Bay Aquarium

From Monterey Bay Aquarium

We didn’t manage to make it through the trip without another public display of Athena’s eating issues, but overall it was very fun. I’ll end with a photo of Sandy and Athena watching the jellyfish. I took some more photos of the sea life that you can see in the Picasa album. A few of them turned out okay but I started to feel bad taking them – I have a nice camera but I really don’t have the equipment for this kind of photography. I wouldn’t feel bad taking an extra moment here and there to focus and whatnot except everywhere I went there were dozens of people with digital cameras and camera phones. It was like no one could just look at anything to enjoy it. Weird.

From Monterey Bay Aquarium

By Jason

Eating is not something you just know how to do – it’s a skill that must be mastered.  This post will show the remarkable progress made so far, starting from our first attempt at spoon feeding with Athena:

Despite the setbacks Athena was ready for a second attempt.

Though we didn’t quite get all the rice cereal in, the second try involved a lot more actual eating and much more enthusiasm for spoons.

Something you might notice in the photos is the way she keeps trying to grab the spoon as Ann feeds her.  This little girl just wants to do everything herself.

The next food on the menu was peas.  Which apparently were delicious:

We make a big deal about it when she eats solid food, look how pleased with herself she looks in this photo:

The peas were so delicious, in fact, that at the end Athena grabbed the bowl and tried to lick it clean.

Here are Ann and Athena hard at work:

I’ve got lots of additional messy feeding time photos up at Flickr.  Finally, here’s a 10-minute video of Athena’s first experience with sweet potatoes.  Enjoy:

Just for fun I thought I would share this classic Monty Python sketch about childbirth. If you can’t see the video, follow this link.

The doctors and nurses at Palo Alto Medical Foundation and Stanford have better bedside manner than this, so we’ve got that going for us.