Coffee from a Reusable Ceramic Mug

We had some friends over to carve pumpkins today! It was fun! We still have a pumpkin to be carved because Matthias took Clair duty for most of the party, so he didn’t get a free second!

I baked some cookies and even decorated them with some piping, which I haven’t done in years! Clair helped me with the baking yesterday, which meant she made a mess for long enough for me to finish the cookies. Actually, An and Sarah helped the most with the cookies the other day whey they came and hung out while the dough chilled (for hours!). Everyone else at the party brought some great food, and we have some wonderful leftovers - love being the hosts!

It is really getting to be fun watching Clair play with other kids because she is interacting more and more. Luca, who is 3 months older, is really teaching her a lot. She is learning a lot about sharing and learning also learning to stand up for herself. There was a lot of head pushing involved when she plays with the little guys, and the parents sat back watching to see how they sorted themselves out. Luckily, none of the kids are aggressive to there are a few tears but only when their piece of bread was stolen or something. I think Clair is pretty gentle with other kids (so far) even though she does have a bit of a temper. She seems to save the head slaps for us - joy.

Too tired to post individual photos, so here is a slide show:

Disney admits that “Baby Einstein” doesn’t actually make babies smarter - duh? I have only seen one of the videos (a friend gave me), and it is a video of toys being played with accompanied by classical music. Did anyone actually think this made babies smarter. Clair is mesmerized by it, but it is bright and flashy, so that kind of makes sense.

The scientists who came up with the idea of the ‘Mozart Effect’ (who was a UCI physicist by the way) even says there is no evidence that listening to Mozart makes anyone smarter. His studies just showed that it seemed to offer help for short term memory but had no significant lasting effects. So if you are cramming for an exam, play Mozart, aside from that, just enjoy the music.

Clair likes classical music, so we’ve listened to more lately, but she also likes Lady Ga Ga quite a lot. She even dances when I chant the Yoga Sutras - I wonder if they will ever make a kids video of that.

I think Clair figured out how to ask for food today. She says ‘num, num’ while she is looking at what she wants to eat. He also stood looking in the kitchen and said ‘num, num’, and I gave her a snack. She ate it, so maybe she really was communicating hunger. Cool.

Anyway, here are some random photos of cuteness from the past week.

Sometimes Clair falls asleep while sitting on daddy. She doesn’t do this with me ever anymore.

This is a fuzzy photo of Clair watching the first snow of the season (in mid October - ugh!).

She is obsessed with my keys. She seems to have figured out that they are connected to the car and the doors. She holds the car key up toward the door handle. Of course, then she screams when I try to get her to put the keys near the door (she doesn’t want me to touch them).

This is what it looks like when I go grocery shopping with Clair. It is awesome because now I don’t have to be the packing donky! Note to Cliff - the celery is in the basket; not chance of losing the panties.

Here is the beginning of a little walk we took this weekend. She did great for about 50 meters. Then she took a slow motion header into the gravel path. She couldn’t quite catch herself with her big jacket on. I picked her up and she had little stones up her nose and in her mouth. She was not happy until we took off her wet pants and tucked her into her warm, dry stroller.

I follow a blog written by a woman who is very involved in research and activism for natural birth. She recently attended a breech conference and is summarizing it on her blog. For anyone interested in reading a bit on the latest on breech births, I highly recommend it.

When Clair was born, I delivered her on my hands and knees, and no one touched her until I had pushed her out. Turns out, that technique is the “new” technique for breech delivery. Actually, it is a pretty old technique, but it is new to doctors. Midwives have been doing upright breech deliveries for much longer. It is being revived, apparently, because some German OBs have been trying to spread the word about the positive outcomes.

I am just really grateful that I had Clair over here and in the hospital we chose. Many other places would have put a lot of pressure on me to do things very differently. Yay for German midwives and doctors!

Yahoo weather claims that it got up to 42 degrees today - I don’t buy it! I finally dragged myself out of the house around noon, and with the windchill I’d say it got down to somewhere around ‘Arschkalt,’ as the Germans would say.

I was glad to see that Clair is as big of a fan of the cold as I am. I bundled her up in the jacket from Oma and Opa, and set her out. I remember thinking the jacket looked HUGE last year when they gave it to her, but it fits her perfectly now.

These days, we usually start out with her walking, and I have the carrier in my backpack for when she is tired. We walked out the door today, went about 50 feet, and then she turned around and went back to the door. It was as if she said, “OK, I’m done. Let’s go back where it’s warm.”

She was pretty much complaining most of the walk. We went to Boston Coffee in town, which has a nice little play room, and she enjoyed that. We shared a croissant, and then she checked the place out for a while while I sipped coffee (periodically retrieving her from other rooms). Once we got out side again though, the complaining resumed. I put her in the carrier to save my arms and just went straight home.

I’m glad I went down to the basement this morning and pulled up the winter jackets! I used my long wool one and a hat today, and it was just enough to keep me warm! Oh, and it actually snowed a few flakes while we were out! I think Germany forgot to do fall this year.

When you are trying to organize events to capture the public’s attention and help them be part of a huge and expensive science project, having good PR helps. The idea being that if people are interested in your science, they are mote likely to want it to continue and may even be willing to help fund it. Plus, a lot of scientists really do enjoy sharing their work with the world outside of their research bubble. NASA has a huge PR machine, and their build up to the end of the LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) mission got a lot of attention. That is, until Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize at almost exactly the same time as impact!!! doop!

There is a video making the rounds on the interwebs showing Nancy Pelosi standing with Harry Reid. People are laughing/analyzing her body language with regard to what he is saying. I watched the video, and I think people may be missing the point. In the video, Reid puts his arm around her as he is making his point, and she is obviously NOT OK with that contact and discretely moves away from him. Reid, on the other hand has the body language of the good husband, standing with his quiet wife at his side, making an announcement to the kids.

Wasn’t Bush’s shoulder massage to Angela Merkel enough of a gaff for male politicians to remind themselves to keep their hands off of the women they work with (at the very least, in a public setting)!!! You can see by Merkel and Pelosi’s reactions that it is awkward situation for a professional woman to be in because they obviously don’t want these men touching them but telling them to keep their f$*#ing hands to themselves is kind of strong reaction (and possibly a bit over the top during a press conference, though it would undoubtedly grab headlines).

I have worked with many, many men (sometimes for long hours in close quarters), and the men I work with don’t put their hands on my body when we are working with the exception of a hand shake when we meet (there was an exception of a creepy old professor who is a slime bag and was confronted for his grabby, grabby hands). Is that too much to expect? Am I missing something? I worked with my good friend Brian for a couple of years. We worked together daily, traveled around the country together, and became friends, but when we were working, we were working! I can’t imagine him putting his arm around me during a meeting as he makes a point about a decision we made. Why doesn’t anyone in the media think it’s strange when male politicians are overly familiar with their female counterparts??

I have to give Michelle Obama some props for ardently sticking out her hand to Sillvio Berlusconi rather than letting him kiss her! I guess she could have guessed that unwanted contact was coming and headed it off. It is the times that socially awkward men catch you off guard in front of an audience that are harder to deal with.

I think Clair is officially a toddler - and I am tired.

Here is what today’s excursion to a mall looked like. I needed to pick up some winter hats, a scarf and mittens for Clair at H&M. I learned quickly that Clair’s newest obsession is escalators because as soon as I set her down, she made a beeline for them. Shopping consisted of wrangling her and then trying to convince her to stay relatively close for a few seconds and then letting her wander towards the escalator for another few seconds before getting up to stop her. Fortunately, my friend An showed up after a short time and did some wrangling for me.

We eventually went grocery shopping as well after a short stop for a bite to eat (when Clair announced she had enough to eat by flinging pretzel bits and her water bottle). Clair was pretty happy in the shopping cart trying to grab anything that came within arms’ reach for about half of the time. She started trying to escape her seat at some point near the dairy section, and so I put her down to wander.

She LOVEs the kiddie yogurt packages so much that she needed to touch and hug them. Those people who put them down at kid level are marketing geniuses. We made quite the threesome in the dairy section. Clair was hugging the yogurt, and I was kneeling on the floor helping An with a foot problem!

After An’s foot recovered and we broke Clair away from her new love, she start getting more and more fussy until she was screaming in my arms. Always armed with the secret weapon, I whipped it out in one of the aisles and she nursed herself to sleep. An went to the front of the store where I had checked her carrier, and she brought it back to me. We had some technical difficulties getting her in there because she wouldn’t let go of me! An was cracking up at this point as she put the carrier around my waste and I just rotated Clair, still latched on, and strapped her into the carrier.

We just got home, and I am wiped out! Clair’s not though - she did sleep after all. I’ll see if I can get her to vacuum the living room for me.

Yesterday, Matthias and I did something we rarely do. We did a Yoga practice together while Clair was awake. Usually, if one of us is doing Yoga while Clair is awake, the other one wrangles her as her favorite place to be is usually on the Yoga mat.

Yesterday, we put on a DVD of Mr. Rogers, and Clair liked it (he meets “Stomp” so it was a very musical episode). Matthias was following me through a practice (another rarity), so I kept track of things for the two of us. I have to say it was a good practice. Clair still interrupted my flow, and I ended up holding her here and there and nursing her at some point, but I talked Matthias through the parts I skipped or took Clair with me through adapted standing poses (if you ever need some extra work on strengthening the legs, try standing posture while holding a one year old). It required a lot of concentration with the noise from Mr. Rogers in the background and periodic farm animal noises from one of Clair’s toys - imagine ‘The Red Rooster; coo coo coo!!” said over and over and over and over….

It was kind of like practicing with as much distraction as possible - something that is good for me to do once in a while. It was challenging and fun. Matthias rested while I did my inversions so he could make sure that she didn’t try to push me over while in head stand.

We are trying to get her used to the idea of mommy and daddy practicing Yoga. Our apartment is not big enough to have an entire room devoted to to it, so we need to give each other space. I can’t really practice when Clair is being too demanding. When she needs me and I want to practice, the words of my Yoga teacher ring in my ears - “If you are standing on your head and there is a crying baby in the next room, you are just standing on your head.” Yesterday was a pretty good exercise in her entertaining herself while we did something else in the same room.