Whew. Been a while. Friday was our last day of teaching. Monday we give our final, and then we're done teaching for the year. We'll still have committee work and lectures to prepare for next year, but we can finally get around to setting up our labs and getting back to research and writing. It's been a marathon. Every day we've been in lab all morning, lecture all afternoon, and usually up studying for 2-3 hours after we put London to bed at night. Hence the absolute lack of new pictures here since we first moved in.
From the end of the driveway--or any other place in town with an unobstructed view to the north--the San Gabriel mountains are BAM! right there in your face. I took London up into the mountains a couple of weekends ago, to the Forest Service visitor center. We looked at the taxidermy exhibits inside and walked around the grounds, which include reproductions of Indian dwellings and mining camps, and a cool little pond with a waterfall.
London was very interested in the little tiny minnows that swarmed in the pond.
Our Friday fish stick picnics are a tradition--we haven't missed a Friday night since we moved in, although a couple of the 'picnics' have been inside when the weather was bad or we were feeling lazy.
There are lots of things that London is keen to by himself, and going to the bathroom is one of them. "No,
I do it! You don't come in!" All he needs help with these days is wiping his heinie and turning on the water to wash his hands. His natural inclination to count extends to
everything: "Daddy, I made seven stinks!"
Elmo is still his "baby sister" and goes with him everywhere. He has also decided that Cookie Monster is Elmo's father and his (London's) son. Don't ask me how that genealogy works out.
He still sleeps like a little baby, with his feet tucked up under his bum.
Here are some more of London's words:
The other day he was going through the alphabet and raising one finger for each letter. When he got to J he was out of fingers, and he exclaimed,
"I have J fingers!"At preschool he learned how to trace his hand, and I showed him how to turn his hand tracing into a picture of a turkey. He drew a good turkey, but after it was done he drew a long line angled up out of the turkey's back. I asked him what it was.
"This is the fing it shoots with."The week before last I was in Cleveland for the annual meeting of Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. London asked when I was going to come back from
"Keefland."London has always taken a long time to rouse after a good sleep. Ever since he was a brand new baby Vicki and I have joked that he is like a little caveman thawing out of the ice. When we come to wake him on our early weekday mornings, he buries his face in his pillow and mumble/whines,
"I'm still fawing out."
I taught London about Dutch rubs the other night. The next day he said to me,
"Bend down. I want to give you a rubber dub."
On Friday evenings I usually haul out the telescope and show London Jupiter and its moons and some of the brighter deep-sky objects. His favorite is the Double Cluster in Perseus (shown above--not my photo!), which looks like a double handful of diamonds scattered on black velvet (or blue silk in our case, thanks to the horrible light pollution here in LA county). This Friday night London hopped up on my lap, put his eye up to the eyepiece, and started counting stars. He got to
"firty-nine", which is as high as he can count right now. Vicki and I almost cried.
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London will be four on November 13, and Christmas is coming up, too. I thought it would be a good idea to let you know what he needs and what he doesn't.
Here are some things he doesn't need, because we already have far more of them than he can use (although if you already have some put away for him, of course we will be grateful):
- toy trains
- toy dinosaurs
- stuffed animals
- story books
And here are things he likes but doesn't have, or doesn't have enough of:
- paper for drawing, preferably bound into books so it doesn't end up all over the house. Doesn't have to be fancy, the cheapest paper pads will do.
- nonfiction books. Our favorites, and his too, are the DK Eyewitness books, which are sturdy full-color hardbacks with tons of photos of all kinds of real objects and vehicles. They have titles like Space, Pirates, Knights & Castles, and (inevitably) Dinosaurs, and they're in every bookstore on the planet (and Amazon, too, of course). We read them at the library and he doesn't have a single one, so the field is wide open.
- Legos. In the past month he has stared building like crazy with his Duplo blocks, but he's ready for Legos. The big tubs of general bricks would probably be best, and they are reasonably cheap in department stores. And we're not worried about duplicates, because you can never have too many Legos.
- Star Wars. London is a huge Star Wars fan, and the only Star Wars toys he has are his lightsaber, an Anakin Skywalker action figure, and one of my old spaceships. He'd go nuts for one of the life-sized blaster pistols or any of the ships, vehicles, or action figures, small or large, whatever. About the only thing that is probably beyond him right now are the Star Wars Transformers. Oh, speaking of which:
- Transformers. London loves 'em. He can't work the full-sized ones that actually transform yet, but there are small action-figure versions that don't transform, and versions from the new animated series that have very simple transformations.
- Tonka trucks. All of London's trucks are either soft baby versions that he's outgrown, or Hot Wheels size. A good-sized sturdy fire truck would be especially appreciated.
- Similarly, all his planes and rockets are Hot Wheels scale. A plastic plane or rocket (or both) that was big enough to put a little tiny man inside (like one of his 1-inch tall astronauts) would be wonderful.
- toy tools. Ho man, London loves these. He had two hammers but they were both goofy soft ones for babies and we haven't gotten them out here (the fate of many of the toys from Merced that he's outgrown). Right now he has a plastic wrench and that's it.
Thank you all, sincerely, for keeping him supplied with things to play with. That said, we are overrun with toys. If you are trying to decide between several small things and one bigger thing, please get the one bigger thing. He'll enjoy it a lot more, and it will keep us from getting cluttered right out of the house.
