Nora Evelyn

Amy (aka Auntie Carrots) sent us some pictures she took of Nora while we were in Boston. These are fairly representative of the bean’s experiences in bean town.

Nora and I hung out in the Boston Gardens (not the hockey arena) with friend, artist, photographer and computational physicist Mark Stock. Nora waved at the kids on the carousel, elbowed a boy in the nose for trying to push his way around her on the slide and generally had fun laughing and running and stomping in a surprisingly deep puddle.

At one point she was saying “hello!” to some ducks when a nice lady came up and gave her a piece of bread which, as the second photo shows, she promptly ate. She did somewhat better on subsequent pieces of bread (trying to hand it to the ducks directly) but as I didn’t relish trying to explain to her mom why Nora came home from the park destined to be incredibly gifted at base 9 math I never let her and the duck make a loaf connection.

Many, many thanks to Mark for the excellent photos. I guess I have to stop blaming the camera. (As always, be sure to click on at least the top picture).

Nora has experienced a lexical explosion in the last two weeks. In no particular order, here are most of the words we can remember her having said:

ducky, mamma, dada, papa, fishie, yellow, elbow, bye bye, hello, hi, apple, shoe, sock, spoon, cheese, car, truck, cheers, balloon, booboo, diaper, doggie, keys, hop, hat, paper.

The only thing she routinely says that we have no idea what it is is ‘sha’ which, from context, seems most likely to be ‘tree’. Today I also got her to attempt barking like a dog; she’s got promise!

By far the most exciting act of communication happened today, though, and was totally non-verbal. Shortly after a diaper change she walked over to me, got my attention, looked into my eyes, and pointed gravely at her pants. I asked if she needed a new diaper and she nodded enthusiastically. Sure enough, her nappy was freshly soiled. I’m a little blown away.

The coolest (and most recent) word is paper because we got to watch her make minimal edits to transform apple into it. It went approximately like this:

nora: *holding a piece of paper*
auntie carrots: can you say paper?
nora: apple
auntie carrots: no, it’s not an apple. it’s paper. paper?
nora: papple
auntie carrots: that’s closer, can you say paper?
nora: pappuh

so, yeah, it still has the first vowel from apple and she’s still totally non-rhotic but she was clearly editing a known word into a lexical item for the object in her hand — pretty cool. Oh! and (here I wish I had video) she was watching ac’s mouth *very* closely. I really think she was mimicking gestures and not trying to match sounds (which would help explain the reluctance to match vowel quality but is probably completely ridiculous, unfounded and inexcusable wishful thinking on my part).

p.s. she also snores.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is an almost magical place for me. My advisor (by far the smartest person I’ve ever met (and one of the nicest)) went here, Noam Chomsky (whatever you may think of him) is still here, they’ve named a road after Galileo and the nearby Mass Ave. bridge over the Charles spans 364.4 Smoots and 1 ear. They invented Kerberos (which cosign both mimics and expects you to have). It’s just a cool place, okay?

Nora and I went for a long walk on campus and took some pictures near one of the buildings.

She’s crouching in that first picture because I was crouching and she’s laughing because she thought it was an absolutely hilarious game of crouching.

I spent a lot of time rolling around on the ground trying to get a good angle on her and the flowers and the building; when I got up there were construction workers, students, and a professor watching me and not without a certain amount of (hopefully good natured) laughter.

Nora is a remarkably tolerant child.

Nora, Jen and I visited Jen’s old stompin’ grounds: Harvard. It was great fun looking at all the old buildings, taking a nap in the stroller, and not succeeding in finding the Linguistics department. Here is a shot of a statue that is not John Harvard posing with Nora. Harvard was also not founded in 1638 and was not founded by John Harvard.

For the record, you should only touch that toe if you’d be willing to kiss the Blarney Stone (and for roughly the same reason). P.S. Never, ever kiss the Blarney Stone.

Does anyone on Earth actually enjoy the game of baseball? Seriously? I absolutely don’t get it. Baseball combines all the excitement of watching your lawn grow with the wholesome family atmosphere of an opium den*. So… Nora, Jen and myself went on a tour of Fenway park which was um… green? Had a lot of seats? Is kind of old? I’m sure that if one cared a lick about this game the tour would be very special. It included dramatic moments like “this is where the players park their cars when they’re coming to a game *dramatic pause*”. *shrug*

Here’s a picture of Nora atop the “green monster.” It costs $160.00 (USD) to sit here and watch a game and you have to enter a lottery for the opportunity to pay that price. Have I mentioned that I absolutely don’t get baseball?

oh wait!! one exciting thing did happen while we were at Fenway. Our friend Tami bought Nora a new ducky.

*now that I’ve written this diatribe Nora is certain to grow up and be the world’s biggest baseball fan. She’ll end up owning a team or being the President of the United States or something like that.

Nora continues to be a more or less model traveler. She flew from DTW to EWR with a song in her heart and a magnadoodle in her lap and from EWR to BOS with a similarly sunny disposition. Sure, she wiggles a lot now, she would really like to get down and run around and she can’t figure out why so few people say “hello” back to her, but we have absolutely no complaints. We are very, very lucky parents.

We’ve been traveling lately so our most recent unforgivable paucity of posts is attributable entirely to the exhaustion of taking the happy toddler suicide watch show on the road. The most exciting part so far is the set of railings outside the door of our eleventh floor hotel room. They’re so widely spaced that Nora could literally walk between them to her rapid demise. I know this because she got to them before I did, put her hands on a pair of vertical bars, leaned over, calmly passed her head between the bars, and stared down at the ant-like people in the lobby below. Sometimes parenting is a dream, sometimes it is a nightmare, and sometimes (like that moment) it causes nightmares that I expect to linger well into my age.

*shudder*

Here’s a picture of Nora looking fierce to drive the horrid images from my mind.

‘feis’ (pronounced [fɛʃ]) is an Irish word meaning “place where perfectly lovely dancers with unfortunate clip-on curls stomp their feet while pressing their arms awkwardly at their sides) and they’re all the rage since Riverdance (which I also blame for the clip-on hair). Occasionally at a feis, though, people will get bored standing around and an Irish dancing competition will break out. It was to such an event that my dear sister and niece brought Nora last weekend for her first ever day trip away from mom & dad.

Mom celebrated by going back to bed and dad, ever the dedicated academic, used the time to fall asleep on a stack of papers he needed to read. Nora, for her part, had an absolute ball. Here’s some photographic evidence from the day.

Apparently climbing into the bookshelf has become a thing. It’s amazing how fast she can get up there. :/