Posts in category daddy
It’s a toss up.
This has long been one of Nora’s favorite activities and, I find, the bigger she gets the higher I feel comfortable throwing her.
Norakon Camera
Nora and I made a simple version of a pinhole camera today out of an old junk food can. I foolishly neglected to take any pictures of the construction process, but Nora and I collaborated about equally on all of the tasks (except the x-acto knife which I handled solo). The tube has a piece of wax paper suspended a few inches from a tiny, tiny hole in the bottom of the can. When light bounces off objects in the world, some of that light finds its way through the pinhole and creates a perfect (albeit upside down and backwards) image of the object on the wax paper. This is very similar to the way your own eye works and working evidence of how simple it would be for a species to evolve something as useful and (eventually) complex as an eye.
Here are some photos of Nora using our new camera (and some shots taken through the new camera with our old camera!
Houston Arboretum
Nora and I spent a pleasant Sunday morning at the Houston Arboretum. It’s a surprisingly tranquil collection of trees (obviously) and swamps adjacent to Memorial Park and nestled in the middle of the vast sprawling metropolis we call home. We had great fun hiking on the trails, looking for tadpoles, trying to decide if the turtles sunning themselves were alive (they were), and (for Nora) finally seeing what the heck a lily pad is.
bodhrán lesson
Earlier this evening, much to Colin’s immense delight, I spent some time practicing the bodhrán. Like his sister did, baby Colin loves the bodhrán. After I’d played half a dozen reels, jigs, and a mazurka or two, I let him have a go at it!
cyclist
Today, Nora rode her pedal bike without training wheels. It took us a few weeks back on the balance bike to unlearn the bad habits she picked up with those blasted training wheels but now she’s got it and she’s unstoppable (literally unstoppable, we’re still working on brakes).
Happy Birthday to Me!
For my birthday, Kevin and Nora made me a beautiful (and delicious!) cake. It was a modified pound cake with fluffy chocolate frosting, decorated with some very fancy sprinkles.
Baby sitter
Colin can sit! mmm… sort of. It might be slightly more accurate to say that he now falls over following the physics at play in the Road Runner cartoons. He can stay up and happy until he realizes nothing is holding him up and then he falls like a stone (but we catch him) (and he doesn’t hold up a little sign saying ‘uh oh’ first).
NASA with Drakes
Nora and I went with Ben, Rachel, and Harper Drake to NASA a few days after Christmas. Ben, more talented with a camera (by far) than anyone on the Rubberducky payroll, took some great pictures. We love these particular Drakes and only wish we lived closer so we could see them more often.
