Nora Evelyn

Today Nora’s Granny gave an Irish breakfast (a proper fry at the crack of noon). At some point the topic of my old VW Beetle came up and its rather unfortunate and untimely loss. I loved that car. It got 25 miles to the gallon (of gasoline) and something like 20 miles to the pint (of oil). I once traded apples for motor oil at a rest stop near Novi just so I could get home without my engine seizing up.

After hearing of the car’s untimely loss, Nora turned to me, put her hand on my arm, looked earnestly up into my eyes, and we had the following conversation:

Nora: I will get you a new Beetle car, daddy.
Me: oh, thank you, sweetie!
Nora: I will get you a new Beetle car. It will have to be when I’m a grown-up so I can drive it to you.
Me: *sniff* *tears up*
Nora: And you can drive it everywhere. You can drive it to work!
Me: thank you, honey, that’s very sweet.
Nora: *hand still on arm* what’s your favorite color, Daddy?
Me: green
Nora: I will get you a green Beetle car, daddy. When I am a grown-up.

*sniff*

Sorry about the radio silence lately, but the technical department of rubberducky.org has been busy writing his dissertation. The good news is that it is now all written and submitted so you should expect a few updates soon.

Incidentally, the dissertation defense is going to be (a) boring and (b) open to the public and everyone is invited:

date: August 5^th 2011
time: 10:00am EDT
place: 201 Lorch Hall
title: The Role of Socioindexical Expectation in Speech Perception.

the editorial board here at rubberducky.org would like to take a moment away from our normal parenting activities to relate a message to all of the spammers like Trainum34@ymail.com who are constantly trying to get us to link to their crappy ad sites. We’ve never once been fooled by you people and we never will. Okay? It’s particularly easy to not be fooled when you say:

Children are so precious and only should be taken care of in that way! Your blog has given me some great ideas, so thank you and please keep it going!

in response to a blog post about the time we accidentally let Nora climb up on the back of the couch and dive into the pack-n-play. Yes, precisely the manner in which our precious children should find themselves cared for — we’re so proud.

We’re at a conference this week and, though we remembered the camera, we’ve forgotten the USB cable. If we’re able to find a place that will sell us a cable (or an SD card reader) we have all kinds of great stuff to post; otherwise it will have to wait until we get home. Hang in there, the management.

We think this totem might be a marker for the mother ship.

Thing 1: Nora noticed this morning that I was showering but had stupidly neglected to stock up on duckies. So she did me a solid and tossed each of the four duckies currently doing a tour of duty in the bathroom into the tub with me. I’m just glad it wasn’t the hair dryer. Luckily for you, there is no photographic evidence of this.

Thing 2: We may have jumped the gun on the love interest thing. Nora gave her friend Samantha a big hug today when I was getting her ready to come home from baby school. So Nora’s still playing the field, keeping her options open, and testing the waters.

There were a lot of campaign workers in our neighborhood trying to get out the vote. So I posted a sign.

It says:

shhhhh!
(baby sleeping)

You wake our baby and we’re voting for the other guy.

p.s. we mean it.
p.p.s. shoo!
p.p.p.s. thanks for volunteering!

Nora’s Halloween costume is now made. She’s tried it on and it fits perfectly. She is so blindingly cute in it that you must not look at her directly — instead you must content yourself with looking at her shadow through slits in a piece of paper. Still, though, this may be too much cute. You have been warned.

What is the costume? I’m certainly not going to say. :)

This post is a little weird, I know, as it has no pictures of the baby. I’ve put together a short slide show of Nora hamming it up for the camera yesterday morning, though. Anyone completely uninterested in diapers can go watch that instead. :)

(more…)