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Last fall, Tantek and I presented a poster at HT04. To get it to the conference in one piece and to avoid having to lug it across the country, I created a PDF of the poster and sent it off to the Kinko’s web site. It was printed for me by the Kinko’s closest to the conference. All I had to do was send them a digital file, and 2,150 miles later I retrieved the physical output.

As I did so, I thought: This is really amazing. This is what’s so great about being connected.

A few months later, Kat upgraded her car, and the new one came with XM digital radio. We started receiving music from geosynchronous orbit, a digital signal broadcast from 22,600 miles above the equator and deciphered by the short, stubby antenna on the car’s roof. On a drive to visit relatives, we listened to the same station for the entire four-hour drive there, and again for the return drive.

As we did so, I thought: This is incredible. This is a great example of the benefits of connecting everything.

I was wrong in both cases.

This morning, I stood in a hotel room in Chiba, Japan and saw my wife and daughter on the television. Back home in Cleveland, they saw me on a computer monitor. We talked to each other, waved hello, got caught up on recent events. I watched as Carolyn ran around my office, heard her say “mama”, and agreed with her when she signed “telephone” while she watched my image. I stuck my tongue out to make a silly face, and six thousand miles away, my daughter laughed with delight at my antics.

A few minutes after we’d finished the chat, with the glow of home and family still warm upon me, I thought: This is why we connected everything in the first place.

This morning, Carolyn told me quite clearly that she wanted some yogurt for breakfast. Technically, what she said was “more baby”, but I knew what she meant.

How did a 13-month-old manage to tell me what she wanted? By using sign language. Kat and I have been teaching her Baby Signs, which is a simplified version of American Sign Language. I’m given to understand that Baby Signs figure in the plot of the recent movie Meet The Fockers, but don’t let that sour you on the idea. The amazing thing is that it really does work, if you’re willing to put in time and effort.

At this point, we’re actually looking more to real ASL signs than we are to the Baby Signs vocabulary when teaching Carolyn new signs. I think the real utility of Baby Signs is that it gets you started where it makes the most sense: teach your baby signs like “food”, “water”, “more”, and “all done”. This allows the child to communicate their wants and needs long before they ever become verbal. It works because motor skills advance more quickly than verbal skills do. I’ll be very interested to see if Carolyn retains the signing as she grows up, or if she’s able to pick up secondary languages more easily.

Carolyn’s first sign was “hat”, which of course didn’t help at all with deducing her needs, but it was still incredible to witness. I was actually there when she figured it out. She was looking through a Baby Signs board book while I stood watching. She stared very intently at a picture of a baby signing “hat”, and then put her hand to the side of her head, just like in the picture. My jaw dropped, but I managed to keep quiet. She did it a couple more times, then looked up at me. That’s when I showered the praise. It only took a day or two to teach her that the actual sign for “hat” is to pat the hand on the head, not just place it there, like she saw in the picture. Now Carolyn signs “hat” whenever she sees a picture of one of her grandfathers, because they both wear hats all the time.

Her signing vocabulary is now about thirty words, and she’s actually devised two signs of her own—which means, unfortunately, that we have no idea what she’s trying to say when she makes them! But we’ll figure it out eventually.

As for how “more baby” means “I want yogurt”, that’s because we quickly noticed that when Carolyn signs “more” what she really means is “I want”. As for “baby”, the yogurt we feed her has a picture of a baby on each container. One day she walked over to the refrigerator, patted the door, and signed “baby”. Then she had to do it a few more times while the rest of us scratched our heads and said things like, “The refrigerator’s not a baby, sweetie. What are you trying to say?” before finally figuring it out.

Sometimes I think she’s smarter than we are.

So if you’re a new parent or a parent-to-be, I strongly recommend that you try this with your own baby. When a baby starts waving bye-bye, that’s when they’re ready to start learning sign language. (We started earlier than that, hoping to lay a foundation, and may or may not have been wasting our time.) It will help reduce frustration, and therefore tantrums, because you’ll be better able to meet their needs when they have them. The system isn’t perfect, of course: any baby that gets too upset will be unable to communicate with anything besides tears. It’s still a great thing when your toddler comes into the room and signs “food” long before the hunger starts making her cranky.

I wonder if the children of deaf parents, whether they themselves are deaf or not, have long benefitted (tempramentally and intellectually) from signing, and nobody outside the deaf culture bothered to notice.

Last night we went out for dinner with some of the other kids in Carolyn’s playgroup (and their parents) at default favorite Matsu. Carolyn, as usual, had miso soup with extra tofu cubes and nori, some steamed sticky rice, and half a harumaki. All very much as normal. But then, as Kat started on her Manhattan roll with citrus tobiko, Carolyn grabbed a piece and stuffed it into her mouth.

Her first sushi—I was so proud. We know she liked it, too, because after demolishing the first piece, she grabbed another one and ate most of the contents.

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(And did I have the camera with me? Of course not. One of the other daddies had a camera phone, though, so hopefully I’ll be able to update this entry with a picture.)

For Thanksgiving, we visited Kat’s parents in the West Palm Beach area, where they retired earlier this year. When we left Cleveland on Thanksgiving morning, it was snowing—the first snowfall of the season for us. It was clear that it would build up a dusting, and then melt within a day. Where we were headed, it was in the seventies. A part of me wished I could have stayed with the snow.

But off we went, and had a wonderful dinner with Kat’s parents and brother Neil. After dinner, Uncle Neil taught Carolyn how to work the stacking-ring toy we brought along, and his efforts paid off in spades. She’s been pulling rings off of the toy and putting them back on ever since, although she still hasn’t quite worked out that whole “largest-to-smallest” thing. It’s pretty amazing to see how fast she went from not understanding to clumsy attempts to get it right to being an old pro.

Best of all, there was a prize embedded in the center of our trip: we drove up to Disney World to spend the night at the Contemporary Resort and take Carolyn to the Magic Kingdom for the first time. We had dinner at the Liberty Tree Tavern, an establishment whose name strongly and incongruously reminded me of Thomas Jefferson’s dark aphorism. After dinner we watched the Christmas parade go past. Well, actually, Kat and I watched it; Carolyn slept soundly through the whole thing, thus proving my assertion that when she’s fallen into a deep sleep, you can march a brass band past her at full volume and not wake her up. The parade marched two of them past her. Snores galore.

The next day, we had breakfast at Chef Mickey’s, rode a few rides, saw the new “Philharmagic!” show (highly recommended), and then headed back to West Palm Beach with my father and his wife, who had met us that morning.

There were two things I observed at Disney that completely astonished me.

The first was that all the children, the same media-savvy world-weary jaded children we keep hearing about in the media, totally buy into the ‘magic’ of Disney. They relate to the costumed cast members as if they were the real thing; when “Mickey” comes by the table to dance a little jig and pat the kids on the head, they don’t see quote marks. It really is Mickey, as far as they’re concerned, and even if they know on some level that there’s someone inside a costume, they gladly ignore that knowledge and go along for the ride.

The second thing was that Carolyn, against all my expectations, totally got that the costumed characters were in some way special. I expected her, even at nearly a year old, to regard the characters as slightly strange people, and not significantly more interesting than anyone else. Not so. At first, she was a little hesitant, but with each new character she got more and more excited about them. You can see in the pictures just how comfortable she became: she’d only learned to give kisses the week before, and by the end of dinner gave Chip (or Dale) a kiss.

At breakfast the second day, she spotted Chef Goofy standing alone near the entrance to the restaurant. She immediately let go of my hand and toddled toward him. He sat down, and she went right into his arms for a big hug, then sat down next to him and looked up into his face. As I took pictures, I heard several people behind me saying things to the effect of it being darned near the most adorable thing they’d ever seen. A woman sidled up next to me and said she hoped I’d gotten it all on video. I hadn’t, but that’s okay. The pictures I did take tell the story well enough.

I don’t know what it is about Disney; maybe they put something in the water. But it really does create a kind of magic.

All too soon, it was time to head back home. Like any good parent, we want our child to be as safe as possible, so I was greatly heartened to see her taking the time to look over the important safety information printed on the card found in the seat pocket in front of her.

This past Tuesday, and by that I mean three days ago, Carolyn stood unsupported for the first time, wobbling in place for five seconds. She stood on her own a few more times Wednesday and Thursday, gaining a little more experience and confidence each time.

This morning, she started walking. They’re tentative, almost spastic steps, but she can get from one person to another without any support at all. Her facial expression as she does so is a bizarre mixture of pure concentration and pure joy–almost as if she knows this is really, really hard, and yet loves to do it so much that she can barely breathe.

Remember, this is the little girl who didn’t even start crawling until about six weeks ago. Now she’s walking, and she’s started crawling up the stairs to boot. I can hardly believe it. It’s almost like she was uninterested in mobility until she twigged onto the fact that she could actually move from place to place on her own… and once she figured that out, well, Katy bar the door.

And honestly, I’m not sure who’s more excited, her or us. Yeah, I know, she’s walking now and that means our lives will never be the same, we’ll wonder why we were ever excited about this, blah blah parental scare stories blah. You know what? I will never wonder why I was excited about this. As she’s moved through every stage, I’ve cherished and enjoyed where she was on each day, and how she’d changed from the past. Kat has as well. I think we’ll be free of the wistful regrets that so many other parents have talked about, saying things like, “Oh, I just couldn’t wait for little Joey to start talking, but now he just won’t stop with the chattering and I wonder why I ever wanted him to change!” No matter how jovial the tone or wry the expression, there always seems to be an undercurrent of seriousness, as if they really do wish that little Joey would just shut up… or, at the least, that they’d fully appreciated the pre-talking stage.

I don’t know that we’ll ever understand that view, and I can’t say that bothers me. Every time Carolyn makes a developmental advance, it’s a new and fascinating time. But more immediately, every single day is exciting and wonderful, as we watch her figure out this thing or that; just share playtime with her; or take her for a walk in the yard to touch the trees’ bark, pull up tiny handfuls of the grass, and tilt back to look at the sky with storm-gray eyes full of awe.

Now she walks. Soon, she’ll start signing to us. A few months from now, she’ll begin to really talk; she’s already starting to assemble the rudiments of language, imitating things we say as best she can. One day, she’ll go to kindergarten, and later to grade school. In the farther future, she’ll become a teenager, and then a woman. At every turning point, we’ll celebrate who she is and what she’s doing, and never regret the times that have passed into memory.

Keep walking, little one. We’re right behind you.

September was quite an eventful month around these parts. Guess who learned to crawl, started pulling herself to a standing position, began “cruising” (hesitantly walking while holding on to a couch, table, or other object), moved up to a bigger car seat, figured out how to drink from a sippy cup as well as she already could through a straw, and acquired full object permanence within that thirty days?

And those are just the developmental changes we’re sure happened. We’re very tired now, thank you.

In the process of installing baby gates all over the house, I discovered that I’m becoming vaguely handy. It’s a little weird. Practice does get one closer to perfection, and Ged knows I’ve a very long way to go before I even begin to approach the contemplation of perfection in being handy, but I’m now to the point of seriously thinking about building my own workspace furniture, sort of like Dan did a while back.

Most of my practice was obtained by trying to baby-proof our kitchen. This is no easy task anyway, but the, er, “interesting” choices made by the house’s previous owner made it about a zillion times more difficult. Because of the way the drawers and cabinets are faced, it’s almost impossible to secure about half of them. Of the half that could be secured, two-thirds of them were a royal pain.

Of course, sometimes the difficulty wasn’t with the materials. I had a friend over to help me with the kitchen proofing, and we spent a lot of time complaining about the idiots who had put together the kitchen. We had just pulled out a drawer to install a lock. He selected a thin bit to drill a guide hole, and then started. The drill bit didn’t even penetrate the facing. He pressed harder, and still nothing. Harder, and I realized the drill bit was actually starting to bend. It wasn’t getting anywhere. We were kind of impressed, as the facing didn’t look that tough.

No matter; he switch to a sturdier bit and started again. That one made no better progress than the first one, and as he bore down, we both saw a wisp of smoke curl out of the drill site. When the drill was lifted away, there was simply a small dimple in the facing. Now we were seriously impressed, and more than a little confused. What the heck was this facing made of, anyway?

Just as I started rooting around in the toolbox for a hammer and chisel, he suddenly exclaimed, “Oh, I am such a dumbass.”

It was suddenly very, very clear what had happened. I couldn’t help it. I started laughing, as did he.

He clicked over a lever on the drill, put the bit back in place, and hit the drill trigger. It tore straight in. I almost fell on the floor, I was laughing so hard. I couldn’t speak, could barely breathe.

“Well, go figure!” he said in a self-mocking tone. “I guess it works better when you have the drill actually going forward instead of in reverse! Wow! Who’d have thought?”

Indeed so. Lesson learned.

Since there were requests for pictures of the little one in action, here you go: one crawling, one standing, and a bonus “on the swings” picture. No, I don’t need help adjusting the brightness on these, but thanks.

Long-time readers may recall my ranting about iLife 4 being a for-money upgrade, which in the end was as much about my lack of understanding as it was about Apple’s (perceived) silence on the subject. As it turns out, I never got around to buying iLife 4, so I was happy to have it bundled with my new PowerBook. That’s right, folks, I spent over $2,000 on a laptop, but I saved $49 in the process! Ph34r my l33t sh0pp1ng sk1llz!

So I imported my entire iPhoto library into iPhoto 4, which only took about 45 minutes. In the process, I discovered that I actually have 4,080 photos so far. There was some weirdness, in that iPhoto 4 claimed to have discovered 234 “lost” images. Under half were duplicates, and the rest were completely blank files with the same names as photos I already had. So I threw them all away, and landed at 4,080 pictures. Once I figured out the keyword interface, which is by no means intuitive (or even very usable), I set about adding metadata to some of my images. The first order of business, of course, was to tag all pictures of Carolyn and organize them into a smart album. Guess how many pictures I’ve take of her so far? We’ll have the answer in a moment, but first, here’s a recent one of her sitting up on her own, which she started doing a couple of weeks ago.

Everything I’ve heard about the improved speed in iPhoto 4 proves to be correct, and possibly understated. This thing screams. It still generates bloated directories, though, given the number of XML files and image copies it’s capable of producing. This is largely so that it can support a “Revert to Original” feature, so any time you take out red-eye or lighten up an image, you end up with both the original and the modified image on your hard drive. The same happens if you do no more than rotate an image.

That’s where iPhoto Diet comes in so very handy. It’s a small application that can get rid of all unnecessary duplicates in your iPhoto library, and it can also delete the originals of all rotated images. It can also wipe out all the originals, replacing them with the modified versions. I ran it on my library before I migrated to the new machine and reclaimed over half a gig of drive space. And that was only getting rid of unnecessary and rotated duplicates, not all originals. I did a lot of red-eye reductions, and those are still around. I also have yet to run the “strip thumbnails” option, which could easily reclaim a few dozen megabytes.

I haven’t really played with the rest of the iLife suite since I don’t have a video camera or a garage band. I may eventually burn some images to a DVD for relatives to play on their TVs. If I can figure out how to use Garage Band, I might try creating some background tracks for use in radio production work. It’s nice to know the options are there.

And the answer to today’s trivia question is: as of this writing, the smart album titled “The Compleat Carolyn” contains 1,832 pictures. At this rate, we’ll have about three thousand pictures of her by her first birthday.

Earlier this morning, I obtained a Continental OnePass account for Carolyn. She’s six months old, and she has a frequent flyer number. Even if our schedules remain absolutely static from now until the end of 2004, Carolyn will have earned close to 10,000 miles toward Silver Elite membership before she reaches her first birthday.

I can’t decide if this frightens or amuses me.