Heptadecagon

scan0149 Originally uploaded by three beans Little by little, my parents are divesting their house of my junk. Each time they come to visit, they bring a box (or several) of my Hess trucks , baseball cards, books, Matchbox cars , or old school papers. The last time they were here, they brought an overstuffed folder of my schoolwork from kindergarten. I couldn't believe it. These papers were 32 years old! Why hadn't they thrown them away long ago? Here's how it works, from the parental point-of-view. Your precious little snowflake brings home a piece of paper with something that resembles a colorized Rorschach test. You: "Oh, that's a beautiful, um, dinosaur? Playground? Baseball player?" Snowflake: "Daddy, that's our family. This is me, that's you, and there's mommy." You (who didn't know until just now that you had self-tanning-spray-gone-awry-orange skin, lime green eyes, and jet black hair that sticks straight up): "W

Dear readers, as I sit here typing this post, good things are happening in my brain. Happy chemicals are fluttering around, and neurons in activity centers deep inside my brain are tingling. At this point, you may be thinking (and honestly, I wouldn't blame you for it because it doesn't sound like a half-bad idea), "Oh here he goes, with his pitcher of sangria on one side and keyboard on the other, trying to be a modern-day Hunter S. Thompson ." The truth of the matter is that blogging is good for you . Imagine that. Seriously, go ahead and imagine it, because then maybe your brain will release some dopamine, too. Take a moment; I'll be right here. Do you feel better? I knew you would. According to one author of the study, expressive writing is linked to improved sleep. It seems perfectly clear to me, then, that babies and toddlers should be blogging. Babies could be sleeping twelve or thirteen hours straight at nighttime, and their parents wouldn't

No, it's not what you're thinking (unless perhaps you're an environmental biologist). Testudines have nothing to do with Barry Bonds, Jose Canseco, 500 foot home runs, or shriveled things . Opening day for our baseball team was supposed to be Sunday. Sunday was clear and sunny, but not too hot --- a perfect day for baseball. I was getting dressed for the game when the manager called: the game is postponed because there were turtles on the field. It had rained the previous night, and evidently a gaggle, a school, a flock, a herd, a colony, a swarm, a bale of turtles thought the standing water on the field would be a great place to play. A few hours later, Zoe and Talia got the idea into their heads that the turtles were having their own baseball game. One of them said that the game was probably only in the second inning, turtles being very slow creatures and all.

Although nobody has pointed this out to me yet, the past two posts contain no pictures of the wee beasts. This sort of reckless posting puts me dangerously close to alienating my base readership (mom, et cetera). Without delay, I present the basement ! Not long ago, we almost-kinda-sorta finished part of the basement ("A bucket of bleach, some cans of paint, and I'll have this place ship-shape in no time" -- Jacqueline Ogburn from a beloved book ). Many of the kids' toys have taken permanent residence in the basement, but the world-beating toy down there is the inflatable house. Well, it used to be a house. The green and yellow parts that now resemble flaps used to attach to form a roof-like structure. These days it's more like a box, but for simplicity's sake, we'll continue to refer to it as a house. One way to use it is to sit in the house and play (like maybe "playing house," for example), but that mode of operation lacks in both a

Dear readers (and by "readers" I mean "mom"), it's not that I mean to talk about mathematics all the time, it's just that when Aaron takes a handful of pennies, puts them on his Magnadoodle , and draws this, the first thing I think of is graph theory . I'll be the first to point out that this isn't a simple graph because two pennies have more than one line connecting them, but the boy is only three, so let's cut him a bit of slack. Aaron himself, though, claimed it was a constellation. Is he too young for me to tell him about Hedy Lamarr ?

Whence came the baby name obsession? (I don't get to use words like "whence" that often, so just play along and nobody will get hurt.) Seriously: 13.2 million hits for "baby names" on Google? Even the Social Security Administration is getting in on the action. I'm pleased to know that part of my payroll taxes (though I prefer the term " the money I'll never ever see again ") goes toward helping people track the popularity of the name Wilhelmina over the decades. It turns out, in 1884 Wilhelmina peaked at the 215th most popular name for female babies born in the United States and issued Social Security numbers (is that enough caveats for you?). Sadly, the name has not been in the top 1000 for little baby girls since 1954. What does this mean to you, pregnant reader? Well, it means that if you're looking for that rare, perfect name for your baby daughter, that name that you can shout from the mountain-tops: "This is my exceptio

I guess when you're a kid, maybe the best thing about going to visit other kids is the opportunity to play with an entirely new set of toys. On Sunday we went to a party hosted by some new friends who have three young children of their own. Aaron enjoyed the workbench and, as you can see, followed all OSHA regulations and guidelines. However, the big winner of the day, the one toy that the kids were talking about for days and days before the party, was the trampoline. In fact, I think that was the most desired play object for all the kids there. At one point, I counted no fewer than seven children and one adult on the trampoline. (Full disclosure: I was that adult.) Before the kids asked me to hop with them, I managed to get a few pictures. This one is interesting. Like any almost-safe trampoline, there's a safety net. The picture is kind of nice, but all the little hexagons from the netting mess things up. Warning : \begin{geek} I want to try to get rid of them by t

Zoe and Talia have a thing for socks. I suppose it's our fault. When they were babies, we'd put little socks on their little feet with no regard for matching one sock to the other. But hey, you try being a graduate student who's just become a parent to twins and see how high socks are on your list of priorities. Even to this day, we neither match nor fold together any of the kids' socks. Once they're out of the dryer (the socks, not the kids), they all go into a drawer in the kids' bathroom. As a consequence, when they're getting dressed for school, the girls will typically wear mismatched socks. (Yes, fascinating, isn't it? But there's a point --- well, not really, but there is at least a picture.) They are also a sufficiently impressive influence on Aaron that he has developed the same tendencies --- even to the point of wearing one purple and one pink when his sisters do. On Thursday, though, they quite outdid themselves. The girls deci