Painting The Nursery

Painting in the nursery has been completed. The project involved painting a landscape of mountains under a cloudy sky and a mural with all sorts of funny storytime characters. Because of the close quarters in the room I had to stich these pictures together from several shots. You may note some digital artifacts in the pictures that are a result of stiching process. The actual window in the room is a little less Dali-esque. The whole project took about three weeks of my free time. The walls are Duron Minor Blue. The mountains were painted freehand with colors I mixed. I was inspired by my time on the A.T. The mural was a kit that we found online.

Stargate Atlantis

I watched Atlantis. Same problems as Stargate. Any time I've seen O'Neil, I've always understood his point of view. He's the main character. Why put in any effort? He knows he's going to win in the end. There's really no need to work for it. It's going to happen one way or the other.

The view of advanced technology portrayed here is ridiculous. The Wraith should be embarrassed by their poor development of technology. You're telling my that if the gate builders had "portable life detectors" that the Wraith don't have any integrated into their defense system? They don't have a computer watching for unpredicted life signs? How about video surveillance? Maybe face recognition is a really hard problem, say harder than creating wormholes, but can't the Wraith's computers tell the difference between Wraith faces and human faces? Oh, maybe the Wraith have a strong sense of personal privacy and can't tolerate the invasion of personal privacy that would result from have cameras in the corridors. Yeah, they seemed like the sensitive sort.

How about simple strategy? Surely during their defeat of the gate builders, the Wraith must have developed some basic tactical doctrines about dealing with Stargates. Why did the Wraith even allow the Puddle Jumper into their system? Why don't they have a shield over the gate?

How about when the Puddle Jumper is trying to escape. Why would the Wraith allow them to fly through the gate? Even if they didn't have control of a shield over the opening , and they couldn't prevent the ship from flying through, shouldn't they have just flow through once the gate was open? Why wait until after the ship went through? Oh right, so they could fly into the shield at the other end and get squashed.

So, humans show up with Atlantean technology. That's obvious right? The Wraith must have scanned the Puddle Jumper. Their AI system must have said, "That's a Class B Atlantean Light Troop Transport." Wouldn't someone would have to wonder, "Gee, where might someone get that kind of technology?" Oh, how about Atlantis? So, now we have to assume that the Wraith don't know where Atlantis is. If they knew, they'd scout it out and annihilate the human infestation there. In fact, if they know where Atlantis is, why didn't they obliterate it long ago? Obviously the shield wasn't up over the gate or the power would have failed. If the Wraith don't know where Atlantis is, why was it necessary to create the shield? I guess I've got to suspend my disbelief by assuming that the Wraith know where Atlantis is, but don't know the Stargate Code to get there. They have some FTL technology that allows them to get there without the code, but it takes a significant amount of time to get there that way. That's the only way the human colony survives until episode two.

Or maybe the Wraith aren't the race that defeated the gate builders. We could hold out that hope. Although unless the Wraith are a particularly stupid species who have inherited their technology from their betters, I think we should expect better from them.

Secrets of the Baby Whisperer

The next book in my review of the parenting literature is Tracy Hogg's Secrets of the Baby Whisperer. My initial impressions of this book are very positive. Hogg's book presents, to my mind at least, a much more balanced perspective on the idea of parenting. Where Attachment Parenting takes a very baby centric approach to parenting, Secrets take a family centric approach. One of the baby whisperer's themes is that everyone in the family needs to be getting what they need to live a happy life.

There are some basic principles that under pin Hogg's philosophy. One is that there are different kinds of babies. Attachment Parenting only seems to acknowledge two kinds of babies. Those who are subject to nipple confusion and those that are not. Even on that distinction, Attachment seems to tell us that since we cannot know which our baby is until it is too late, we have to treat all babies as if they are subject to nipple confusion. Hogg clearly recognizes that all babies are different. She identifies five general classes of babies. Throughout the book she explains how the different classes of babies need different kinds of attention.

Another underlying theme is "begin how you mean to continue". Since this sounds a great deal like Covey's "Begin with the End in Mind", it has immediate appeal to me. She explains how many new parents cope with the immediate stimulus of their new bornbaby in ways that are not sustainable. So, as time goes by the parents change their behaviors to something that can continue forward. To the baby, though, this represents a change from how things have been it's whole life. The baby can become upset by the change. So, Hogg advises us to begin how we mean to continue.

One corner stone of Hogg's approach is the E.A.S.Y. method. Hogg recommends that parents adopt a structured schedule for their child. She does not recommend an absolute schedule, however, she recommends a relative one. Rather than schedule your baby's time along a rigid timeline, she recommends that you approach how your baby spends his time by following a series of phases whose order is fixed but whose duration is flexible. The EASY acronym lists the order of the activities: Eat, Activity, Sleep, Your time.

Another basic policy, the one from which the baby whisperer appellation stems, is S.L.O.W. This acronym stands for: Stop, Listen, Observe, What's up? Hogg firmly believes that with practice, you can understand why your baby is crying and use this information to meet the need they are expressing. She contends that many parents react so quickly to a baby's cry that they don't take the time to distinguish between the "I'm hungry" cry, the "I'm tired" cry or the "I'm gassy" cry. The ability to understand the baby's needs also ties back into the structured schedule. If you're in the "eat" phase, the baby is probably crying because she's hungry. If you're toward the end of the activity phase, he's probably tired. These are simplifications, but the structure helps to anticipate the baby's needs.

Hogg also acknowledges that parents sometimes make mistakes. This is also very appealing when juxtaposed with Attachment where I frequently got the feeling that if I made a mistake I may have just screwed up the whole process and doomed my child to a substandard life.

Most of the mistakes that Hogg discusses involve parents not beginning as they mean to continue. This involves bad habits that babies develop. Hogg asks the interesting question, "Where did those bad habits come from?" Clearly they must have been learned from the parents. So, Hogg provides some general frameworks for retraining a baby that has picked up bad habits from her parents. Hogg's philosophy is one of gentle change between the current pattern and the desired pattern.

All in all, I thought Baby Whisperer was a great book. While I have only read two so
far, it is my definite favorite. I was not left with the unbalanced feeling that I had with Attachment. I can understand why thousands of parents have asked Ms. Hogg to come into their homes and help them raise their children. I think she, and her co-author Melinda Blau, have done an excellent job of conveying a coherent system of principles to use in dealing with the challenges of new parenthood.

Star Wars

I grew up in the 70's. Which is another way of saying that I grew up with Star Wars. The new movies may be lame. Revenge of the Jedi might have been a little more satisfying that Return of the Jedi. Nobody likes the Ewoks or Jar Jar Binks. But, throughout it all, anyone who has seen any of the movies will admit, lightsabers are cool.

I recently came across some great tutorials about doing lightsaber effects. My first effort is shown below. I'm pretty pleased with it. John Morgan pointed out that the saber throws a shadow. I'd noticed that as well and I originally tried to remove it from the picture, but if you follow the lightsaber link above, you can see that lightsabers throw shadows in the movies too. So, it actually turns out to be accurate.

My saber is made from a 3/4 inch dowel, some PVC pipe, a few PVC pipe fixtures, and electrical tape. The rest was done in photoshop.

Attachment Parenting

The first book I've read in my parenting research is Katie Allison Granju's Attachment Parenting: Instinctive Care For You Baby and Young Child. Attachment Parenting is firmly in the Dr. Sears camp. Dr. Sears wrote the book's introduction. The words "attachment parenting" are keywords for identifying proponents of Dr. Sears.

The book was challenging for me. A few weeks before I read the book, Tina described the parenting plans of a friend of hers. Using cloth diapers, sleeping with the baby, and several other ideas that just seemed very primitive to me. I'm an engineer by profession, so I have a tendancy to dismiss ideas that don't use the latest technologies. After having read Attachment Parenting, I have a far better understanding of the supporting arguments for this style of parenting and I feel much more comfortable with those ideas that Tina's friend was espousing.

It turns out that the basis of the attachment parenting ideas is primitive. But, the argument is that babies have not evolved significantly since the gatherer days. So, primitive is not bad, it's the condition in which babies have evolutioned. Attachment Parenting encourages several practices that are no longer main stream in America. The book argues that they are mainstream in most of the non-industrialized nations of the world. The practices are: breastfeeding, sleeping in the same bed with your children, and maintaining as much contact with your baby as possible.

Breastfeeding is the centerpiece of practicing attachment parenthood. It strongly recommends that mothers breastfeed their babies. Eschewing bottles entirely is the prefered practice. If bottles are a requirement because the mothers works, then they prefer that the bottles contain breast milk over formula. They recommend buying a good breast pump to ease the task of collecting milk. Granju recommends breastfeeding well into toddlerhood.

The second recommendation is to sleep very near your child. The nearer the better. Granju's preference would be to sleep in the same bed with the baby. She explains how you can install rails on the side of your bed to prevent the baby from rolling out. If that's not feasible, she recommends attaching a three sided crib to the parent's bed. The fourth side opens into the parent's bed. The next best is to have the crib in the same room. Granju recommends letting the child sleep with you in your bed until they naturally want a room of their own.

The final practice is carrying your baby. Granju cites the use of car seat/baby carrier/stroller systems as allowing babies to go through most of their days without human contact. She uses the term "baby bucket" to refer to the pluggable plastic enclosure that goes from car to stroller to shopping cart. Instead she advocates the use of carriers that are attached closely to your body. Her favorite is the sling.

Attachment Parenting seems to be a very lovingingly written book, but it has, underneath, a tone of fanaticism that I associate with philosophies that must be accepted without proof. Attachment Parenting takes several direct shots at it's philosophical enemies. There seems to be great hostility between the attachment camp and some of its competing philosophies. It's the sort of tension that I associate with religions whose beliefs include the belief that other beliefs are wrong. Instead of presenting it's message for what it's worth and letting the reader decide, in places the book devolves into implying that it's philosophy is the only right and correct one. I'd like to left as the judge of whether Attachment Parenthood is or is not the one true way, instead of being told that it is. In the book's defense, I'm sure the competition take shots at attachment parenting as well, but perhaps we should behave like adults instead of children.

What did I take away from the book?

Breastfeeding is going to be difficult for us. At the moment, I think we're committed to doing it for the first six months at least. So far, my understanding is that there are very good statistics that indicate six months of breastfeeding has significant health benefits. Our largest difficulties will be Tina's schedule. We'll have to use bottles because Tina will be a working mom. It will also be difficult for Tina to find time during the day to pump, so we'll have to invest in a good pump. It's important to use the pump consistently so that the milk supplies continues.

I'm far less uncomfortable with the idea of having the baby in the same bed or in a sidecar arrangement than I was before reading the book. I think further research is warranted before I come to any conclusions.

I very much like the idea of keeping the baby in close proximity using a baby carrier. The use of the pejoritive "baby bucket" was quite effective. I see the appeal of using the sling and the backpack as the primary modes of transportation. Better exercise too.

Parenthood

The 1989 movie Parenthood contains what I think is a great comment on parenthood. The character Tod, played by Keanu Reeves, describes having his dad flick lit cigarettes at his head and says, "...you need a license to buy a dog, to drive a car - hell, you even need a license to catch a fish. But they'll let any butt-reaming asshole be a father."

The movie never introduces us to Tod's father except through this one speech. The audience is left to fill in the details on their own. When I fill in those details, I see a parent to whom parenthood has happened. This is a man who has a son, but I can imagine that having a son is really just a consequence of his attempt to have something else that he wanted. I can imagine him being bitter about having to support a child that he did not really want. When he flicks a lit cigarette at Tod's head and tells him to go fetch him a beer, he's really just trying to get something for himself out this whole parenthood thing he's stuck with.

Few of us do anything with our lives as profound as create a new life. It would seem to be something that we should choose to do not something that happens to us. Once chosen, it would seem to be something that we should choose to do well.

Tina and I have decided we'd like to have children in the near future. That the human race has survived as long as it has seems to indicate that it is possible to raise a child with the instincts that we were born with, but I also suspect that a large amount of child rearing is cultural. So, I feel like it's our responsibility to figure out how to be the best parents we can be. Toward this goal, I've begun a survey of the child-rearing literature.

It would appear that today's baby care philosophies are polarized around two camps. On one hand, there's Dr. Spock, Dr. Ferber, and Gary Ezzo. On the other hand, there's Dr. James Sears and Martha Sears. Both camps have devoted followers and extreme critics. My life experience is that in most cases the truth lies somewhere in between.