Factoid Friday: The Amazing Echidna

So I heard that the blog was pretty good and mostly amusing, except for Factoid Fridays. Well, my friends, learning is totally fun too! Especially when the learning involves echidnas! And exclamation marks!


Echidnas are basically a hodge-podge, mash-it-all-together of mammal/bird pieces. Or, to science it up, they are a deep branching lineage that split off close to the common relative of all mammals, birds and reptiles. It's evolution, baby!

What makes echidnas objectively the coolest thing ever, rivaled only by the platypus (the echidnas cousin of sorts)? For starters, they look like an anteater and a porcupine got into some weird Dr. Moreau kind of romance. Check out this hairy guy holding a balled up echidna:

They are mammals, but they lay eggs like birds; after laying the egg, the female echidna deposits it into a pouch (like kangaroos), where the young continue to live after hatching. They also don't have nipples, but have two pores on their chests out of which their young can suckle milk. To make the young even cooler, we call baby echidnas "puggles". To top it all off, male echidnas have a four-headed penis. Two of them are useless, and they alternate using the other two, depending on which was used last. That, dear reader, is weird enough to put them at the top of my crazy animal list. I hope that made Factoid Friday more interesting!

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Ironic

I know Hannah's morning schedule now: when she gets sleepy, hungry, fussy, etc. So after we listened to some music I took her upstairs for her nap. Apparently she prefers to get her exercise behind bars. All of the exercise that we try to get her to do on the floor she saves for her crib. She rolls over and scoots around like it's no big deal, makes the sounds that we try to get her to make, and then just looks up and smiles. After about 20 minutes of confirming that she can make the sounds "mmm" and "mmmbuh", and is capable of rolling both ways, turning herself around, and getting her foot in and out of the crib bars, I took her out and put her in her exersaucer. I thought maybe she was getting a little hungry and after food would take a nap. Please notice the word "exersaucer". Not even two minutes later:

After spending half an hour trying to get her to sleep I then had keep waking her up throughout the bottle. Hopefully the extra food will at least mean a longer nap. Don't get me wrong, I love spending time with her, but this dad still needs to shower.

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6 months!

Hannah was 6 months old yesterday! I have said "I am amazed" enough times now to realize the amazement will be continual. Heidi snapped a couple of pictures of her playing with her bear before bedtime and I made a little stop-motion movie from them:

I think it would look good looped.

I intended to include the below quirk and update in my previous post, but it was starting to get a little long. The additional quirk I have to describe is not quite as weird as the belt or the belly slapping, but we really get a kick out of it.


She loves to fall asleep with a blanket over her head. And when she is ready to fall asleep, it's like her lights out switch. Playing, playing, playing, blanket over face, asleep. It's almost instantaneous. Of course, this means she can't have a blanket for her whole nap. We wait until she falls asleep and then take it from her, for obvious reasons. It has become ingrained in her now for nap time. The other day we were listening to music at the kitchen table as Hannah was getting sleepy. She was holding her blanket, sitting upright in my lap, and I looked down as she was pulling the blanket up over her face and then lights out! as she fell asleep right away, leaning back into my chest. I expect it when she is lying down, but sitting up too?

The update is this:



taken about a week and a half ago, the same time she started waving. She seems to forget how to wave sometimes, but that's ok. She also forgets how to stand when we do this with her. Her love of bouncing tries to come through, so she just bends her knees and drops. We are cultivating a love of gravity; she loves to fall over when she is sitting too (if we catch her in time). That's about it for now; the little one just woke up.

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The quirks continue

So I have been wondering how long someone can blog about their kid and keep it interesting. The answer is: longer than a month and a half! Hannah keeps doing all sorts of new (and sometimes weird) stuff.

Heidi worked today from 2-7, so I watched Hannah in the afternoon and evening. I did not like this as much as the morning shift. Her feeding schedule was a bit different, requiring two bottles and some food. More importantly, I wasn't quite on top of my game. Take this picture as an example:


I don't think I have ever covered her in food quite like that. I love this next shot, and despite what it looks like, I made it through the evening without drugging either of us.

needed that sweet potato fix

I guess that is not technically true - I did give her some Tylenol when I thought she was going to rip her teething toys apart. Anyway, she is so covered in sweet potato because she has developed this neat little trick where she grabs the spoon to help put it in her mouth, then wipes all of the food off of it into her lap, then puts it in her mouth and chomps on it for two minutes. Sure, sure I know you can't expect the baby to not get a little food on themselves. I mean this looked intentional. It was grab the spoon, wipe it off, chew on it. Rub hands in hair, repeat.

Understandably, I followed the food and bottle with a bath. This was my first solo bath. Well, not my first solo bathing, but I think you get the drift. So I got myself a little nervous about it, and proceeded to fulfill my low expectations. For starters, she hated it, which is rare. Bath time is one of her favorite things. After a pretty crappy job of both keeping the baby happy and washing her, I got her out. Usually Heidi coordinates this with having a towel ready, etc, etc. That's not the way this dad does it. For some reason I thought hugging a slippery wet baby and then grabbing the towel was a better way to go. The towel that I picked up and realized wasn't really a towel. It was a blanket. Not a thick fuzzy one, just a thin cotton blanket. Apparently it wasn't just me: Heidi did the same thing before.

I followed this with putting her on our bed with a real baby towel underneath her. I grabbed a onesie before I bathed her, which I was proud of, and used my special technique for onesie application, which I am also proud of (and it's baby approved!). I noticed some sweet potato around her mouth; somehow I forgot to wash her face. But something else wasn't quite right..."Do babies wear underwear? I don't think so. I guess this must be right? But that looks uncomfortable. Do they really not wear underwear?...oh yeah, they wear diapers." So I took her upstairs to grab a diaper, and on the way almost got us smacked by the ironing board I knocked over. Phew.

Baby correctly dressed and intact we headed downstairs, and I set her in the exersaucer so that I could grab a glass of water. She started screaming when I got a few steps away, so I stopped and looked at her. There was some music on (Le Vent du Nord) and I started to keep time with the music, just kind of tapping my belly. She liked it. So I slapped my belly in time to my favorite Quebecoise folk music. I slapped my belly until she fell asleep, right there in her exersaucer. Didn't take long.

I'm starting to get concerned. She laughs when I hit her with a belt. She falls asleep when I slap my belly.

HEY!!! I'm the first person on the internet to use the phrase "I slapped my belly until she fell asleep." You can google search it with quotes if you doubt me.

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First Milestone

Dear Reader,

We are approaching 1,000 hits. That is most excellent! Perhaps you should see if you have that honor (the counter is small and in the lower left hand corner). Instead of doing a real post while Hannah is napping today, I have chosen to do some linear algebra review. That's exciting for both of us! Someday I would like to know enough math that I can come across a problem in my research and say "Aha! I know how to solve this!". The other approach would have been to not spend hundreds of hours trying to learn math that I might never use. Suddenly I am less motivated to review linear algebra. Time to keep on keepin' on!

Until next time,
Bob "the Tomato Tornado" McGregor

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Let's talk about...

...spiders. I am somewhat of an arachnophobe. Sure, I recognize that it is an "irrational" fear. That's why I don't want to pass this fear of spiders onto Hannah. Heidi isn't the biggest fan of spiders either, so we have come up with a plan. It will go something like this:

"AHH! I mean...hmm...there's a spider over there. Do you see that spider Hannah?"
"Yes."
"Good. Now some people are very scared of spiders, but that is just silly. Don't you see how small it is? Now we don't want you to be scared of something silly, so to make sure that you aren't, you get to go and kill that spider."

I really don't think that we have any alternatives. Probably about a decade later, Hannah will be busy, and I'll come running into the room saying "Hannah there is a spider!". She'll ask me to kill it because she is doing something else. And then our horrible little secret won't be a secret anymore.

The topic of this post was prompted by the spider in the corner of our bathroom, right over our shower head. It had it's latest victim wrapped up, hanging there. I generally can tolerate those bathroom spiders for a couple of days, since they eat up the tiny little gnats that sometimes get in. I don't kill them until they do something really creepy. Like move. But this one went over and sucked on it's liquefying victim.

Just think if spiders were closer to our size. Something that could trap you in a web, wrap you up and turn your internal organs into goo that it could then suck out, all the while you get to relax in a super creepy hammock.

In closing, my "irrational" fear really isn't. I still think getting Hannah to kill the spiders might be a good idea.

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First poll

There is a little card on my counter which is advertising a fight, I believe. The front of the card says FREE VS UNDIES PANTY any color. There is also a picture of a butt, probably because either free or undies panty will have theirs kicked. So here is what I want to know from you.



Who knew that Victoria's Secret was trying to break into a new demographic by advertising fights!?!? Pretty zany business plan if you ask me. You can be for lovers or for fighters, but certainly not both.

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