Shortly after she got back from her hockey-filled trip to Texas, commodorified gathered a bunch of us together at a pho place and snapped this picture of Oscar.

He's getting a bit better at staying in his high chair, and at home we can even convince him to stay there as we run around the kitchen, if we give him something interesting to munch on up there.

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[	Tags	|	oscar, photo	]
[	setting	|	J8Y 3E7	]
[	headspace	|	sleepy	]

Not much to write right now, but here are some Oscar photos from the past week or two:

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[	Tags	|	family, fetus: 2012, oscar	]
[	setting	|	J8Y 3E7	]
[	headspace	|	sleepy	]

So, I guess it's time to mention it in here — Oscar will probably have a sibling in late August sometime! A sibling was always in the plan, and we won't be too used to getting sleep with Oscar just coming up on two years old. We've got midwives lined up at the Maison de Naissance (the same birthing centre where Oscar was born).

Oscar is having a rough teething week, but he should be out of teeth soon: his canines are all quite poked through, and his molars seem to be on the way. In general we're getting him to bed earlier, so Elizabeth and I can have a bit of time to ourselves a bit more easily. I'm having more success putting him to sleep, too, which is nice when Elizabeth is teaching late into the evening.

My parents' friends and neighbours gave Oscar a glorious hooded sweater for Christmas, and he's a bit more grown into it now (with the sleeves rolled up). Here he is in it; what you can't see is a positively medieval long pointy hood in the back:

click on the picture for a bigger version

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[	Tags	|	art, books, food, living situation, meme, travel: western adventure	]
[	setting	|	J8Y 3E7	]
[	headspace	|	sleep-deprived	]

stalkingsilence provided me with seven questions:

What is your current favourite song?

I think "Shake it Out", by Florence + The Machine. It's ludicrously catchy, anyway.

What is your ultiamate comfort food?

Galumptious Mac and Cheese, or maybe a bit too much Bridge Mixture. But there is lots of good comfort food out there, so it is hard to choose.

What book are you currently reading? Or what book would you like to read but haven't yet?

I just finished The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood. It was a fun read; I think the characters were more relatable and had more interesting problems than in Oryx and Crake, but Atwood was still having the same sort of parody-dystopia-building fun.

What's your favourite part of being a dad?

Being a toddler amusement park is pretty fun, and so is realizing that my learning curve is starting to catch up with his (for now).

Favourite Canadian museum that you've visited?

I have a soft spot of the National Gallery. When I didn't live here, I would take a couple of hours to visit it almost every time I came up. I should go back more often now that I live here. It's too bad it isn't free like it used to be — it's a bit of a disincentive, particularly if I may be with an awake toddler with a short attention span, to pay by the visit. Maybe they could charge by the hour!

Describe the best holiday you ever had.

I think our cross-country train trip (wow, I didn't really blog that — here are some pictures, behind Facebook security in Elizabeth's account) may have been a once-in-a-lifetime thing.

What does a typical day off for you look like?

Breakfast could be the usual toast or baked goods, coffee and juice, or Elizabeth might make biscuits or pancakes. I'll manage to get some unstructured time to myself for reading or Internetting while Elizabeth and Oscar take a nap. I'll take Oscar with me on some errands to give Elizabeth a break to practice music. We may go as a family off to some happening out of the house, and we'll almost certainly get some Oscar playtime. I'll catch up on laundry, cat boxes and other chores, and Elizabeth will probably clean a bit and get the dishes under control. It's usually a pretty low-key sort of day off, but it's a nice change of pace.

If you want some questions to get your writing juices flowing, let me know in the comments!

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[	Tags	|	domestic, logistics, money, transit: oc transpo	]
[	setting	|	J8Y 3E7	]
[	headspace	|	chipper	]

Life without owning a car is something that gets enough questions asked of me that I thought I'd post a few things about it. Also, I like reading this sort of thing from other people (hi, asimplelife!), so I thought I'd give back.

So, for starters, here's the situation: I live with my wife and toddler son in an older residential neighbourhood in Hull. We're within walking distance of most of the basic necessities of life, none of us have any mobility-reducing disabilities. I've got the lone driver's license in the household.

When Oscar was on the way, we heard predictions that we'd be buying a car (or maybe even a minivan!) soon 'cause young kids require cars — we (well, mostly I) did consider getting one (by buying or hand-me-down), but so far we're managing pretty well with a toddler and all the options we have. I know of one co-worker who's thriving with school-aged children and no car, too, so apparently parents in the right situation can manage with multiple kids and not owning a car.

I guess that's a fairly broad picture of how we manage transportation in our little family. I've been wanting to write that out for a while, I hope it's useful or interesting to some people out there...

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[	Tags	|	food, oscar	]
[	setting	|	J8Y 3E7	]
[	headspace	|	cheerful	]

I'm a little late in posting it, but here is evidence that Oscar basically gets spoons (with mashed potatoes in this case, which is about as close as he ever got to eating pureed stuff willingly).

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[	Tags	|	family, friends, holidays, photo	]
[	setting	|	J8Y 3E7	]
[	headspace	|	merry	]

Photo: rottenfruit

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[	Tags	|	geeky, math, statistics, travel, work	]
[	setting	|	20472	]
[	headspace	|	geeky	]

I made it, through the full-body scanner and a flight above the clouds, to Washington D.C. I mixed Metro (mostly) and walking (from L'Enfant Plaza across the National Mall to Chinatown, so get a sniff of the air, get a look at the monumental-ness, and grab some tasty Thai food) to get me to the University of Maryland, where I'm staying and taking a course on disclosure control. Today was the ins and outs of releasing aggregated data, which is the end of things I've worked more in. Mostly for myself: I should e-mail Dr. Cox about where methodological transparency grants the intruder extra leverage in estimating sensitive cells: his problematic findings on feasible intervals, and Dr. Karr's recent conference papers on the topic in general. I think I'm getting some good review and some connecting details that I was missing so far.

Tonight I'm probably going to drop south from Foggy Bottom into the western end of the National Mall and try to see the giant statue of Lincoln and the Vietnam Veterans' monument. Tomorrow: microdata, dynamic queries, and then the rush to the airport to get home.

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So, Monday after I left for work, Oscar managed to face-plant into the dresser upstairs, tooth-first. Elizabeth brought him in to our dentist office, who is just across the street from work, and a nice dentist and technician took a look at the damage and decided that the (90-degree-tilted) tooth would need pulling. I got to hold Oscar (due to slightly less flappability with respect to other people's blood than Elizabeth, i guess). After a little bit of futzing around with topical anaesthetic, the dentist went for the quick approach and plucked the tooth out with gloved fingers. Oscar was highly disconcerted for a few minutes, and I was a little woozy from watching, but by the time we'd walked a few blocks to get some air and acquire some lunch, Oscar was almost back to normal.

Here's Oscar with seven teeth, down from eight:

Elizabeth and I were planning on having a date night on Monday, but having had surprise dentist dealings, we decided to put it off by a few days. In the end, we left Oscar with random and fairestcat Friday night, and went into Little Italy for supper, beer and creamy desserts. Pub Italia is tasty, gloriously decorated and very busy on a Friday — we had a nice meal, some good eavesdropping and a little walk in the chilly autumn air. Some couple time was really nice. Yesterday, Elizabeth's cousin came by for supper and I fired up the Turkish grill (now safely on a pad of a few inches of gravel in a dug hole) and grilled veggie burgers in an attempt to extend summer into September. It was the first time I really got to meet her, as meeting anyone at your own wedding never counts. She seems nice and fun — she had a daughter at 18, and one thing she mentioned struck us both: her daughter will probably be out of the house by the time she's 36, and she mused about "starting again" with another kid. It's unlikely we consider having another kid when Oscar is likely launched and I'm 48.

This week, I'm off to the Washington, D.C. area for a couple of days to attend a short course on disclosure control. It'll be my first time in the U.S. since 2004. I got a fresh passport, I'm partly packed, and I'm looking forward to my more-or-less-annual work-related trip. My mission is more or less to get the big picture and soak up best practices at the course, and meet other people working in the field. I'll try and explore a little bit, too: fairestcat suggests wandering in the National Mall, and if some fellow guardians of respondent privacy in released data decide to see something cool in the evening, I'll probably see what they're excited about.

Even when I'm not on the road, work is pretty stimulating lately — building and disclosure vetting small-geography cancer incidence tables, welcoming new people, agitating to get the computer infrastructure set up to do record linkage better, trying to prepare to help teach a one-day course in November. Part time — the reduced time and the paperwork — is a bit stressful, but for now it gives Elizabeth a bunch of margin to work, take on new students, and have shorter days holed up with Oscar on a regular basis.

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[	Tags	|	oscar, photo	]
[	setting	|	J8Y 3E7	]
[	headspace	|	happy	]

It was Oscar's first birthday today. We gathered together some friends and family in the park at the end of the street and celebrated and took some photos. Here's a very short synopsis of the day:

It's been a pretty intense year for me with Oscar: assisting at his birth, toughing it through baby sleep cycles, figuring out travelling with him, — being off work to help care for him, seeing a lot of his firsts (or first-time-we-spotteds), starting to be able to do stuff that really counts as interactive play, jumping into balancing work and baby… he's a fast developing creature, so in some ways I'm figuring him out and in others he'll be a few steps ahead of me for some time to come.

Oscar's latest tricks have been dancing to music, backing up to and sitting down on raised things (like me) and going for light switches and the telephone in the kitchen — and in the case of light switches, turning to look and make sure the light has changed.

I think the next thing for Oscar will probably be the beginnings of words. Any guesses what his first recognizable ones will be?

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Oscar has been enjoying his 20-year-old garage sale rocking horse:

Oscar is stepping along more or less until he spots something interesting on the ground or there's rough terrain (like a pillow). He's also figured out high fives and tent zippers!

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[	Tags	|	law and order, travel	]
[	setting	|	J8Y 3E7	]
[	headspace	|	awake	]

random, metawidget, rottenfruit and sleepy baby Oscar are pulled over on the roadside in Renfrew for a routine-ish traffic stop. random has one of those fun Ontario graduated licenses that requires a fully-licensed driver in the front passenger seat (which happens to describe metawidget).

Nice OPP officer

I'm going to need to see your license, as the driver's license is a G1.

metawidget

(pulls out license) Here.

Nice OPP officer

Hey, that's a female's license!

metawidget

No, that's me with long hair.

Nice OPP officer

(blushes)

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[	Tags	|	cat, ellie, family, good people, love, mum, pixel, work	]
[	setting	|	J8Y 3E7	]
[	headspace	|	sleepy	]

This post is in reverse-to-random chronological order.

First, some promised Oscar pictures:

This one is gracing my desktop at work.

Here's a recent indoor one. He needs only a little hand contact with something sort of stable to stay upright.

Date night!

Last night, fairestcat came by, loaded us and Oscar up in her car, drove us all to Zen Kitchen, let us out, and kept going. She, random and the other people at fannish night took care of him for the night while Elizabeth and I got to have a fantastic meal and some time to ourselves without checking baby position constantly or worrying he'd wake up. Toward midnight, we were starting to miss Oscar (or at least wanting to put him to bed and call it a night), but it was definitely refreshing. We should definitely do that sooner than the eight months it took us to get around to that.

Raven’s Knoll work

Raven's Knoll, the campground that hosts Kaleidoscope Gathering among other pagan and pagan-ish happenings, is kept running in part on volunteer labour. The three of us went up with random on the weekend. Moving and stacking wood and brush was the main activity for random and me, and Elizabeth took care of Oscar and helped out in the kitchen. Working out there was fun both for the satisfaction of working (and stacking wood with proper ends on the stack — thanks, Dad, for teaching me that!) and for the universally pleasant company of the other workers. I was quite happy to get a better sense of Brendan, who led things and is there full-time keeping the place running.

Mum Update

Thursday and Friday, we headed up to my parents' place to see my mum and give my parents an Oscar fix. Mum's looking great and despite being a little out of breath occasionally, had lots of energy. Oscar also got to meet Jeannie the cleaning lady, who I think has been looking forward to meeting Oscar for about eight months now :)

Back to work

I went back to work on Monday. It was a little surprising how quickly work felt sort of normal to me; I guess it hasn't been that long. Most of Monday was spent getting things re-activated and catching up on what I was supposed to start work on, and yesterday and today were pretty meeting-heavy, but there looks to be imminent actual work, and a variety of it, with clients that I either know I like or get a good vibe from. I feel like it'll take a couple of weeks to say hi to all the people that make up the complete work experience, and thus be completely back, but I'm feeling good about the transition so far.

Pixel Update

Pixel had her stitches out yesterday, and looks much less scary and a bit happier today. I think she lost some weight when she was stressed and not eating in the cone, but not a scary amount as the vet weighed her and didn't worry. She's got a vaccine booster appointment in a month, if she's still skinny then we'll see what else needs doing. She was a little grimy looking after the cone for a while, but she's groomed herself back to her usual elegant coat.

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con_girl

foms

con_girl

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[	Tags	|	cat, food, good people, health, pixel	]
[	setting	|	J8Y 3E7	]
[	headspace	|	hopeful	]

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[	Tags	|	family, health, mum	]
[	setting	|	J8Y 3E7	]
[	headspace	|	calm	]

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[	Tags	|	cat, health	]
[	setting	|	J8Y 3E7	]
[	headspace	|	stressed	]

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[	Tags	|	family, health, logistics, mum	]
[	setting	|	J8Y 3E7	]
[	headspace	|	chipper	]

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[	Tags	|	family, health, mum	]
[	setting	|	J8Y 3E7	]
[	headspace	|	calm	]

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[	Tags	|	garden	]
[	setting	|	J8Y 3E7	]
[	headspace	|	optimistic	]

Last week, I took some photos of our bare-looking but largely planted garden.

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