channeling his inner buckethead?

perhaps what with his interest in playing guitar and wearing buckets on his head.

no requests yet for a kabuki mask but i'm sure it's just a matter of time :-)

while he might not want to hold her hand, that doesn't mean that odin doesn't watch the every move of his cousin who is a few years his senior.

he doesn't seem as intently interested in the actions of kids his own age, but put him around three to five year olds and it's almost as if he's making mental chronicles of their every move.

which is sometimes a good thing. and sometimes not so much :-)

hmmmmmm. if i jump, i wonder if i can get that camera strap.

yes, i thought, how cute to get a shot of odin walking cutely with his cousin ella.

he, however, had other plans.

as you can see, he's getting his running legs. quickly.

sometimes things get lost in translation, but i'm pretty sure he's telling us to stop playing in the street with odin. i'm guessing he's wondering why dogs can't play in the street if little boys can. or maybe he wants an early dinner. for those that don't know, alaskan malamutes rarely bark, but they do "talk" incessantly. what does it sound like? the malamute faq gets it just about right:

"Alaskan Malamutes are rather quiet dogs. They generally do not bark at all. They do tend to "talk," however. The best way to describe the talking is to recall Chewbacca, the Wookie in the movie "Star Wars." It is sort of a soft "woo woo woo" sound. Malamutes can howl the roof right off of your house however. Owners of multiple Malamutes have noticed that when their dogs howl, they will all stop simultaneously. Again, this behavior is due to the fact that they are a _very_ pack-oriented breed."

since we see odin every day it's sometimes difficult to keep a proper perspective on how fast he's growing.

and i guess this photo doesn't really help out, unless you know that my own hands bedwarf those of mere mortals.

his hands, they've grown, a lot.

odin loves his toy cars but his favoritest vehicle is none other than a yellow school bus.

and i can't help wondering if, between rounds of singing "the school bus song" and playing with his phonics bus and running to the window every single day to watch the big, real busses go by ( where he excitedly laughs and proudly yells "yeah! bu!" ), if he might just wonder what sort of magic powers are possessed by the bus, as it certainly seems to be a Very Important Thing.

o.k. we need to slow this train down.

everyday odin can reach new things that used to be unreachable and climb onto furniture that was previously insurmountable and carry things that had been uncarryable and say new things that were recently unsayable.

maybe it's just me, but the old cliche about kids growing up fast seems experientially different when it's your kid and not the neighborhood ankle biter.

i mean nobody told us it'd go by at warp 15.

even since his first bath from mamma, odin has loved his baths. and thanks to the fact that it's one of The Four Bees he has had a bath almost every single night since coming home from the nicu. for better or worse, he so strongly associates bathing with sleeping that if we ask him if he's tired, and he is, he exitedly runs for the bathtub.

but these days, you'd never know that he's close to bedtime considering how much fun he's having taking his splashing game to the next level. it has, apparently, become big fun to see how much water he can get on him mamma and pops.

but i guess it's his way of winding down because almost without fail, 30 minutes later he's fast asleep. for 14 hours. without waking.

in some ways, it seems like just yesterday that we were draping odin in a cloth diaper while giving him nicu baths to help him feel, if only slightly, like he was bundled in the womb.

sure, i'm not exactly unbiased, but it's still amazing to take a slow stroll down memory lane via odin's bathtime slide show.

it has only recently come to my attention that we have not been receiving packages larger than a first class mail that were sent to odin's post office box. ( we have been getting postcard project postcards though - christy and others i hereby pledge to start scanning them in soon. we really do very much appreciate getting them even if we're slow as molassas at uploading them. ).

apparently i didn't fill out the proper paperwork when i started forwarding his mail from the box to our "real" address and larger mail wasn't redirected.

unfortunately they can't promise that something didn't get "returned to sender". so if you sent anything and got it back or we didn't acknowledge that we received it, please let us know so we can try to track it down.

which is a long way of explaining why we just received this package from vanillasky ( and here ) who meant to have it to us before christmas. thanks for the wonderful shirts! he and we always love your taste in clothing. they fit perfectly and i'm sure you'll see him modelling them real soon :-)

of the many things i learned from training for and running in marathons, these are but a few:

1. by setting reasonable daily goals and challenging yourself a little each day, you'll be surprised at what you can accomplish. really, it works. it's not just motivational babble.
2. discipline. discipline. discipline. and more discipline.
3. the little voice inside your head that says you can't possibly go one step further is almost always wrong.
4. except if you don't pace yourself properly In The Beginning, then the little voice might be right.
5. usually when you're in the thick of it, you don't realize how silly you look, but even if you did you wouldn't care because you just ran 18 miles and stomped out that little voice and are pretty sure you can run 8 more.
6. when They tell you that you'll never run again, sometimes they're wrong.
7. accept the kindness of strangers. when you're at mile 23 and you're once again doubting whether or that little voice is correct, people you don't even know will help you keep on keeping on by cheering for you.

when working on odin's perceived "issues" with walking on uneven or cracked terrain , we thought it might make things more challenging by throwing balls at him while he walked around trying to avoid mauja's dogbombs.

just kidding. it's a trick of the camera and the ball is actually several feet behind him. honest.

but, it's only taken a day and he's already a super champ at walking on unfamiliar territory which makes us think that his earlier problems were just due to inexperience and not vision loss.

or maybe he's just really, really adept at compensating quickly :-)

cake, cousins and a puppet theatre!

you can click on each image for a brief description.

today it was time for another eye exam - this one provided by the same local organization that performs some but not all of his developmental assessments and also sponsors his preemie play group.

i must admit that we were a little disappointed with the home exam because it didn't answer the question we were hoping to answer - whether or not he is legally blind.

but the nice examiner did measure quite a few other parameters and verified that in all other aspects his eyesight and general health is astonishing. she was particularly amazed and to hear that he had over 1500 "burns" in each eye and yet didn't seem to be suffering any adverse affects ( loss of depth perception or peripheral vision ) from the scar tissue that is necessarily created from the eye surgery itself. and she commented that his "near field" vision was almost certainly perfect ( e.g. he was able to repeatedly pick up incredibly small individual "sprinkles" from a small pile in her hand.

and it's perhaps promising that although she agreed that the doctor who performed the exam is very good at what he does, she also thought it was unusual to have such a dramatic shift in vision over his last two exams ( from -1 to -5 ). i guess we'll just have wait patiently for the next 4 months until his next "official" exam to get some clarity.

we spent some time outdoors intentionally walking around on uneven and cracked surfaces because she wanted to see how he reacted to relatively unfamiliar terrain; she did point out that he doesn't do as well walking up or down inclines and steps up high when he approaches a large groove or crack in his path which might mean that he has a difficult time discerning depth changes due to vision loss.

or it might also mean that he's a relatively new walker and not really used to walking on rocky, cracky, uneven terrain.

hi. ho. ironically ( or not, i guess ) lately he's been enjoying putting on a pair of mamma's old glasses.

odin eyes the exam room door warily, barely consoled by pops, as he awaits The Evil Women who will come in and poke him in both legs.

apparently rsv season is in full effect and the pediatrician noted that they've seen a rapid increase of cases in the past few weeks and urged extra caution around the unwashed masses for the next few weeks.

if you're into monitoring these sorts of things you can also track regional rsv trends.

and no, i'm not being sexist, they are always women - i've tried to explain to him that he can be a nurse someday if he wants despite evidence to the contrary.

i wasn't intending on writing a daily log [ ahem ] on our adventures with elimination communication but today was a big day.

three days ago, i thought it'd be a tremendous struggle just to get odin to sit on the toilet for more than a few minutes and couldn't possibly have imagined that he'd be semi-regularly doing all the business that one normally does on the loo!

and we would have had an astonishing 80% success rate had he been able to get up more easily to the toilet by himself!

we might switch to a standalone trainer like the totco over the bjorn trainer that we're currently using since it'd be an easier for him for do things all by himself.

as i stated above, communiqués from the throne will probably be minimal because, well, some things are better left unphotographed. but if you're thinking about elimination communication and think your infant/toddler might be amenable to the idea, we heartily give it the odin seal of approval.

the results have been amazing and i only wish we had started a few months ago.

is it common knowledge around the world that "throne" is a colloquialism for toilet?

i don't know how i did it, but i almost missed scout, which makes it simple to see how your photos rank on the flickr explore page which itself is an attempt to rank interestingness of all the images posted on flickr for a given day.

of course there's a lot of truth to the warning listed on the scout page that "..reading too much into Interestingness is bad for your mental health..." and of course that didn't stop me from seeing which images were ranked in the top 20 for a given day.

in doing so i've proven conclusively that interestingness does not directly account for bad lighting and composition :-)

o.k. actually number 12 is ranked 27th for that day, but i needed an even number of photos for the mosaic.

1. day 99: odin's cousin cometh. I.
2. day 141: attack of the malamute tongue! I.
3. day 102: hungry odin and concerned cadence.
4. bed rest
5. day 105: odin versus the inchworm. V.
6. day 78: little feat
7. day 299: goodbye cadence. or then there was one (dog). I.
8. day 253: the apprentice.
9. day 110: twirling in the kitchen. I.
10. day 325: the bestest birthday present, EVAH!
11. day 56: a lunar birthday party
12. day 288: The Littlest Fighter (somewhat) Merrily Fights Onward.

Created with fd's Flickr Toys.

i'll admit that until very recently i had never heard of "elimination communication" or "infant potty training" which the Always Authoritative ( joking) wikipedia defines as, "...nurturing in which a caregiver uses timing, signals, cues, and intuition to help an infant address his or her elimination needs, partially or completely avoiding the use of diapers (nappies)." i'll also admit that at first the concept seemed just like one of those trendy, kooky theories that are cooked up to fill shelf space in the parenting section of your local big box bookstore.

i don't know where the "truth" lies but after some investigation, books such as "Early-Start Potty Training" make a compelling case that children can be successfully mostly diaper free much sooner than most people realize ( 6 months?! ) and that there are a raft of problems that can occur from the erring on the side of "convenience" and waiting to potty train until the average age of 3 or 4. and that perhaps there's some plausibility to the argument that the longer a toddler learns that soiling a diaper is "normal", the longer it will take to teach them elimination communication skills. so we thought we'd give it a try and have some semblance of "fun". and if it doesn't eventually work for us, so be it. i suspect that in the end [( ha! pun intended! ), when and how to potty train has religious adherents on both sides and that some things work well for some infants and others do not.

unsurprisingly, one of the first stages in effective elimination communication is learning your toddler's elimination schedule more precisely than his or her diaper changing times. so, today odin wore his first pair of "training pants" and stood and watched as mamma showed him how to baby sign "potty/toilet" right before reading "going to the potty" by mister rogers.

odin is very perceptive and already knows what and where the "potty" is and also clearly understands what a diaper is and that a dirty diaper is No Fun, but if today is any indication i think that putting all the pieces together might take some time and a whole lot of effort!

but then again, we did potty train all of our dogs in a few days, so maybe we should give him a little credit.

in addition to learning his schedule we also want him to get used to sitting on a potty. who knew there could be so many options for potty training gear? rather than jumping right in to the high end with something like a totco toilet trainer we decided to go with a baby bjorn trainer with a matching step stool. the step-stool isn't as stable as we'd hope, but the toilet trainer is easy to insert and remove and seems to sit securely on the loo.

and i'm not positive if it's officially sanctioned "elimination communication" behavior, but we also discovered that a leapfrog phonics radio also helps one pass the time on the water closet. if he ever becomes one of those people who needs something to do while their doing their business ( reading, playing video games, talking on the phone ) then i guess we know who to blame.

i can't claim that we saw anything remotely resembling success today, but it also wasn't horribly traumatic for anyone involved and maybe, just maybe, he'll be diaper-free by his 19 month birthday! ( just kidding. sort of. )

additional information on "elimination communication"

the boston globe: look ma, no diaper
the boston globe: diaper-free way
diaperfreebaby.org
bloggingbaby: Elimination Communication works -- sort of
daddytypes: I Know That Face! Elimination Communication
daddytypes: Elimination Communication Hits England (Or Returns, If You Count Those Stonehenge Druids)

sure. odin has always been independent and strong willed and it's certainly served him well having been born so soon. and sure. he've had to learn strategies for getting past no.

but for the most part, odin has expressed that strong willed independence in creative and surprisingly helpful ways. like getting upset if we don't let him push his stroller. or close a door. or feed mauja by putting a serving of dog food in his dog bowl and taking it to him.

so, you can imagine that it came as a complete and utter surprise when on a trip to a local library he instantly transmogrified into The Independent Toddler.

you know the kind. they don't want to sit in their stroller and when you let them out instead of helpfully being helpful they do something they've never done before. they run. and yell "noooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!" when you try to pick them up or otherwise corral them. and once you do finally get them somewhat contained in a semi-secluded part of the children's section - rather than being helpfully helpful at picking out new and interesting books like they have on every single prior trip to the library - they decide to pull every book within reach off the shelves.

a declaration of independence? indeed.

thanks to a generous grandmother, odin received a new radio flyer ride for christmas.

if this keeps up we'll have to get a separate garage for all of his radio flyer gear :-)

i don't see him giving up on his beloved walker wagon anytime soon, but he's slowly getting into the groove of advanced toddlerdom with his classic tiny trike.

i'm not sure what this look ( and sign ) means - he's stopped for a little grazing by his trike during his afternoon ride and seems to be saying, "check out my fly ride, yo."

or somethign like that.

ah yes, the holidays have come and gone and we've observed our familial tradition of not sending out holiday cards before the dismantling of holiday regalia.

sigh.

we'll put "procrastinate less" on our list of new year's resolutions just as soon as we get around to making one :-)