Puppies and Belly Buttons

Shopping Trip

I emailed this photo to Alma's godmother, my cousin Christine. Her reply:
"I look at the picture and say, "What a cutie!!" Quinn looks at the picture
and says, "She should so get them...they look great on her!!" HEE HEE"

How wonderful!

Dining with a toddler

Daddy's Shoes (or as Alma calls them "MAMA!")

Ugly Furniture Store

I swear that this store was a block away from our South Philly house.

St. Patrick's Day in Bethlehem

The weekend before St. Patrick's Day, we celebrated with a meal of corned beef, cabbage and Irish soda bread, then went to the parade in Bethlehem, and came home to run around the yard with the dog. Pretty much the perfect day!

THE ROBOT

Joshua let me get a ROOMBA for my upcoming birthday.  I couldn't love it more.  Hooray for unnecessary wonderful gifts!

Sugar-Sugar

While Joshua loves playing video games to have some down time, I'm not such a big fan ... until now. He found a logic game (Sugar-Sugar) that totally had me hooked this weekend when I needed a short break from work.

Try it! And then send me suggestions for other computer logic games!

Recent Memoriable Meals

The other day Alma requested oats for dinner. Not oatmeal or anything in the oats. She just went to the cupboard, pulled out the huge Quaker container and walked it over to her high chair.

She also discovered a love for her grandfather's cherry pie.

Preparing the Garden

Last weekend we started prepping our garden, which is located along the alley behind our garage.  Luckily we didn't plant anything (aside from a few cheap flower seeds) because it snowed twice this past week.  Oh Smarsh the wonderful month when the weather is unpredictable.

Alma and I had already spent several weekday afternoons moving pavers to set up a walk way along the garage wall and a separate flower bed by the sidewalk (so the local dogs who are out on walks don't pee on our vegetables).  So Joshua and I spent the day picking not only rocks (of which there were few) but bricks and entire cinder blocks (of which there were a surprising number) out of the soil and tilling the entire thing. 

As you can see in these photos, Alma's contribution to garden work is to lounge on her mini Adirondack chair, eat snacks and point out birds that fly by.  Oh, and she also makes a mean pile of shriveled up tomatoes from last year's missed harvest. 

Yes, the paint is chipping horribly from the side of the garage.  Any suggestions for hiding it?  The idea of fixing the problem with paint doesn't sound as fun as elaborate plans to build a huge structure to hide it.  Planters that hang down from the side of the garage?  Huge planters that sit on the pavers?  A flying dragon that distracts you from noticing the chipping paint?  To me, all of these sound like more fun that actually fixing the problem.  

Joshua also moved some extra pavers so that we don't have to walk through a huge pile of mud to get out the back gate.  Hooray!  Now we just need to talk to his mom about how to make our thriving lilac bushes into multiple lilac bushes for the yard....

All that Hard Work ... for a Monkey Room

When my parents were visiting in February, my father went to town working on our extra bedroom -- fixing the ceiling, painting the walls and making the trim perfect.

It's great to have that space as a usable portion of the house now ... well, it will be once we figure out how we are going to use it. For now, Alma's huge monkey is the only thing in there. Yup, a room just for the monkey. He's big!

Laura's Former Outfits, Alma's Bedroom and Curls!

Our Most Recent Visit to Nana and Padre's House

Alma Crocker

New-Old Toys

In love with Joshua's Cooper and putting My Little Ponies down for a nap...

Press Release about a Movie that Joshua Helped Create

Digital Stories Dramatize Information’s Role in the Lives of People and Communities
February 28, 2011

What's at stake when local news and information flow doesn't serve all members of a community equally well? How can people respond?

These questions lie at the heart of Information Stories (http://informationstories.org), a series of twelve three-to-five-minute videos (plus an introduction and conclusion) making their official online debut this week.

Some are stories of journalism. Examples include the struggle of a labor union secretary/mother of five to get media coverage for asbestos-related disease in Libby, Montana, and the creation of an online newspaper for the “news desert” of southeast New Hampshire.

Others are stories of activism. The executive director of Native Public Media describes the drive to bring broadband to Indian Country. A faith-based community organizer discusses a campaign to help poor people overcome the powerlessness caused by living “in an information vacuum.”

Inclusiveness is a major theme to Information Stories. For example, an undocumented immigrant tells how he pursues art and community organizing to make visible the immigrant experience. A young radio reporter and producer from Chicago reveals how he learned to listen to, not just speak to his community. A high school student relates why she thought it important to make transgender people a more visible presence at San Francisco Pride. A “hard-of-hearing” English professor talks about making the voices of deaf students heard.

Other storytellers include a small town mayor, the manager of an online dialogue space, a community television board member, and a convener of community conversations about public health.

Information Stories reveals the loss when local information flows leave stories uncovered, concerns unaddressed, or voices left out – and the gain when these exclusions don’t happen.

The series idea was conceived by Ohio State University law professor Peter M. Shane and Columbus, Ohio filmmaker Liv Gjestvang. In 2008 and 2009, Shane served as executive director to the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. Gjestvang serves as Faculty Programs Manager for Ohio State’s Digital Union.

The Knight Commission was a diverse, bipartisan group of 17 leaders in media, public policy, and community, who were organized in 2008 to articulate the democratic information needs of America’s 21st century local communities. They were asked to recommend remedial measures where the Commission perceived that community news and information needs were not being met. Funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and organized through the Aspen Institute, the Commission maintains an active, resource-rich website (http://www.knightcomm.org).

As the Knight Commission was preparing to issue its October, 2009 report, Professor Shane approached Ms. Gjestvang for help in making the Knight Commission issues more compelling and concrete for the everyday public.

“The Commission explained why ‘second-class information citizenship is looming’ for many Americans,” according to Professor Shane. “I am hoping to motivate activists around the country to pay attention to their local information ecologies. We want them to ask whether everyone in their communities gets the information they require to meet both their personal and civic needs.”

Shane emphasized that Ms. Gjestvang and he also intended the diversity embodied in Information Stories to send an important message. “We wanted to come as close as we could with just a dozen storytellers to assemble a kind of American tapestry. The last line of the Knight Commission report is, ‘The “information issue” is everyone’s issue,’ and we wanted to drive that home,” Shane said.

The Information Stories storytellers learned how to produce their narratives through a July, 2010 Digital Storytelling Workshop, co-sponsored by the Ohio State University Digital Union, the University Libraries, and the University Center for the Advancement of Teaching. The series was produced with a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which advances journalism in the digital age and invests in the vitality of communities where the Knight brothers owned newspapers. Since 1950, the foundation has granted more than $400 million to advance quality journalism and freedom of expression. The Knight Foundation focuses on projects that promote informed and engaged communities and lead to transformational change. Additional information about the foundation and its programs appears at www.knightfoundation.org.

The Information Stories web site (http://informationstories.org) provides links to both captioned and non-captioned versions of the individual stories. The site links also to resources that explain how anyone can produce his or her own “information story” and a feedback form to enable viewers to explain how they used Information Stories in their local communities. A low-cost DVD containing both the individual stories and a “full reel” version that shows them as a continuous documentary is available at .

Ohio State University is releasing the Information Stories series subject to a Creative Commons non-commercial license. That license allows the stories to be freely copied, distributed, transmitted or adapted for noncommercial purposes, provided appropriate credit is given.

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Please take a moment to watch Joshua's portion of the movie, which is beautiful, powerful and sums up his work perfectly.

This is the way...

Another video that shows how joyful Alma is.  She has recently figured out how to spin around (who taught her that?!) and it's funny to see her adverse reaction to being dizzy.

Around the House

Shot this video yesterday after we spent the morning making doughnut holes for Fasnacht Day (a.k.a. Fat Tuesday). When she rubs her stomach, that means "please" which she also uses to mean "please help me."

1.25!

Alma turned 15 months yesterday.  She continues to surprise us with her thoughts and playfulness.  Sure, we don't understand everything she is thinking but the little bit of sign that she knows offers more insight than we thought possible ... or we are just filling in the gaps in her expressions and find ourselves completely fascinating!

Here are some photos to summarize her life.

She loves corn and peas ... and tons of other foods.  But mostly corn and peas.

It has become impossible to keep her clean. She loves walking through the garden and climbing in and out of the raised flower bed. Her cute little shoes are usually caked with mud. Love this about her.

She is very excited to wear headbands ... for a minute or two. She calls them hats.

When she has an afternoon snack at her little table, she likes to invite a stuffed animal and pretend to feed it.  We recently received a large supply of stuffed animals.  My parents returned all the stuffed animals I collected as a child.  It is great watching Alma play with them.  This particular stuff tiger is a hand puppet and Alma wears him around the house frequently.  I've kissed him at least 40 times in the last two days, due to her requests.

Other updates:

• Her thirteenth and fourteenth teeth are coming through this week.  This is a lot of teeth for such a little one.  For example, my cousin's child got her first tooth when she was 14 months, although that may be on the other end of the spectrum.
• She weighs 21 lbs (20th percentile), she is 31 inches long (70th percentile) and has a head circumference of 19 inches (95th percentile!).
• Joshua was so determined to teach Alma to say "mama" (because a few months ago she was only saying "dada") that now she calls both of us mama.  In fact, she also calls herself Mama because it sounds so close to her own name.
• She still refuses to drink milk.  But she loves ice cream and milk with a little bit of hot chocolate in it to change the taste.  Know that this isn't the way to get her to drink milk ... still working on that.
• Been carrying her in the sling carrier I used when she was a baby, which is a fun way to have her on my hip and still get to use both hands.
• Alma doesn't feed the dog as much from her high chair these days. Think she is realizing that the food doesn't come back once it goes to him.
• Started watching the first 15 minutes of Sesame Street with Alma in the morning (10am). At times feel that this is a slippery slope to watching tv.  Joshua contents that because I'm so keen on not having tv be a big part of her life that I will probably not let that happen.  
• Mid-month Alma was singing along with Bjork surprisingly well. I wondered if I should be proud of my daughter or embarrassed for Bjork?
• Her sign for cat is said by making lip smacking noise while putting thumb and index finger in mouth.  She might be Alf!
• She keeps exclaiming "bop!" So we have had the song by EnVogue that starts with "mmmmbop" in our heads all month.  At least until we realized that she was saying either ball or bib.  BOP!
• Alma dances with both hands up while bringing her fingers together repeatedly (basically, doing the sign for milk).  Finally I realized that she is mimicking my snapping.  Guess I dance and snap a lot.
• Most days she gets up at 7am, naps once (for two hours, starting around 12 noon) and has a very consistent bath and bedtime (6:30 and 7:00, respectively).  I've finally learned how to make her nap without nursing her, which is key to the weaning process.  I'm still nursing first thing in the morning and at bedtime. 
• It is great watching her learn sign and also to see her signing improve as her dexterity improves.  For example, she can now do a textbook "more" instead of simply clapping.  But signs like "doll" (hooking index finger over nose) usually ends up somewhere around her ear. Becoming aware of her own body is fascinating.  Incidentally, she often tells me that the large statue of St. Francis we have in our backyard is a doll.  Yes, I guess he is.
• One of the best signs she knows is "all done" which is used to say that we/she cannot do something.  For example, I use it to say "we are out of strawberries" when she requests them or "you cannot play with that" when she points to my phone and says "please".  
• Words: mama, book (gook!), hat, hi and bye (usually said in a very soft and high voice), dad, bark (funny side note: she barks when she sees things she likes or wants like crayons), bib (bop!), nana
• At story hour, she is usually rather shy, sitting on my lap, hiding behind my legs and sucking her thumb.  Until they bring out a basket of shakers then she quickly gets up to get one for each of us.  
• She does tons of funny things like spending an afternoon trying to get a stuffed cat to ride on Shanti's back and using a cut out puzzle piece of a horse to ride on her rocking horse.  She seems to like the order of putting similar things together.
• Alma will freeze to watch older children.  It becomes hard to move her through a store if older kids are around.  
• She will point to the mixer on the counter and say "please" if we haven't spent time baking that day.  When I say "let's bake" she goes into the dining room to push her baking table into the kitchen.  Then I hand her each of the ingredients (i.e. the flour and sugar canisters) and she carries then to her baking table.  She is certainly at the stage where she loves to ferry things back and forth between people and rooms. 
• She reads books while being changed.  Joshua noted that this combination -- toilets and reading material -- seems to be throughout our lives.  

Alma is an absolute joy and hanging out with her all day is awesome.  Sure, she has some pout-y moments, but she is redirected rather easily.   I love my little gal more and more each day.  When we were talking about expanding the family the other day, Joshua said that it was hard to imagine since his heart is already so full from Alma.  We would explode!  She is just that great for us.

Birds

This video pretty much sums up Alma's feelings on birds.



Alma is constantly pointing out bird and seems so excited to see them. However, when she gets close to them, she freaks out like we have never seen. The tears explode from her eyes. She grips us with such intensity that she has left bruises. We have learned to skip the bird section of Petsmart in favor of the rabbits and fish. I cannot wait until she can throw dishes at them! Wait, maybe I should reconsider the bird feeder I just hung outside of the kitchen window...