He is learning to speak, and the latest discovery is letting me know the process of bunping into stuff (a second ago, in front of me, usually without hurting himself). He comes to me, tells me “boom” pointing at where he fell, then “aua” with the saddest face, pointing at what he supposedly hurt. Sometimes it’s even the correct spot! He often then patiently waits for a kiss on it.
My kid started hating waking up from his daily nap. I still don’t understand why or how, but at least half of the times, he wakes up so mad! And there seems to be nothing to do. At times he gets more mad if you try to comfort him. Sometimes taking in a soothing voice helps, but not always. Often giving him his pajama pants helps -and that’s the only time in the day he requires them. I don’t know if it counts as tantrum, but i can’t classify it as anything else… we usually wait it out, can take up to 20 minutes of screeching.
1.5 years old he is understanding the concept of hot, so he is learning to blow on warm food, let me know if it’s too hot and communicate this: a hand over the head is the signal for “hot”. It gets used when he passes near the oven, when I am cooking and when we serve food.
At 1.5y, diversion has started to loose its power when having to stop playing or having to leave toys. Luckily I found out that “saying goodbye” is extremely effective. It gives the kid an understanding of what is happening (we are leaving) and a moment to process the loss. So now every time we go home from the playground we say goodbye, even if there are no other people around.
“Latest hack you figured out”
As a new parent, there have been countless little hacks shared with me that really helped my life. The first one: “sometimes babies just need to cry it out” (within reason). Helped me drop the parent guilt of hearing your baby cry and not being able to fix it right away.
Latest one: if you are excited, they will likely be as well. (Experiences of potty training)
My baby has been sleeping incredibly well since he was 3 months old. Fellow parents ask me the magic formula and, most often, when I share what we have been doing, it’s something they have already tried and didn’t work. We just are very lucky, there is honestly very little else…
I personally had a bigger problem with the science… I am a scientist and I worked on chaos and the three body problem, there are many elements in there that just killed my immersion by being wrong. One of them was the mathematician that was computing the solution to the three body problem. No sane person would consider that worthwhile!
Chaos means sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Between other things, that means that any error you are making is going to be exponentially magnified in finite time. So if you only considered 3 digits of accuracy in your solution, you can just throw your solution away after a couple of time steps. But if you considered 30 digits of accuracy? well… you only get one or two extra time steps in which you solution still makes a little bit of sense! Check out this youtube video on the double pendulum, another well-known chaotic system, to get a feeling: https://youtu.be/ldnEHycw40E
Still talking about math, when the “the baby problem” planet is kicked away from the two-stars system, likely it would not be able to ever come back. Assuming the planet never actually leaves the solar system is quite a large assumption.
Another far fetched change I would like to see in our society: shorter work days. I don’t think there is any real reason why we settled on 8h work days, and with the growth of productivity I see no reason why we should stay there. A shorter work day (at same pay) would allow the worker to have more time to enjoy life - and the family they chose to create.