ABCs
I was laid low by food poisoning or something similar for the last couple of days, and I've barely been able to get out of bed much less blog (note to self: beware the chicken salad in the Intuit cafe, which I suspect was the culprit -- and I probably deserved it, eating a salad with chicken in a corporate cafeteria). I'm feeling significantly more chipper now, however, so I am dusting off the old keyboard.
My friend Chris has three children, and his wife, Erica, is home-schooling all of them, so they have lots of educational child goodies. Not too long ago he brought to work two puzzles for Devon -- one that has the alphabet and another that has numbers 0-9. Devon has been really interested in puzzles and blocks lately, and we've spent a lot of time building block towers and playing with puzzles. We have some of those old-fashioned wooden puzzles with the cut-out shapes (this batch was also courtesy of Chris, actually) -- the ones that have, say, pictures of animals that fit into a wooden backing and the pieces themselves have little red "handles" to pick them up and then fit them back into the correct places. Devon has really been into the picture puzzles as well as the alphabet/number puzzles. I think the interest in the alphabet was triggered by singing the ABC song to her (in my quest to pull out some children's favorites from my meager memory of such, I had to scrape the bottom of the barrel with "A B C D E F G..." etc.).
At any rate, she's getting surprisingly adept at putting puzzle pieces into the slots, and she's also picking up some letters and numbers. She recognizes the odd letter and number -- she just started recognizing 8 recently, and she's quite adept with O and Y (so we've only got 24 more to go!). It is surprising how effective plain old rote repetition can be -- play with the alphabet puzzle and the block books enough, and she starts to remember some of the letters. It's fascinating to see how Devon is gradually accumulating knowlege, though. I ran into one of my colleagues recently who mentioned that in the last year and a half her son has learned to crawl, walk, talk and feed himself, and she can't point to a single thing she's done in the last 18 months that's even close to that. She's right, it's humbling.
Walt and I have recently been sucked into another addictive eBay-ish activity in search for parts for the apartment. We have been surfing eBay for weeks looking for light fixtures (I'll spare you the condensed version of my modern lighting rant), and last week we ran into a great set of sconces that were on "live auction" (as opposed to the usual eBay structure of bidding up until a set time period). It turns out that the eBay live auction is just that -- auction houses that also allow people to bid via eBay as if they were on the floor (although honestly floor bidders get preference). This particular set of sconces happened to be from an auction house in Oakland, so we decided to try bidding on them (the place had to be local, since the auction house wouldn't pack or ship any goods). It was a very interesting experience.
Now of course I left the registration part to the last minute, which caused a little nail-biting anxiety. I didn't realize that we had to register with the auction house separately (in addition to having an existing eBay account), so I rushed to register us online, since we were planning to put in a couple of absentee bids on items and then check back later for the status. As it was, we were free earlier than we thought and tuned into the live auction. This was the cool part -- we downloaded a Java applet, and using this, we could watch the whole auction in real time. The lot # would come on the screen along with a photo of the item and a "bid now" button, and then if you wanted the item, you'd just bid away in whatever increments the auctioneed had set. This, I'm afraid, turned out to be far too alluring for Walt, who was so enamored of the whole online/live auction thing that he starting bidding on a Miro print just to "see how it worked" and before he knew it, he had bought it. I was in a complete rage about this for the whole day, since it wasn't an insubstantial amount of money -- all I can say is that he better stay away from Las Vegas, since I think the thrill of the betting would be too much for him.
We did, however, get a rug that we had absentee bid on, which was fun (and it was quite a bit less than the estimated price range, so that mollified me slightly -- ever so slightly -- after the print fiasco). There was a ton of stuff up for auction, though, and I think if we're judicious with our bids and selections, we might be able to pick up some items that we need for fairly reasonable prices. Walt went out to the auction house today and said it was literally crammed with stuff from the sale, so if we decide to bid on the next month's auction, we might actually go in person to get a good look at the items before we bid.
My friend Chris has three children, and his wife, Erica, is home-schooling all of them, so they have lots of educational child goodies. Not too long ago he brought to work two puzzles for Devon -- one that has the alphabet and another that has numbers 0-9. Devon has been really interested in puzzles and blocks lately, and we've spent a lot of time building block towers and playing with puzzles. We have some of those old-fashioned wooden puzzles with the cut-out shapes (this batch was also courtesy of Chris, actually) -- the ones that have, say, pictures of animals that fit into a wooden backing and the pieces themselves have little red "handles" to pick them up and then fit them back into the correct places. Devon has really been into the picture puzzles as well as the alphabet/number puzzles. I think the interest in the alphabet was triggered by singing the ABC song to her (in my quest to pull out some children's favorites from my meager memory of such, I had to scrape the bottom of the barrel with "A B C D E F G..." etc.).
At any rate, she's getting surprisingly adept at putting puzzle pieces into the slots, and she's also picking up some letters and numbers. She recognizes the odd letter and number -- she just started recognizing 8 recently, and she's quite adept with O and Y (so we've only got 24 more to go!). It is surprising how effective plain old rote repetition can be -- play with the alphabet puzzle and the block books enough, and she starts to remember some of the letters. It's fascinating to see how Devon is gradually accumulating knowlege, though. I ran into one of my colleagues recently who mentioned that in the last year and a half her son has learned to crawl, walk, talk and feed himself, and she can't point to a single thing she's done in the last 18 months that's even close to that. She's right, it's humbling.
Walt and I have recently been sucked into another addictive eBay-ish activity in search for parts for the apartment. We have been surfing eBay for weeks looking for light fixtures (I'll spare you the condensed version of my modern lighting rant), and last week we ran into a great set of sconces that were on "live auction" (as opposed to the usual eBay structure of bidding up until a set time period). It turns out that the eBay live auction is just that -- auction houses that also allow people to bid via eBay as if they were on the floor (although honestly floor bidders get preference). This particular set of sconces happened to be from an auction house in Oakland, so we decided to try bidding on them (the place had to be local, since the auction house wouldn't pack or ship any goods). It was a very interesting experience.
Now of course I left the registration part to the last minute, which caused a little nail-biting anxiety. I didn't realize that we had to register with the auction house separately (in addition to having an existing eBay account), so I rushed to register us online, since we were planning to put in a couple of absentee bids on items and then check back later for the status. As it was, we were free earlier than we thought and tuned into the live auction. This was the cool part -- we downloaded a Java applet, and using this, we could watch the whole auction in real time. The lot # would come on the screen along with a photo of the item and a "bid now" button, and then if you wanted the item, you'd just bid away in whatever increments the auctioneed had set. This, I'm afraid, turned out to be far too alluring for Walt, who was so enamored of the whole online/live auction thing that he starting bidding on a Miro print just to "see how it worked" and before he knew it, he had bought it. I was in a complete rage about this for the whole day, since it wasn't an insubstantial amount of money -- all I can say is that he better stay away from Las Vegas, since I think the thrill of the betting would be too much for him.
We did, however, get a rug that we had absentee bid on, which was fun (and it was quite a bit less than the estimated price range, so that mollified me slightly -- ever so slightly -- after the print fiasco). There was a ton of stuff up for auction, though, and I think if we're judicious with our bids and selections, we might be able to pick up some items that we need for fairly reasonable prices. Walt went out to the auction house today and said it was literally crammed with stuff from the sale, so if we decide to bid on the next month's auction, we might actually go in person to get a good look at the items before we bid.
posted by Devon Szalva at
8:50 PM
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