Milestones

I remember the weeks following the birth of our daughter moving at a languid pace. Perhaps it was because it seemed like she was changing with each breath, or maybe we were just a lot more attentive to shifts in her routine back then. As the months went by it felt like the passage of time accelerated, and it wasn't long before the series of firsts in a category of locomotive, gastronomic and verbal milestones faded into distant memory (although hopefully chronicled for posterity in some form). I imagine this is how fathers end up sneaking out of chapels on their daughter's wedding day to shed a tear as they struggle to understand where time, and their little girl, have gone.

We had a pretty big milestone this weekend. One that Alison and I have both been waiting for and dreading at the same time. By all accounts from experienced parents this is going to mark the start of an extremely challenging time for mummies and daddies.

Before we get to Eleanor I'd like to back track to a little miletsone of my own. This is supposed to be my blog after all.

Couple of weeks ago marked the 31st year of my life, and I was treated on the day to a fun day packed with food oriented activiites. Alison had found out about a new documentary called "Jiro dreams of sushi" that was playing in a limited release at the James Street Palace Cinemas. The name of the movie alone is awesome and reviews promised much entertainment for the epicurean, littered with "food porn" and interesting notes about the pursuit of becoming the best sushi chef in the world. The film follows Jiro Ono and his small ten seat sushi restaurant in the Tokyo subway below Ginza, the only sushi restaurant to ever win 3 stars in the Michelin guide. The story itself is fascinating and the stream of imagery featuring fresh, perfect nigiri sitting voluptuously on a plate was mouth watering. Highly worth watching for foodies.

After coming out of the cinema we headed to the Fresh Sushi Co. on James Street to pick up a smorgasbord of sushi for dinner. We arrived home later than expected with food in tow but thankfully Annie, who had kindly offered to babysit so we could see the movie, was happy to spend a little more time with a grizzly Nelly. Once we put our little girl to bed we sat down to enjoy dinner with some sake. The blue fin tuna and uni were great.

In place of a traditional birthday cake, Alison baked me a monster sized creme caramel. Far better in my opinion and you can still stick a candle in it! I won't reveal how long it took us to finish this...

For a cheese course we picked up a soft blue and a ferociously stinky washed rind to consume with a spiced pear paste and lavosh bread. A little indulgent perhaps but I think pushing your arteries to the limit is a great way to celebrate a birthday.

Anyway, enough about me. Eleanor has been doing a fair bit of growing up since she turned one a little over a month ago. We made it to Olivia Rose's birthday party last weekend and it was great to see her interact with all the other kids there. She didn't seem to mind the bouncy castle but wouldn't stay still for long to let the face painter draw a butterfly. I'm sure she'll calm down a little more as she matures.

That's not to say that she hasn't learned any new tricks, as yesterday we witnessed the beginning of her ambulatory independence. She has been rushing around the house with assistance of her walker for a while, but up till now has been too cautious to take more than a couple of steps without support. I think we captured enough on video to suggest that she's ready to start making a habit of being bipedal.

It's a little premature but we also think that she's got a few definite words under her belt and is starting to understand what we're saying. Of course we now know that comprehension and compliance are not necessarily related. Hopefully she'll pay attention to us when we warn her about the new precarious positions that her new found freedom will put her in. Either way, we are so very proud of our daughter right now.

Well done Nelly!

Nelly Turns One

Hard to believe how quickly the last twelve months have flown by. In the last week we celebrated (twice!) our little girl surviving under our care for a whole year, which is a pretty credible milestone I would say.

Mum flew out on the Friday before Nelly's birthday for a short stay with her favourite grand daughter. As mentioned in a previous post, we have been Skyping with AhMah and AhKong pretty much every weekend so Eleanor recognized mum immediately as that energetic lady from the TV. Mum has made a great recovery from her back surgery and was game enough to pick our little girl up for short periods for cuddles and relocating babies from dangerous areas when necessary.

I took the Monday off work for Elenaor's actual birthday on the 16th as we planned to have a small family party. John and Sheena drove down with the great grandparents who were delighted to see how gorgeous Eleanor looked in tartan (a birthday dress from her AhKong in Malaysia). It was the first of several costume changes that day as it's very difficult to crawl and play with toys when one is not accustom to dresses.

A little Chinese tradition is to give the baby a few gifts on her first birthday to help her along in life. New clothes so that she will always have something to wear, new shoes to take her to interesting places in life and best yet a whole chicken drumstick to guarantee wealth and food to eat. It seems like she's going to need it as our little girl absolutely demolished that chicken leg (with a little help from the parents to cut the meat off the bone) along with everything else that was served up for lunch.

Mummy and Daddy woke up early to decorated the cake, which turned out pretty well I think. The Vienna cream was probably a little rich but that didn't stop us from eating most of it. I've also started to develop a hatred for lighting birthday candles on windy days.

The following Saturday we invited a bunch of Eleanor's friends over for another party. They insisted on bringing their parents along too and we obliged, which made it one of the larger parties that we have had at our home. In preparation of the large event we composed a lengthy list of food to feed everyone, including a medium sized boneless ham. I've been keen on baking a glazed ham ever since we watched a special episode on Good Eats years ago so it's an understatement to say that I was a little excited. We ended up selecting an orange and mustard glaze which produced rather scrumptious results I would say.

In the end I think we over catered by a fair amount, which goes to show that our estimates shouldn't be based on how much food I would eat. At least we would have left overs for a week and the kids could feel free to drop half their plates on the grass.

The birthday cake for the Saturday party was decorated by our friend Christina, who is ever so clever, and was adorned with a cute chicken for our little girl. Everyone was thoroughly impressed with her efforts and the cake tasted great.

I tried to take as many photos as I could on the day and have put together a little collage in iPhoto on the iPad to try that feature out. Quite impressed with how easy it was to compose and share something. You can find the link here.

So that's one year down. I mentioned to Alison a while ago that I had never really imagined what it would be like to have a toddler. All my preconceptions about children began with an infant and immediately skipped to a walking, talking child asking about the origin of rainbows. The last six months have been surprising and absolutely delightful so I cannot begin to imagine how I will feel when Eleanor reaches her next verbal and locomotive milestones.

 

iPads, Codea and Eleanor

Continuing the trend over the last two years, I woke up early to watch Tim Cook announce the latest revision of the iPad (sans numeral). One change this time to my little ritual of eating potato chips in my jammies while following the live blogs was the additional duty of checking in on our little baby girl grizzling (obviously because she wanted to be kept up to date on the news). With daddy and daughter excited about the most recent awesome Apple device I pre-ordered one straight away that morning and had it delivered to the office on launch day.

I absolutely love the new screen. It's fantastic for reading and viewing photos, although in truth I've now found it hard to take or even find photos that are sharp enough to show off the new Retina display. The increase in weight and thickness are certainly noticeable but it didn't take long to get use to that. The other great addition in this new model is a much improved camera, which I've been using to add snapshots of documents and whiteboard drawings at work to Evernote. The resulting photos are more than usable and I don't bother with a photocopier or scanner anymore when capturing discussions and diagrams.

Another purchase that I made to compliment the our little Apple infused household was the new AppleTV. I've been waiting for an update to the little black box (which now supports 1080P) and I'm glad that we finally have one as AirPlay is such a great feature. Browsing your content on an iPad or iPhone and slingshotting that to the big screen is so much better than clicking incessantly through menus on our TV remote. Particularly happy with being able to use our Plex server on the TV now, even if there seem to be some teething issues with lock screens activating when you pause a show for too long. Hopefully the rumours about Apple opening up the AppleTV platform to apps will mean that it won't be long before we can get a native Plex client on the AppleTV itself.

Something else we tried with AirPlay yesterday was mirroring the iPad screen during our weekly call with mum and Uncle Wing on Skype. I thought we'd try it for a bit of a laugh but I thought it worked out really well as Eleanor could see her AhMah and AhKong from wherever she was playing in the room. I turned on the back camera of the iPad and followed Eleanor around, which gave the grandparents a great view of Nelly playing while Alison could still interact with the TV. The disconnect also meant that I could show what Nelly was like laughing and touching the faces of her grandparents through the TV, without the previous downside of accidentally hanging up on the iPad.

My other latest geek indulgence has been scratching my game development itch with Codea on the iPad. I never thought that programming on a touchscreen device would be feasible (at least this soon) but I've had an blast over the last week knocking up a game prototype together. The app allows you to develop games (other applications as well but the API is clearly geared towards game development) in a dynamic scripting language called Lua. The experience is so fluid and the API exposes some pretty complicated functions of a tablet device (multitouch, accelerometer, sound, graphic manipulation, keyboard support) in a really simple manner. The barrier of entry for experimentation is so low and the results so immediate that it really becomes a pleasure to code, which is certainly a departure from some of the heavy weight enterprise development that I do for work.

What's also impressive is the speed which the API is expanding. The last few updates have added support for a physics engine (using Box2D) and 3D graphics. There's promise for networking support for multiplayer games to come in the future and eventually the ability to export these sandbox games into XCode so that developers can publish their efforts to the App Store. At the moment the only way to share code is to copy the source and paste it somewhere on the active forum for other developers to import into their own Codea app.

In less than a week I put together a simple prototype of a puzzle/memory game that I wanted to try. The idea is to memorize the randomized sequence which the game scrambles the tiles and return it to the original layout, which becomes progressively difficult as the sequence gets longer. A cross between Simon and a picture tile puzzle basically. Codea even allows you to capture video of your program running, so here's a short clip of the working game on YouTube.



Little Nelly has been doing some real growing up over the last few months. She's now cruising naturally and has begun to attempt free standing on her own. So far I think her record is about 5 or so seconds, so I'd expect that walking will not be far away. Life at day care has improved and she seems to be having fun with the other kids based on reports from the centre, which has made Alison's transition back into the work force two days a week a little easier to cope with. Eleanor's verbal skills continue to expand (in inflection if not phonetic variety) and I managed to convince her to crawl across the room to "bring Daddy the blue square" yesterday which was immensely rewarding. She's also a lot happier playing by herself for longer periods, although when she tires of that we often hear a frantic battle cry as she charges on all fours through the house to find you. It's hard to believe that our baby girl is morphing into an increasingly independent little person. *sniff*

If there was one milestone that really hit home how much time has passed it would have been Lily's first birthday last weekend. We had a great time at the Roma Street Parkland with Jeff, Julie and the birthday girl (who as always, looked gorgeous in pink). It's crazy to think that we met a little more than a year ago at antenatal class.

Which obviously means that there's another beautiful girl that will be celebrating her first birthday soon. AhMah will be flying out in two weeks and we have most of the party plans nutted out. I suppose it goes without saying that we're all more than a little excited.