friends don't let friends "curve"

I still haven't caught up on my email inbox.

Things here have been busy, although not exactly taking care of highest priority events. Because the weather has turned suddenly warm, we took advantage of that fact to get the girls out of the house as much as we could. They both enjoyed the Drumlin farm on multiple occasions -- since we decided to get a membership this year -- and were lucky enough to get to see one day old pigs. Although both girls preferred the baby goats and lambs, but it was a good and tiring adventure for both.

Wagon rides are back in season. Aderyn got a nice wagon for her birthday last November and we haven't had much opportunity to take the girls out for long wagon rides until this week. The minuteman bike trail is near our house, but there isn't any easy access route to get on the trail. Trekking down streets is dangerous -- our part of Massachusetts doesn't endorse sidewalks in any fashion -- and walking through the swamp was barely manageable. But manage we did.

Aderyn's vocabulary has exploded the past couple of weeks. We've listed close to 100 'words' she knows. Most of them are only partial phoneme or syllable approximations, but the consistency is unmistakable, so I suppose that means it's language. I believe her 'baby accent' as we're calling it is similar to her cousin Kristen's.

Paela has had a couple of good social advancements this week. She has tried playing with the boy next door in the past, but the social tradeoff is noticeably one-sided. While she enjoys the exchange, she doesn't say much to him -- instead, she runs around laughing at his clownish games. This week a girl from down the street who is much closer to Paela's age came over and the two of them played in a more reciprocal fashion. We were happy to let the two of them run around the house, coming up with new games to play on their own (only listening in occasionally). At one point in their conversation they were discussing how they do their hair and Paela told her friend "I curve my hair." Grins.

This semester is almost over. It has been a good one with my New Media I class challenging me and accepting my challenges. I wish that we had a longer semester with more class time. But, of course, things would progress much further if I could require students to purchase their software. Or that they weren't all coming from massive commutes.