Lucy's Fourth Month

Lucy Loo is four months old! She is between the fiftieth and seventy-fifth percentile for her weight and head circumference, but she has jumped up to the ninetieth percentile for her height. Perhaps she will be a tall little girl, just like her B family relatives!

She is eating well and sleeping fairly well. I wish that there were more times that she would sleep through the night, but I'm trying to be patient. She still isn't laughing yet, but she does make an aspirate "k!" sound when she is amused or happy. Over the past four or five days, though, she has discovered that she can make loud, high pitched shrieks. She makes these when she is happy, or sad, or bored, so I don't think they have any inherent, specific meaning. We think she is just trying out her voice and seeing what noises she can make. But the shrieks are quite annoying, so I hope they end soon! I told J that I will only be glad about these shrieks if she ends up being an opera singer.

I get to look at this cute face while I prep for work.

She smiles the biggest and longest if Sam is behind the camera. She is mesmerized when she is around him, and always is happy whenever we pick him up from the school bus stop.

We had some warm days this past month, which gave Lucy the chance to explore and drool in the Moby.

Lucy's first piggy back ride on Sam's shoulders. It looks like she's taking advantage of the chance to inspect Sam's hair!

Apparently she likes to watch television. Here she is enjoying a few minutes of "Phineas and Ferb" with Sam. When I'm getting ready for work, Sam is really helpful at keeping Lucy happy and entertained.

I love her nicely-folded hands on top of the Bumbo in this picture. And I love her little boots, which were a gift from my cousins.

A jrink of water

Sam is learning how to spell. Each week his teacher is sending home spelling words that he is supposed to learn, so he can be prepared for the weekly test. So far, the words have been really easy (like short words that end in "-ag" or "-at"). But these exercises in spelling have gotten Sam to think about how more complex words are spelled. Tonight, after asking for a drink of water, Sam asked about how to spell "drink." This was our conversation:

Me: "D-r-i-n-k" spells "drink."
Sam: Oh, with a "d!" Like, "duh-rink?"
Me: Yes, with a "d."
Sam: I thought it was with a "j." Like "jrink."

I guess with the tendency to swallow and mispronounce consonants in American English, Sam mistook the "d" for a "j." And I think it's amusing that for the past several years of his life Sam has been asking for a "jrink" of water before going to bed each night, unbeknownst to me and J.

The Magic Pumpkin Sleeper: Round 2

Halloween jammies!

It's fun to have things come full circle, now that we have a baby in the home again. Almost exactly six years ago, I wrote a post about how Sam began to sleep through the night with the help of what we called his "Magic Pumpkin Sleeper." And now, since Lucy is about the same size that Sam was six years ago, she gets to wear the Magic Pumpkin Sleeper too. Perhaps it is helping her to sleep through the night a little, but she has been better sleeper than Sam all along. Lately we put her down to sleep around eight o'clock at night, and then I wake her up around ten or eleven for a final feeding before I go to bed. She has been sleeping somewhere between five and seven in the morning, which I think is pretty good!

I think Sam and Lucy look like they are related in these two photos, especially either their roundy-round heads and pointy chins. But they also look different too, especially in their noses. Sam also had darker eyes at this age than Lucy does right now, which makes me think that her eyes will stay blue. We will see!

To Feel Like An Idiot

This is a excerpt from email that I just wrote to a friend from graduate school:

I have to say that your email came at a timely moment; it saved me from feeling like a complete loser after I had just stepped out of a dinner with the other art history faculty members and some art historians who were visiting our campus. The visiting art historians were specialists in Renaissance and Baroque art, and in some ways it was really fun to talk to them. But they also were mentioning so many scholars in such a nonchalant way ("So-and-so's newest book on Caravaggio..." or "So-and-so who published in 'Art Forum' - he was was up for the open position at Yale last year") that I felt quite overwhelmed. I kept nodding my head like I knew what they were talking about or who they were talking about, but I really didn't. I left the dinner wondering if I really even knew that much about scholarship on the Baroque period, let alone art history as a discipline. And I also had to quickly jot down all of these names that I heard (like Lorenzo Pericolo, Todd Olson, and Stephen Greenblatt) so I can try and be more informed next time.

These professors, who obviously have to focus a lot on publication and scholarship as part of their careers, seem to have a totally, totally different profession than mine. It was really interesting to see these professors interact with my colleagues who are tenured. It almost felt like they were speaking another language.

Anyhow, it was an eye opening moment about how different my life would be if I had a PhD and was a tenure-track professor right now. It would be nice to not feel like an idiot in certain circles. But I also don't know if I'm ready or even want to do quasi-ritualistic dances with other professors which involve naming scholars and publications left and right.

Even though I feel like I have learned so much in the past few years, even since graduation, I guess it is a good to be reminded that I don't, in many ways, know much at all.

This evening as I've been thinking about my career and what I do as an art historian and instructor, I've felt comforted by looking at pictures of myself teaching in the classroom. These photos were taken about a year and a half ago. At least I look like I know what I'm doing in those images!

The Worst Hundred Books

 Last night I came across a copy of a letter that Oscar Wilde wrote to the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette in February 6, 1886. You can find a full copy of the letter online, but I want to highlight the paragraphs that I found the most amusing:

Books, I fancy, may be conveniently divided into three classes:-- 

1. Books to read, such as Cicero's Letters, Suetonius, Vasari's Lives of the Painters, the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Sir John Mandeville, Marco Polo, St. Simon's Memoirs, Mommsen, and (till we get a better one) Grote's History of Greece. 

 2. Books to re-read, such as Plato and Keats: in the sphere of poetry, the masters not the minstrels; in the sphere of philosophy, the seers not the savants.

3. Books not to read at all, such as Thomson's Seasons, Rogers's Italy, Paley's Evidences, all the Fathers except St. Augustine, all John Stuart Mill except the essay on Liberty, all Voltaire's plays without any exception, Butler's Analogy, Grant's Aristotle, Hume's England, Lewes's History of Philosophy, all argumentative books and all books that try to prove anything. 

The third class is by far the most important. To tell people what to read is, as a rule, either useless or harmful; for, the appreciation of literature is a question of temperament not of teaching; to Parnassus there is no primer and nothing that one can learn is ever worth learning. But to tell people what not to read is a very different matter, and I venture to recommend it as a mission to the University Extension Scheme. 

Indeed, it is one that is eminently needed in this age of ours, an age that reads so much, that it has no time to admire, and writes so much, that it has no time to think. Whoever will select out of the chaos of our modern curricula 'The Worst Hundred Books,' and publish a list of them, will confer on the rising generation a real and lasting benefit.

When I read this, I was pleased to see that I had already read many of the books that Wilde has on his "books to be read" list - although perhaps this makes me a bit of a nerd, since I actually put forth the energy to read things in a category that seems to be a place where one keeps their "good intentions" that don't come to fruition.

I was amused, though, at the thought of simply recommending that people not read books in printed reviews. I don't know if I have read enough horrible books to compile a list of "the worst hundred," but I do have a list of books or authors that I avoid. My latest addition would be Wuthering Heights. I would put the Master and Commander series on there (sorry Zillah!). I also didn't like The Dogs of Rome from the Commissario Alec Blume series, despite a recommendation from someone. I also haven't enjoyed what I've read by Terry Pratchett. And I avoid anything written by Stephanie Meyer or Dan Brown. I did read The Da Vinci Code, just to be informed with the hype, but that was plenty for me.

There are other books I could add to this list, simply as books that I avoid because others have recommended that I not read them. Madame Bovary would go on this list - I remember ixoj slogged through that book for some time and I've mentally decided to not undergo such torture. I have a horrible habit of needing to finish every book that I begin, even if I'm miserable the whole time I'm reading it from cover to cover. I don't think it's because I have a secret hope that such books will improve as I turn each page; I more so want to make sure that I'll be able to finish the book and cross it off my mental list of books that I've read. If I set the book down, then I can't truly say that I've read it, right?

What books do you avoid or recommend that someone not read?