bodhi tree swaying

One day recently Maia wanted to play in the car, where she likes to twiddle knobs and pull levels, but I decided it would be more enriching to go for a walk in the woods. It turned out to be a good call, and she had a great time even though she was still getting over a cold.

In an article in Atlantic magazine, author and Yale University professor of psychology Paul Bloom makes a provocative observation about parenthood and happiness:

Pretty much no matter how you test it, children make us less happy. The evidence isn’t just from diary studies; surveys of marital satisfaction show that couples tend to start off happy, get less happy when they have kids, and become happy again only once the kids leave the house. As the psychologist Daniel Gilbert puts it, “Despite what we read in the popular press, the only known symptom of ‘empty-nest syndrome’ is increased smiling.” So why do people believe that children give them so much pleasure? Gilbert sees it as an illusion, a failure of affective forecasting. Society’s needs are served when people believe that having children is a good thing, so we are deluged with

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On Monday, the processing of Maia’s citizenship papers came through. The nice people at Homeland Security gave her an American flag.

In case I haven’t mentioned this recently, my daughter shares a name with our president-elect. Her birth name, and current middle name, is Bereket, which is Amharic for “blessing.”

The name “Barack” also means “blessing” and is Swahili.

So both are essentially the same name, but in different languages.

I hope they get to meet.

The picture, by the way, is from a little after 4AM on the day of her birthday. She’s a morning person. Unlike her father.

Meet Snooky (aka “Snooky Bear”). He is a bear with the face of a pig. He was my toy when I was a little kid, which makes him about 50 years old. My mother recently ran him though the washing machine and mailed him to Maia for her second birthday. So Snooky is now Maia’s toy.

We have one toy in our family which is older. My sister has a teddy bear that used to belong to me, and before that to my Uncle Alan. That bear is now 55 years old and going strong.

Here’s a close-up of Snooky’s face. Isn’t he cute!

We have a lot of singing around the dinner table in our household. The trouble is that Maia is such a technology geek that she stops singing so that she can play with the video camera when it appears. However, with a little deft bribery I was able to get this rare footage, which includes stellar performances of “The Alphabet Song” and “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Both are a little surreal.

Enjoy!

The cuteness knows know no end.

I’d be interested in any feedback on the new design. It’s the old Hemmingway design that I used to have before my green period, but substantially redesigned to be more accommodating of multiple posts and posts containing images.

The picture, by the way, is from April. It was Maia’s first trip to the beach, at Rye, New Hampshire. She had a fab time.

Oops. The new design was working fine and then I did something to break it. Apologies. I’ll get it back online as soon as possible.

OK — fixed now! It was just a small error I’d introduced to the code, but a hard one to track down.

Another picture of Maia at Aryaloka. She loves Buddha statues and likes to do the anjali mudra in front of them.

This was taken just over a week ago in the grounds of Aryaloka, my local Dharma center. So much cuteness.

Shrijnana and I were wondering how Maia’s linguistic development compared with the average. I looked at a few websites and they all said things like, “A typical 22-month-old’s vocabulary consists of about 20 words, and most toddlers can also combine a couple of words to ask questions or make statements.”

We haven’t counted Maia’s active vocabulary, but it includes words like head, teeth, foot, toe, socks, shoes, piano, motorbike, airplane, car, cat, dog, door, outside, diaper, milk, bottle, tea, coffee, eat, toy, water, river, tree, sky, moon, blue, light, apple sauce, home, cup, wall, cheerios, peach, upstairs, stairs, down, up, picture, iPod, phone, keys, paper, come on, coming, slide, sand, bath, poop, pee, change, pretty, book, banana, dammit (a rather unfortunate one, that), spoon, fan, walk, jump, turn, yes, no, hi, hello, belly, knee, etc, etc , etc. I’d guess she knows well over a hundred …

This was taken a month ago, during some unseasonably warm weather. Maia loved her first experience of the beach.

At the risk of seeming to be obsessed with Obama, while looking for transcripts online I came across one where he mentioned that his given name, Barack, means “blessing” in Arabic.

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to notice this, but that’s my daughter’s name as well. Maia’s birth name is “Bereket,” which also means “blessing” (in Amharic) as well as “abundance” or “gift.”

So if you read my post of a few days ago regarding my precocious wee one, you may have thought it was a fluke that she found her favorite CD on the shelf and that she tried to hook up my USB headset so that I could Skype my parents, but she did it again this morning. Both things.

She picked out her favorite Aimee Mann CD and handed it to my wife.

And she started patting my laptop excitedly this morning after breakfast, and when I went over to her she started starting at the place where I keep the USB headset. When I went over and got the headset she bounced up and down with excitement. So we talked to her Nana and Grandad once again this week.

She’s quite fascinated by technology. She loves picking up my iPod and one of her favorite things …

Maia did two very smart and cute things this morning.

First, she often asks (in sign language) to hear music in the morning. This morning I asked her if she wanted to hear anything but she was a bit noncommittal. Nevertheless I put on the Cocteau Twins’ Heaven or Las Vegas, which she loves. But she put up a protest and then toddled over to the CD shelves and pulled out Aimee Mann’s Bachelor Number 2 CD. That’s one of the other CDs she really likes and she was able to identify it by the spine and haul it off the shelf. My CDs are shelved alphabetically. She’s not quite 15 months old.

Second, she saw me pick up my laptop this morning and got very excited. She got hold of my USB headset and tried to plug it in — she was wanting …

I was talking the other day about how Maia is signing and how she’d been repeatedly using a sign that neither Shrijnana nor I could figure out. She’s made up signs for “cheerios” (which she’s addicted to — that’s a modification of the sign for “more”) and “music” (that’s kind of sad — she waggles one arm in what is evidently an imitation of her father dancing).

Anyway, so we thought she’d made up yet another sign, but my clever wife figured out that she had been trying to tell us that she wanted a bath! (She was doing the sign, but in a modified way). Poor Maia must have been so frustrated wanting to play in the bath but not being able to get her dense parents to understand her.

Incidentally, neither of us is a signer. We’ve learned what little we know from The Complete Idiot’s Guide …

Maia (who just turned 14 months) is understanding a remarkable amount of what we say. She can pick up any of her books when we name them, she can point to her ears, nose, tongue, teeth, belly, toes, foot, etc.

But the most surprising things are the words we didn’t teach her. One of her favorite toys is a firewire cable. It’s not too surprising that it turned out she could pick out the firewire cable when asked. But the other day when I mentioned “headphones” she draped the firewire cable over her head, imitating a pair or headphones! And today I discovered that she knows what a dishwasher is.

She’s been making up signs for things as well, so she also does a lot of talking. She made up a sign for “cheerios” (which she loves) and a sing that means both “music” and “dance.” Today she made up another …

It’s only when you have a curious toddler that you start to realize the fatal significance of all the really important keys on a computer keyboard being closest to the edge — when she grabs the computer with her inquisitive little fingers all kinds of interesting things happen, from windows suddenly vanishing, text changing size, and (sometimes) the whole computer shutting down.

A laptop designed for parents would have all those functional keys right in the middle of the keyboard! Or maybe they should be hidden safely away under some kind of locked cover. Not very practical of course! I guess toddlers and laptops just don’t really mix.