Cold Spaghetti

Tonight, Kate, you and I had a special talk where I asked you why you are trying to destroy yourself. I used to think that your attempts at destruction were about chipping away at my sanity, following in the lead of your well-practiced brother. But after tonight — when you (for the first time ever) pushed your legs under the table on the table leg so hard that you actually pushed the big wooden chair back on its two back legs and flipped the whole chair on its back with you and your booster seat firmly attached — I no longer believe you’re out to get anyone but yourself.Now that you have successfully thrown your self from two dangerous locales (your Aunt’s stairs and now our kitchen table), I am very worried. These things come in 3s, my superstitious Grandmas taught me, and my instinct says you’re going to give it one more go. At least.

While we had this Very Serious Discussion, you took the opportunity to put your toes in my mouth, fling your body on top of The Cat, and shout “ELMO” four or five times. I could tell you were listening intently as you rarely give that much attention or stay that still. This is not a sarcastic statement.
You are very clear about your likes and dislikes. Something you have decided to like, A LOT, is The Wubba Song. You remind us often of how much that song means to you. Like everytime we are in the car, when you shout “WUBBA!” until we play the song, even if we’ve just heard it 75 times in a row. Or, whenever you break into the study and start climbing things to get to a computer. When we race in the room after you, catching you with one leg on the desk edge perched and ready for the last leap up, you explain the whole event by saying, “Wubba.” You just wanted to watch it on YouTube, that’s all. Your love for Wubba even surpasses your love of The Imagination Movers, which has Daddy and I a bit depressed. (We really like grooving to “I Want My Mommy” and “Clean My Room.”)

You are finally turning the corner from last week’s bought of the Crud. It sucked. We slept very little, as you threw yourself around all night long. You were miserable and shared it well. We felt helpless, holding you tightly to try to keep you still long enough to fall asleep. Working to keep you warm in the cold snap (you refuse blankets), rocking you and walking you around for hours. Please show us some pity for the next few weeks while we catch up on rest.
At the Heifer International fund raiser last night, we discovered that you like gelato. And you like it A LOT. This is a surprise, since previously you’ve turned your nose up at all ice cream and gelato products (except once when you ate some of Dad’s bacio — chocolate hazelnut — gelato). I had a cappuccino gelato in a cone. I wanted you to try it, smashing a bit on your face so that you’d lick it off. To my surprise, you responded by grabbing the cone and licking it with intensity. We tried to scoop some off and let you eat it from a bowl, but you wanted NONE of that. If we so much as TOUCHED the cone, you let out some pretty serious sounds. It is going to take a lot of work to get you through the next couple of years in one piece.

I am constantly trying to get a decent photograph of you and your brother, together, in the same frame, facing the same way, with a fairly pleasant expression on your face. This, The Holy Grail of sibling photography, is as unattainable to me as if it were buried somewhere in Israel with a Templar Knight standing guard. After years of fighting it, Will has resigned himself to the fact that his Mother is a paparazzi, so when asked he generally compiles with simple requests. You, on the other hand, are a blur in most photographs. It is hard on me, as you are changing so much each day and I look to my camera to help hold you still… for just a little bit longer…

Secret monkey moment. I couldn’t hear what Will was whispering to her.

And yes… we FINALLY got them hair cuts!! I’d almost forgotten that Kate had eyebrows and that a comb could, actually, go through Will’s hair.

Click on the flyer for more information!

PS: I get first dibs on the BEAUTIFUL EARRINGS Will made for this event!

A software package created and used by the Center for Disease Control, “the sentinel for the health of people in the United States and throughout the world,” does not work on any laboratory computer, or instructors computer, in the entire School of Public Health at Tulane University. That’s right. The CDC software is non-functional in a School of Public Health.

How do I know? Because I tried to teach an EpiInfo lab to 43 students last night in the SPH computer lab. Apparently, IT staff promises of functioning software (we found similar problems last year and were assured they did not exist this year) do not account for much.

I went to Plan B. We went back to our classroom, where I plugged my laptop up to the podium screen. Students who intended on using their own machines got ready with others piled around them. Then we found that the MyTulane system had corrupted the file (note: the University IT is a mess of Microsoft… if you don’t drink the water, you run into a ton of problems) narrowing our window of working student computers down to about 4. Actually, we’d figure out the corruption problem later. In the meantime, I demonstrated some of the simple commands needed for the assignment, went through the assignment to discuss how to approach the questions (“Plan C”). Then I offered a solution… since it is not reasonable to expect students to do the computations themselves (we can’t trust the lab), I’ll provide a big mess of output and ask them to shift through the tables and use the given information to answer questions and provide support for their answers. Ack.

Upside: Paul had arranged for a babysitter as a treat, picked me up, and took me to La Crepe Nanou for dinner.

Here’s your chance to be a hero!

Don’t tell me that the error means EpiInfo can’t handle it! Tell me how to make it work. It SHOULD work. The Syntax is correct. The error is telling me that the program can’t handle this much information/this many variables. (Wha???) I’ll share the dataset with you, if you like, but please — for heaven’s sake — make this damn thing work. Or teach me another command that will make it work.

Yesterday morning, the Abeona kids trick-or-treated down Oak Street — which was great. Shopkeepers, almost all in fantastic costume (note: if you aren’t wearing a costume in New Orleans on Halloween, no matter who you are or what you do, you are the one who looks out of place). Many of the shopkeepers went ALL OUT with the kids’ gift bags: soaps from The Livin’ Oak, paintable puzzles from one of the home-goods stores, free gelato for everyone from Pazzo, even cool color-changing cups from a Chiropractor’s office! Plus, of course, edible treats. The kids had a great time (parents, too!)

Below are some moments of Will during his Oak Street Trick-or-Treat…

We went to a Halloween party for about an hour as the sun set and then came home to trick-or-treat. There were many more kids out this year (much more than in previous years) and we went around to where neighbors were gathered on common porches having parties. (Paul and I refused the parental offerings of frosty beverages along the way.) The kids came back with plenty of loot — even with Kate giving back a piece a candy at every house. (They’d give her something, she’d give them something — and insist they keep it. Since at least half of the givings were chocolate pieces smooshed in the wrapper by her hot little hand, we didn’t consider it much of a loss and she’s cute enough to get away with it.)

Kate did well last night and even slept for most of the night. We think that her cold turned into a mild case of croup somewhere in the last day or so. She still has the barking cough, but it is more a nighttime thing than a daytime one and her energy is back. No fever since yesterday morning… so she’s back to school today. (Thank goodness!)

UPDATE: Emmy has some school pictures up!