Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Lucinda goes to day care up the street at Step By Step (http://www.npssinc.com/child.htm) two days a week. This gives her a chance to play with other kids, and also gives Mommy a well-deserved break. Today she graduated out of the Infant Room, and into the Young Toddler Room. Our baby is growing up.

We took her to Adventure City (http://www.adventurecity.com) today. This is a theme park in Stanton that is geared towards very young children. We rode the train, the carousel, and spent lots of time at the petting zoo. Lucinda liked the zoo the best. She seems to really like animals of all kinds.

Daddy is starting to let her play with the computer. He installed a little X-windows program called ‘oneko’ that creates an animated cat. The cat chases the mouse pointer around the screen. Lucinda doesn’t try to put the mouse in her mouth any more, but she still doesn’t quite understand how it moves the pointer on the screen.

Lucinda has figured out how to stand up in her crib and reach the light switch. She can turn the light on and off now. It’s getting harder to get her to go to sleep now, since she knows how to turn the light back on after we’ve turned it off.

Lucinda is currently 24 lb (10.9 kg) and is quite the walking and climbing dynamo. She is getting into everything. She has started to say a few words, like “Dada” and “baba” and the like. Unfortunately, she is still unclear on the concept, and uses “Dada” to refer to all men.

We took Lucinda to KidSpace Museum today. She enjoyed climbing around and playing with the balls and such. She will probably like it even more when she gets a bit bigger. We will probably have to get a membership, since it’s a good place to take her, and it’s very close to our house.

Lucinda’s first birthday party. Her birthday was actually yesterday. Grandpa Schwarz visited on his way up to Berkeley for the Chemists’ Reunion. Today we all had a birthday party for Lucinda at the Tarantino’s house. She currently stands 70cm [27.5″] tall.

It’s official now. Walking is her primary mode of movement. She no longer crawls to get around. She can walk the length of the house unaided, although she’s still a bit wobbly at times.

Today she was able to walk just over 2 meters [about 7 feet] unaided. I lost count of the steps, but this was a new distance record for her.

Lucinda is progressing nicely on her walking. The record now stands at ten consecutive steps, and she is able to stand unaided for up to 30 seconds at a time.