Geek dad

Another sort of milestone reached in the relatively short life of Declan Nelson Fraser, future Supreme Galactic Overlord (munificent) of All That His Eyes Descry: he is now drinking his milk out of a sippy cup rather than a bottle.

Oh, he still takes a bottle of water for his afternoon naps and his beddie-bye time to be sure, but he has now abjured the latex nipples for the firmer, manlier, mostly spill-proof sippy cups.  He's growing up so very fast!

In addition to providing larger drinking volumes for his sometimes bottomless belly, they also allow Declan lessons in the fundamentals of gravity, still lost on some adults I know.

The bottles he's had since being weaned from his mommy have the drop-in bags that create an air-free drinking environment, thereby giving Declan the flexibility to extract milk from the bottle at any angle without heed to gravity's inexorable influence.

His sippy cups, being made of sterner stuff, have dual valves that allow for pressure equalisation such that air is drawn in when milk (or your beverage of choice) is extracted.  Very handy, but there's now the air to deal with, and gravity's patient revenge.  When drinking, Declan must ensure a sufficient angle up from the horizontal such that liquid flows towards the spout.

He's gotten quite adept at this in a short period of time, but showed that there is still some room for improvement just the other day in the car.  While drinking, Amy and I could both hear him sucking nothing but air with plenty of milk still in the cup.  This allowed me the opportunity to encourage my son as well as provide a brief lesson in trigonometry when I spoke up with, "You're sucking nothing but air Declan!  You need more angle; you're too acute!"

(This is the part where you picture Austin Powers explaining that he finds this funny since he is referring both to the angle of the beverage container as well as Declan's general level of adorableness.  It was funnier when I originally thought of it but I just couldn't stop typing.)

*****

Further evidence that Simon is a geek:

While typing this post there was a fly that elected to land on my monitor and I tried to shoo it away by waving my mouse cursor at it...  I can be such a noob sometimes.

Comments

[Dixie]

Just wait until you have to teach him to hold his cup UP to get milk out of a sippy cup and DOWN out of a cup with a straw! We're still working on that one.

That fly thing is great. You might enjoy a quick post I did about "The Computer Age" (one of my first posts). http://vandermeander.blogspot.com/2005/05/computer-age.html

Sorry if this looks like a spam post. It really isn't -- just a funny story.

[Alec Lynch]

As far as "computer noob" moments go, my parents take the cake.

The first time my mother went to a "computers for beginners" course, the instructer started off by promising that nobody would laugh at them there. My mother made her break this promise within minutes when, as a first step, the instructor told the class to take their mouse and click the start button...at which point my mother picked up the mouse and tapped the screan with it.