The Trixie Update

Trixie learned a lot of lessons this week; car doors are dangerous, candles are dangerous, running on hardwood floors when wet is dangerous and dropping stoneware is dangerous.

The week started out with a bang. Unhappy with her mother’s day present, Jennifer slammed the car door on Trixie’s hand Sunday morning. I know it sounds terrible. But you would think Trixie could do a little better than a card and some earrings. She won’t make that mistake next year.

It was a pretty scary moment. The only good thing is that her hand was slammed in the hinge of the back door (where it meets the edge of the front). There’s about a 3/8″ gap when the door is closed. That was enough to prevent her fingers from breaking. It was not enough to prevent a horrific indention in two of her fingers. 30 minutes of ice did wonders, but she’s still sporting band-aids as we hope to avoid infections.

Later that day, for reasons known only to her, Trixie grabbed a candle with her remaining good hand. It took me a good minute to figure out why she was crying because the wax was completely clear. I then grabbed one of the other candles and poured it on my forearm (like the way you check bath water or milk) to see exactly what kind of pain Trixie was experiencing. She was fine.

The next day Trixie jumped out the bath tub and tried to run to her room — across the hardwood floor. We’re thankful it wasn’t a concussion.

Tonight Trixie got out of clearing the table for the next couple of years when she dropped a 23 lb stoneware plate. The interesting part is that the plate did not shatter into a million pieces. Instead it cracked exactly in half. The really interesting part is that it left a small scratch on her toe the size of a paper cut. I have no idea how that happened. If the plate had landed square on her foot, I think it should have smashed her toe into a pulp.

In retrospect it wasn’t that bad a week. Trixie now has a healthy respect for metal, fire, water and dishes. If only I could somehow get my keyboard added to that list.

Just a head’s up that we may be on a San Diego NPR show today around 10:20 PST. I say may because you never know when you may get bumped. But if it does happen, we’ll be part of a segment about mothers who blog. Yes, they know I’m not a mother.

Update: Well, what do you know? This turned out to be totally real. What a neat surprise. I got to join in on a cool interview that included Heather Armstrong of dooce and Samantha Goldstein.

Schaff up in New York City was nice enough to record and convert the interview to a MP3 audio file. (He also trimmed the tape to where I came in.) Take a listen if you like:

• MP3 file of Ben MacNeill on NPR (9 minutes long, 4.3 MB)

This clip was excerpted from the show These Days on San Diego NPR.

If you are a first time visitor, I have a First Time Here section. I also like to point out a few of my favorite sleep stories:

• Two Nap Minimum
• The only Telemetry that’s still kicking

Thanks for visiting!

I’m switching up the format here a little. I just can’t pretend that I’m going to write anthropological stories anymore. Those stories were always driven by data. And the data, as far as Trixie is concerned, is just about played out. Anyway, I’m leaving the data collecting up to the new parents. They are the ones who are going to get their 5-month old on an overnight schedule, and work on potty training their toddlers. I’m happy to leave those days behind us.

I’m taking a page from a really well done blog which I don’t think gets enough attention: Jamie Madigan’s jmadigan.net. I don’t read it enough, but he created a great weekly format for his daughter. Weekly summaries make a lot of sense to me so I’m going to give it a try.

“Oh-my-god-what-is-grabbing-my-foot!!”

We brought a small wooden puzzle on the plane to keep Trixie occupied. It worked great for about 2 minutes and then pieces went everywhere. In retrospect I should have asked the passenger sitting behind us to if she could reach those stray pieces. At the time I thought it would be less obtrusive to just let Trixie crawl under the seat and get them. The lady behind us thought a gremlin was loose in the plane. I glad she didn’t scream any louder.

The rest of the flight was not as entertaining, but it was super easy. I had heard horror stories about traveling with kids. Trixie did great. Matter of fact, I wish I could always travel with a toddler because of the awesome preboarding policy at Southwest. Do you need to transport a toddler across the country? Call me.

This trip marked Trixie’s first flight. And the trip was an unorthodox one — visiting great-grandparents in Florida! We all had a great time visiting with Marvin and Carol (thanks so much for inviting us!). Trixie adapted pretty well for all the traveling involved and the shift in schedule. By adapted well, I mean about a dozen tantrum meltdowns a day, a refusal to nap and a 10pm bedtime. On the plus side she especially enjoyed having a new house to explore and when outside, an infinite number of lizards to chase after.

We hit the beach one day and Trixie got dipped into the Atlantic for the first time this year. She also came within 2 inches of stepping on a giant crab. I yelled for her to jump. She saw the crab. That was the end of the ocean for this trip. The sand was a lot of fun though and we all did some good digging.

This week also brought a lot of “THIS ONE GOES RIGHT HERE???”. That’s what Trixie asks when putting on her shoes. Normally I only hear it a few times in the morning when we get dressed. However, being on vacation, she got to take her flip-flops on and off about 60-70 times an hour. I’ll be so glad when she can tell the left and right shoes apart.

I haven’t documented Trixie’s language skills in so long that it’s pointless to even try to compare what she can do now to the primitive babbling of one year ago.

Her language evolution is relentless, yet so absolutely incremental that I have no idea how we arrived at the current point in time. One year ago it was simple object identification. Today it’s an assemblage of thoughts, feelings, observations, consideration of consequences and mimicry.

As a parent, it makes me proud. As a human, it completely blows my mind. Being able to witness firsthand how our species develops is probably the most amazing thing I will ever do with my life. The fact that I’m about the 100 billionth person to do it doesn’t diminish it for me at all. In fact, it just reaffirms how the experience is so universal.

The event that made the biggest impression was the first time she imparted knowledge to me. I do not remember what the knowledge was, or when it took place. It’s a shame. I was busy at the time - not writing - and you don’t always know what’s going to make an impression on you. But it was sometime around 6-9 months ago.

Prior to that point, you could communicate with Trixie, but the majority of the conversation was reaffirming things: “Are you hungry?”, “Do you want some juice?”, “You want Mommy to take you potty, right?”

In other words, it wasn’t anything I didn’t already know. At one point though, a question was asked out loud, maybe not even directly to Trixie, and she provided an answer that shared her knowledge.

It might have been something as simple as, “Where in the world is the TV controller?” But the answer to that inconsequential question was the first time Trixie ever educated me, with words and knowledge. It’s a striking realization, because you quickly understand how each generation eventually takes the reigns from the previous. Not in a depressing way, but more of a cycle of life that makes you appreciate being a part of something.

Anyway, that’s a little too heavy to think about when taking care of toddler. For the most part talking with Trixie is pure joy because you can actually communicate in interesting and unpredictable ways. Plus tantrums aside, she doesn’t let you get too stressed out about things. Her favorite thing to say when things go wrong is, “Wellll… that’s ok”.

“Trixie, there’s juice all over the floor!!”
“Trixie, you were supposed to be asleep TWO hours ago!!”
“Ah crap, we’re out of beer.”

The next important milestone will be when she can take care of that last problem. Then I’ll be really impressed.

I switched the Trixie Update to a different server. If you can see this, then you are seeing the new server. A few time zone sensitive elements (like the sleep chart) will display incorrectly until I get a chance to fix things. Also, if you have left a comment and it doesn’t show up, I’ll restore it later on (might take 24-48 hours). Just an FYI. thanks!

Update: Everything should be fixed now.

I thought I would be writing more Trixie stories after we launched Trixie Tracker ( http://www.trixietracker.com ), but things don’t always turn out the way you expect. In fact, marketing Trixie Tracker is much, much harder than I expected, and there’s not time for much else.

I’ve learned that creating a new business and and introducing a completely new type of service is no cake walk. The design of the software was the fun, creative part. This is the nitty gritty part. I have to let new parents know that Trixie Tracker exists, and show them that it’s an insanely helpful and cool new way to understand their baby’s daily patterns and needs.

I’d appreciate your help in getting the word out. Can you recommend the site to family, friends and co-workers? Or are you an active participant on a parent’s message board or forum? Encourage folks to come try out the free trial. Thanks in advance everyone!

It’s hard to start writing again. After almost nine months off, it’s taking a while for the story juices to start flowing. So the best thing to do is doodle. Just write something until you get where you want to be. Clean it up later, or throw it out. The important thing is just get something down.

Trixie is pretty good at getting something down. Better than I am and most adults I know. This is not a Trixie thing, but something I’ve noticed with all toddlers. In general, they rock at arts and crafts.

I love stuff like that. It’s pretty awesome to watch kids get so absorbed without worrying about the consequences of what they are making. It gets a lot harder once you start learning the rules of art and social pressure starts creeping in. Or even worse if you study art and end up paralyzed because you realize everything has already been done before. Thankfully, 2-year-olds are protected from that kind of knowledge.

Trixie is a machine when it comes to doodle time. I have sometimes just taped down a bunch of sheets of paper to the table and she’ll draw on one, advance, draw some more, advance and so on. Who knows what criteria determine the completion of a sheet? Sometimes she claims she’s drawing something specific, but more often it’s just an exercise to consume resources. The pressing issue for her is not “how does this fit into the social construct of post-modernism”, but rather, “how much glitter glue can be squeezed onto this paper when Daddy is not looking?”

I’m definitely proud of her, and I’ve included two pieces I really like. I forgot to date them, but they were done in the last 2-3 months. (that’s how long I’ve been procrastinating this story). They aren’t necessarily typical pieces. For the handful I’ve kept, literally hundreds (and probably thousands) have been thrown away.

If she saw me dumping them in the trash, I suspect she’d get upset. Otherwise, she doesn’t care a bit what happens after she’s done. We might hang one or two for a while, but it’s not the result that matters. It’s all the process — just being able to zone out and grind a crayon into oblivion for an afternoon.

Two things I’ve learned in the 23 months since starting Trixie Telemetry LLC (in April of 2004):

1. It’s really hard to do anything else when you’re taking care of a baby/child/toddler
2. I’m extremely bad at estimating launch dates

For almost the first year of the company, I was still taking care of Trixie all the time. That’s when the real progress was made. I could reliably count on writing about 3 or 4 lines of code a week. Extrapolating this work schedule would mean completion of the software some time after Trixie finished college, got married, lived in the Bronx for a couple of years, moved back down to NC, and then had a kid of her own. Add a few more months, say when the kid was 10-11 months old, and then the beta would probably be ready. Probably.

Instead of projecting a launch date in late 2020’s, I clung to the following rather optimistic estimates:

Actual launch March 8, 2006

Some of these launch dates were public, some internal. I stopped projecting after February, which is really too bad because it was fairly close at that point.

Things started moving a little faster after Trixie started part-time, morning school in Feb 2005 (at 18 months old). We launched the Beta two months later in April. I loved the concept of working on the Beta. It’s a constant design-in-progress with real time feedback as soon as you roll out new features.

That’s about the time that stories stopped here on the Trixie Update. It was just too much to juggle, and the dirty little secret is that I was managing another blog — the company beta blog — which racked up hundreds of stories and thousands of comments on its own. I couldn’t do both, so TTU took a hit.

By summer we had moved Trixie up to three-quarter time at school, and things started moving much faster again. Fast enough to fuel more wildly inaccurate launched date estimates. It was at this point that Jenn took a somber tone about the whole project. I acknowledged her tone and solemnly promised we would launch in November.

I’ll spare the excruciating details of the dark months of November and December. But January was a new month in a new year. An excellent developer (James) came on board the project, and started cranking out the missing code we needed to launch. He knocked out a permission based user management and public/guest access scheme which allowed our beta testers to finally share their sites with their friends and family. We wrapped up all the loose ends the next 2 months and finally launched last week.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around the whole thing (and catch up on sleep). I’ve been working on this thing for so long, it’s hard to come down off the programming high. I’ve also been extremely irresponsible in my personal correspondence. I have a stack of letters and emails that date back to last summer. I kept putting things off because I always thought I’d be launching in the next month. I’m going to be working on all that stuff now, but if you emailed/wrote me and didn’t hear back, that’s why.

Thanks to you folks that still visit. I really appreciate it. Even though I wasn’t writing stories, I did feel pressure (good pressure) to do the TPODs. I’m glad I did, because I like looking back on the picture record. And there were times when I was ready to drop the TPODS too because they take about 5-10 minutes to prep every night. And sometimes 5-10 minutes seems like too much time.

Anyway, I think the Trixie Update is back. Thanks for sticking around!

As most readers know, The Trixie Update isn’t as prolific as it used to be. This time last year we were a spry, young blog with lots of energy and boundless enthusiasm. Here we are a year later, which is about 29 years in internet time, and blogsteoporosis has set in. It’s hard to remember how we got here.

When Trixie was a few weeks old, we posted a few pictures, and a couple of stories about the miseries of sleep deprivation. At three months we had Telemetry up and running, and stories started rolling off the assembly line. At six months, we had collected so much data, the stories were writing themselves. That was our golden age.

By 12 months, having blown through a year of milk, we turned off Bottle Telemetry. By 18 months, Diaper Telemetry was discontinued. Here at 2 years all we have left is Sleep. It’s going to shut down some day too, but not yet. And until it does, we will dutifully present the data we have collected on the ever improving sleep habits of a 2-year human child.

The chart on the left right details 4,388 points of sleep data collected over the last 616 days. I wish I had data for the first few months, because that’s where the real painful stuff happened, but when it comes to raising children you just have to do the best you can and hope they turn out all right.

Sleep data is not enough to keep The Trixie Update running forever. But that’s where TPOD’s come in. I’m also still hoping to post more once Trixie Tracker launches. Thanks for sticking with us for almost two years!

Update: Want to create sleep charts for your baby or toddler?

Now you can! Give Trixie Tracker a try and discover your own amazing sleep patterns.

Some of the house favorites from the last 2 years:

The Cheerio Syndrome

XX

What do you think about…

Mealtime Atlas (images)

We’re all Mammals (images)

Still Mammals

Teeth (images)

Clik. clik. clik-click… clik

Paper Shredder (images)

And you thought metric was hard

Beware Toddlers Bearing Gifts

Two Nap Minimum (images)

Want more charts? Visit Metrics.