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Posts Tagged Katherine

A Special Morning at the McDonald’s Playplace

Jul 6

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

On our last day of our 4th of July staycation, the whole extended family went out to McDonald’s for breakfast.  We chose this for two reasons:

  1. We’d eaten all the eggs and didn’t have anything prepared for that morning, and
  2. It had been raining constantly for the last 24 hours and we wanted to get out of the house and go somewhere the kids could play.

So we ended up at Mickey D’s.  We deliberately chose the one nearby that doesn’t have video games, so we wouldn’t have to constantly chase the kids away from them.

When we got there, there was only one other family there.  A deaf man was there with two cute little toddler girls.  We couldn’t tell whether they were hearing or not; they just signed to communicate with their dad.  Over the course of breakfast, several other families arrived as well.  Towards the end of the meal, Thomas was walking around with a little Hispanic girl that either couldn’t or didn’t speak, and who looked slightly dysmorphic.  She was hugging him with a huge smile on her face, and wanting to hold hands as they went around the play area.

It was fairly obvious that she was special-needs of some sort; after Thomas and the girl played together for longer, her mother came over and told us how wonderful she thought Thomas was, as he was “the only child that was ever nice to her”.  Even allowing for a bit of maternal exaggeration, we were extremely proud of Thomas for his kindness and tolerance for being hugged and fussed over, even though it was obviously a bit embarrassing for him.

Shortly before we left, another young boy came in with his parent or caregiver.  He was an African-American boy who looked to be about Katherine’s age, and he was also either mostly or completely nonverbal.  He bounced a lot and hooted, and was approximating some sign language.  He had the hugest grin on his face the whole time; it was obvious that he loved being in the Playplace and was having a great time!

So, counting Katherine for our family, there was exactly one couple there who did not have a special-needs child at the Playplace that morning — Robin’s sister and brother-in-law Polly and Rick.

I think before we had Katherine and learned to understand and deal with her autism I would have been really freaked out with that many special-needs kids around.  But given where we’re at and what I’ve learned over the past few years, I just enjoyed the fact that everyone was playing together really nicely and having a great time, whether or not they had any disabilities or differences.

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Flash Photography

Jun 29

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

We recently picked up a new toy, pictured at right.  When Robin got her new phone, with the built-in flash video camera feature, we found ourselves taking quite a bit more video.  It’s very convenient to just pull it out and start filming, and it’s very easy to get the resultant video out into a form where you can do something with it.

Robin has also wanted for some time to do some video therapy for Katherine.  She learns very well based on what she sees on video, so Robin wanted to get the therapists and our family on an instructional video they could use to do some of this type of teaching.  If we had gone with our original tape-based camera we’d be sunk; it would be very difficult to get the video off the tape, convert it, and get it edited.

Enter the new Handycam.  We knew we wanted a flash-based camera (no tapes or mini-DVDs), and since we already had what amounts to a flip camera built into Robin’s phone, we figured we go for something with good optics and image stabilization.  We are extremely happy with the new camera.  It’s very light, very easy to work with, holds charge for a long time, and takes great-looking video.  We’ve probably taken more video in the week we’ve had this camera than we used to take in a year with the old one, and it’s incredibly easy to get at the video.

There’s no way we’d ever go back to a tape-based camera — once you use a camera that stores directly to RAM and links via USB to your computer, you’ll never look back!

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Swimming Weekend

Jun 21

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

We had a pretty good weekend!  My mom came down to watch Thomas’s swim meet on Saturday morning, but also got to see his baseball game on Friday night.  Thomas got two good hits but never really got the ball in the field.

At the swim meet, he demonstrated improved form in his freestyle, breathing on both sides and getting his arms out of the water, but his kicking is still pretty weak and not propelling him enough.  He ended up either fourth or fifth out of six in freestyle.

He was last in backstroke — we definitely need to work on that stroke — but in breaststroke he did great!  He was second place in his heat and his form looked great — if he hadn’t kept looking to the side to see how he was doing against his competitors I think he could have won.  He also had by far the best breaststroke form in his heat, so he should only get better with time.

The rest of the weekend was fun also, although Katherine had an upset tummy early Sunday that really made her miserable.  Fortunately, she had recovered by evening and had a good time swinging out back before bath and bed.  Before my mom left, we went to the new Fritz’s Railroad Restaurant up in Shawnee, where the food comes out on overhead tracks to your table.  That was pretty fun, and was a nice way to end up the visit.

Below are some movies of Thomas’s swimming. In freestyle, Thomas is second from the right. In breaststroke, Thomas is in the far left lane.

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Katherine the Chef

Jun 10

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family, Humor | No Comments

Katherine has been very interested in grocery shopping and cooking lately.  Many times she will suggest a trip to the grocery store to Robin, where she insists on helping to load and unload the cart, and gets upset if the trip is too quick.

If she can’t go to the actual store, she will often pretend-shop at home.  She gets food from the pantry and refrigerator, loads it up in her toy shopping cart, and pushes it around the kitchen.  When she’s done with that, she gets plastic shopping bags from the pantry and bags the groceries, leaving them arrayed on the floor for us to gather up.  We have not yet been able to get her interested in the process of unloading the groceries and putting them back in their proper places, unfortunately.

But recently that has not been enough to fully satisfy her.  We came downstairs after doing some cleaning to find that in a remarkably short time, Katherine had gotten out a bowl, a spoon, soy milk, oil, eggs, hot chocolate powder, and Folgers instant coffee crystals, and had mixed them all together in what can only have been an attempt to make brownies.  In what may have been a tactical error, we praised her for the attempt because we thought it was incredibly cute.  So the next day she followed up with an even grander concoction of graham cracker crumbs, a full container of maple syrup, about two dozen whole strawberries, and milk.  We think the intended end product was strawberry shortcake.

She also had a can of blueberries from a blueberry muffin mix and had gotten the can opener out and set it next to it, which is pretty amazing since we open cans about maybe four times a year.  She’s obviously more perceptive and holds more in her memory than we sometimes give her credit for!

That attempt wasn’t praised.

Since then we haven’t had any more solo cooking exploits, although Robin has done a lot of cooking with her to keep her satisfied.  I’m just glad that she didn’t try to flambé anything.

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Baby Katherine

May 10

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

It’s not a secret that Katherine is jealous of baby Jonathan.  She certainly makes no attempt to hide it.  In the first days after he came home she would make an extremely obnoxious noise when he was nearby, and was prone to telling us “Down baby!  Down baby!” when we carried him.  There’s still quite a bit of direct jealousy, but currently her preferred expression is to try to emulate him.  Well, either that or to say “No baby cry!” when he’s being fussy.

She started her emulation process by trying to climb into his high chair, which didn’t work particularly well.  She then moved on to his Boppy seat, which she can just barely wedge herself into.  She also spends a lot of time in the rocking chair in his room, which is where Robin nurses Jonathan.  Lately she’s been trying to swing in his motorized swing.  It has a weight limit of 25 lbs. — she’s 45.  She’s now also developed a fake “baby cry” that she uses when she’s playing sometimes.

Yesterday she tried jamming herself into Jonathan’s rear-facing infant seat.  She was able to do it — by squeezing her knees up to her head.  Robin took the opportunity to fuss over “baby Katherine” and put Jonathan in the booster seat, which greatly amused Katherine.

I’m just concerned that we’re going to find her lying in his crib, or trying to put on one of his diapers one of these days.

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Family Gallery

May 3

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

Thought I’d share a selection of some of the best pictures from the last couple of weeks.  Here you go!

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A Singing Turnip, Benjamin Franklin, and A Real Baby Doll

Mar 22

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

It’s been an eventful last few weeks with the kids.  I haven’t had the pictures downloaded, so I’ve been putting off writing about what’s been going on, but now that Spring Break is here I can catch up a bit.

Thomas has had several school activities, including his school musical and a major history project.  For the musical he was one of the vegetables.  He chose to be a turnip, so Robin made him a purple turnip costume.  He had a speaking part (one line) but sang all the songs as well.  The performance was very cute — I wish I had video to upload but our video camera’s battery was dead.  I took quite a few stills and got most of his classmates.  Here’s a pretty good one of Thomas delivering his line:

He had some difficulty with the hat, but other than that he had a great time and did very well!

For his history project, he chose Ben Franklin.  He didn’t know a whole lot about him before he started, but by the time they were done with the project he’d researched quite a bit.  We helped him do a timeline and a name poem, and Thomas chose a representative sample of his inventions to feature on his trifold poster.  And of course, he had to dress up like Benjamin Franklin.  Unfortunately, this project came right on the heels of the musical, so Robin had to make two costumes in quick succession.  Luckily, Benjamin Franklin isn’t that tough of a costume.  Here’s what it looked like:

One of the nice side effects of doing this project was that he got more interested in inventions and electricity.  He’d gotten an electronics kit from my folks last year, and had played with it a little, but after doing this project he got it out and started making all sorts of circuits and playing with all the components, and generally having a great time with it!

Lastly, Katherine and Jonathan have had their share of playtime as well.  He’s a very sweet baby and very tolerant.  Katherine sometimes shows interest in interacting with him and sometimes doesn’t.  But recently, she wanted to feed him a bottle.  So we… well, a picture is probably worth a thousand words here:

As you can tell, Jonathan thought this was hilarious, although he may have been confused as to what the bottle was actually supposed to be, since he doesn’t take real ones.  This cute scene didn’t last long, as I’m informed, but it’s typical of how she wants to play with Jonathan.  That’s not all that’s been going on with everyone, but it’s a good sample of the pictures we’ve gotten.  I have some good video of Thomas playing basketball, also, that I’ll try to upload soon.

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Close Dog

Mar 3

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family, Humor | No Comments

I’ve already written about Katherine’s reaction to having her four lower teeth extracted (“I want glue teeth“).  Lately she’s been a bit more OCD than usual — it comes and goes, but at the moment she really wants cupboard doors closed and pots centered on their trivets, etc.

Robin was privileged to see the newest manifestation of this yesterday.  Katherine was in the office with one of her teachers, working on programs, while Robin was working on the computer.  Also, Aurora (Rora), our female Sheltie, was in the office as well.  And she was panting — likely due to the fact that with all the floor lamps on in that room as well as the computers it turns into a reasonable facsimile of an Easy Bake oven.

This canine behavior, though, was apparently unacceptable to Katherine, so she expressed her objections forcefully:  “Close dog!”  “I want close dog!”  “Yes close dog!”

I’m not sure whether Robin took the dog out of the room or if Rora just settled down and stopped panting, but apparently the problem was solved without the use of duct tape, so all was once again well.

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So I Rewired It…

Mar 1

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Family, Humor | No Comments

One of Katherine’s more annoying recent habits is to flip off the light switch in our office.  That wouldn’t be so bad, except that the switch is a half-hot that controls some, but not all, of the outlets in the room.  My webserver and my own computer are not on it (although the monitor is) but the main email computer and the one Robin uses for her work are on it.

So after about the fifth time Katherine killed power to Robin’s computer this past week I decided to rewire the switch to a flat plate and remove the control over the outlets.  This was a pretty trivial change compared to some of the work I’ve done in our basement over the past couple of years, but it was pretty satisfying.

So far Katherine hasn’t made any comments about the lack of the switch — we were out of the house enough yesterday that I’m not sure she noticed.  I’ll be interested to see her reaction when she finally figures it out — I hope it won’t be to go over and shut down the computers manually…

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Ferb, I Know What We’re Going To Do Today

Feb 8

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family, Humor, Reviews | 2 Comments

I don’t really watch a lot of cartoons these days.  I’m pretty busy with 3 kids, plus I generally prefer to read or play on the computer rather than watch TV.  When we do watch TV it’s usually The Biggest Loser or American Idol — shows that Robin and I both like and that we watch together.

On weekend mornings, however, we usually turn the TV on for Thomas and Katherine, and what they generally watch are cartoons.  They watch a wide variety of different shows, but the one that always gets me to sit down and watch with them is Disney’s Phineas and Ferb.

This is a very cute show that combines kid-friendly situations and antics with humor that appeals to both kids and adults.  And unlike The Simpsons, the two aren’t really separate; there are not really two levels to the show.  If you’re laughing, your kid probably is too.

An episode of Phineas and Ferb is fairly structured.  The premise is that it is summer vacation, and the eponymous brothers are trying to find fun things to do to occupy the day.  Phineas (it’s almost always Phineas) comes up with a Big Idea, which they set about implementing.  This usually ends up being some mammoth construction or engineering project, such as building a giant car wash, rollercoaster, or day spa.  Phineas, the short redhead, is the “mouth” of the group and the idea man, and Ferb is the technical genius (although neither boy is a complete slouch in the other’s area of strength).

The major obstacle is almost always the boys’ older sister Candace, who plays Daffy Duck to the boys’ Bugs.  Early on, she catches on to their plan and tries (inevitably futilely) to “bust” them by dragging their mom over to see whatever giant construct the boys have put together in the backyard.

Depending on the episode, some of Phineas and Ferb’s friends might show up to participate in whatever the scheme might be.  The most commonly appearing are Isabella Garcia-Shapiro, the overachieving Fireside Girl and the ballerina to Phineas’s Harrison Bergeron; Baljeet Patel, an East Indian supergenius and geek; and Buford Van Stomm, a tough kid who oscillates between bullying and friendly behavior.

Candace, besides her obsession with “busting” the brothers, is even more obsessed with fawning over her boyfriend Jeremy, and she often ends up madly juggling these two imperatives (often failing amusingly) as the plot unfurls.

At the same time as this is happening, there is almost always a side plot involving the boys’ pet platypus Perry.  Perry is actually a secret agent known as “Agent P”, and gets summoned to his secret underground base under the kids’ backyard to receive a mission briefing from Major Monogram, the head of the Agency.  This mission always involves dealing with the nefarious schemes of Doctor Heinz Doofenshmirtz, a crazed evil genius who invariably hatches some grandiose plot rooted in one of his many childhood traumas.

In his agent persona, Perry sports a stylish fedora, and although he can’t talk, he communicates very effectively using eye rolls and other facial expressions.  As his struggle with Doctor Doofenshmirtz reaches its climax, whatever bizarre device the Doctor has created usually misfires and either inadvertently resolves whatever jam the kids are in, snatches victory away from Candace just as she’s about to bust the brothers, or saves the day for Candace just as she’s on the verge of doing something monumentally stupid in front of Jeremy.

It’s all put together with excellent comic timing, and the voice work is great.   Candace and Dr. D. in particular are excellently done — Candace constantly skates the edge of hysteria while still projecting a unique personality, and the Doctor delivers some incredibly bizarre dialog with feeling and humanity.  Another appealing thing about the show is that the animation is fairly normal-looking instead of the almost aggressively ugly drawings in some other kids’ shows.

But the thing that really makes the show shine is the message and the relationships between the characters.  Despite Candace always trying to bust the brothers, she really loves them and has worked hard to protect them when they needed it.  In turn, Phineas and Ferb always try to help Candace out when she’s distraught over something (usually Jeremy).  Likewise, Perry and Dr. D., even though they’re each other’s “nemesis”, have each gone out of the way to protect the other when something seriously threatening is happening, and in fact exchanged gifts during the Christmas special episode.

All in all, the show presents kids using their imaginations and having good clean fun while displaying positive personality traits and resolving conflicts in a healthy way.  And it’s freaking hilarious!

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