Midnight Musings

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Fun Milestone

This isn't perhaps the most interesting post for many Evan watchers, but this was really cool to me. Evan has been able to count to 10-15 for months now and even picked up 1-5 in Spanish back in June, but he's never really been able to count things.

Today, however, during lunch Evan picked up two plastic knives and said "I got two knives." I didn't recognize the significance of this to start with until it suddenly hit me and I was shocked. To make sure it wasn't just a lucky coincidence, I handed him a third knife and asked him how many he had. This time he said, "three knives." Pretty cool that he's now able to recognize that basic mathematical rule. Of course, he got a little iffy once he got past three, but he's barely two, so I'm okay with that.

And about the whole knife thing. They were plastic and aren't sharp enough to even handle a piece of ham efficiently. He'll be okay.

posted by Jacob # 11:07 AM 0 Comments

Monday, July 13, 2009

Evan the Photographer

I know it's been more than a month since my last post on Evan's site, but part of that reason is that we've been a-wandering for a significant portion of that time. It's been the summer break and as Evan has learned over this two years on Earth, when Daddy doesn't have to work, Daddy doesn't like being anywhere near home. He was less than two months old for his first trip to Cleveland. His second summer involved another road trip to Ohio. This year we decided it would be a good idea to pack a two-year-old off on a camping trip to Wyoming. Turns out that it wasn't as dumb of an idea as it sounded. We took a portable DVD player with us and stocked up on Go, Diego, Go!, Dora the Explorer, and Wonder Pets DVDs and planned our trip out pretty carefully with stops a couple of times a day that would give Evan some running room outdoors. Evan ended up being a great travelling companion. He'd give us a good couple of hours on the road before he'd get a little whiny from being cooped up, at which time we'd take a short break and then put on a DVD when we got back on the road. We made it to the Western border of Wyoming from Georgia in about four days. Once we got to Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks, Evan didn't have to ride as much, but he did end up being really clingy with Kim. He was out of his routine and away from comfortable places, and he left Kim a little frazzled at times because she was the only one he wanted. I tried to help and keep him distracted, but it rarely worked. Still, for a two-year-old racking up more than 4,000 miles in two weeks, we can't really complain.

In addition to travelling, Evan's been hitting a few cognitive milestones as well. Early this summer he started to string together grammatically correct simple sentences like, "The ants hurt my toe," "I am running," and "I need cheese." He actually has the conjugations of the verb "to be" down pat, which is pretty impressive for a two-year-old.

Another skill he picked up during our vacation is photography. We took both our new digital SLR and our old digital point-and-shoot. The SLR is just too big for hiking, so we packed the much smaller camera to take with me on hikes. At some point in the trip, Evan picked up the point-and-shoot and started snapping photos, some of them actually pretty good. He actually got his start by pressing the button on our bigger camera, but he did the little camera all by himself. Here are a few photos he's taken over the past month.

This is our friend Courtney. We went out to Wyoming in part to visit Courtney and Mickey, friends of ours from college. Mickey is a park ranger at Grand Teton. This isn't from one of Evan's entirely solo shoots. I'm actually holding our big SLR for this shot, but letting Evan aim and press the shutter button. He took a whole bunch of shots of Courtney, but I really like this shot. We were waiting for one of the geysers to erupt in the geyser basin near Old Faithful when Evan took this shot.

We hadn't really planned on Wyoming being quite so cold in the middle of June, so when the forecast for the low on one night was 29, we got a room at a lodge in Yellowstone. We just didn't pack enough cold weather gear to feel comfortable keeping Evan out in a tent in that weather. Evan entertained himself that night by taking pictures of the room and his new favorite toy, Baby Bison. He named it himself. We bought it for him after he kept asking to "pick it up" every time we saw a bison herd in Yellowstone. Baby Bison didn't get far out of Evan's reach for the rest of the trip.

A few days later in a campground in Grand Teton, Evan's photography skills have obviously improved. This is actually a really interesting shot. Kim was the center of a lot of Evan's photos.

I call this photo "Feet and Camera Case" because that's pretty much what it is.

The sizzling bacon at breakfast that morning caught Little Man's attention and therefore was immortalized in a series of zeroes and ones.

I'm actually not sure how he got this close to this bird. It's out of focus, but he's two so I'll let it slide.

In this shot I can only assume that he was experimenting with composition. I like the artsy tilt that creates the feeling of motion in an otherwise static still life.

Another feet and camera case shot, although this time Evan compares his toes to those of his mom.

Evan actually crawled behind the end table next to our couch to take this shot of our living room. He's really working to get just the shot he wants.

This shot is really neat looking, although I don't know how he took this shot. It looks like he's sitting on the end table he was behind in the previous shot although this was taken the next day. From the darkness of the shot, I kind of wonder if he got out of bed one morning, got out the camera, and took the shot before coming to wake us up. I doubt that's what happened though. The first thing he always does when he wakes up is to come and get Kim out of bed.

Now I just need to work on Evan to get him to bring a little more variety with his photography. Kid needs to realize that vertical shots make a shoot a little more interesting and sometimes do better justice to the subject. I'm sure he'll have that mastered by three.

Of course, I know most of you come here to see actual photos of Evan and not photos he took, so I'll back-date some photos from our trip after I post this. Just scroll down and you can see some of the better shots from the trip below.

posted by Jacob # 7:28 AM 2 Comments