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Kid #1 has done a few interesting things lately.

After having trouble with waking up very upset and not able to explain herself on and off for the past several months, she's talked to me about a couple of her dreams:

• A group of friendly giant spiders (the size of dogs) taught her to climb trees even if there are no branches close to the ground to grab onto.
• A large cricket was poking people, but not in a mean way. She accidently broke one of its legs off while dancing around, but it still kept on poking people.

I had been thinking about getting a copy of The Phantom Tollbooth to read with her as a first bedtime story with a relatively small number of pictures (and because she'd appreciate the humor in it), but I don't want to inject any more surrealism into her three-year-old mind.

The other interesting thing is that she's apparently learning to read. I was doing some online banking, and she wandered over and asked me "Why does it say 'bank' up there?"; when I asked where, she pointed to the word "bank". This is not entirely surprising, since we play phonetic games at the dinner table and read to her (by her request) morning and night, but I wasn't expecting it to start happening. The downside is that the wife and I will have to come up with ways to obfuscate our conversations that don't involve spelling words.

Kid #1 is doing well enough that sometimes I forget that she's just a little over three years old, but then she'll whip out a malaprop or mangle an idiom to remind me. For example, while she was explaining to me that she was Lowly Worm and I was Huckle the Cat, she tripped and fell flat on her face, and the following conversation ensued:

Dad: Whoa! Are you alright?

Kid #1: No, Dad! [somewhat exasperated] I'm Lowly Worm...

Our son was born today.

As she's approaching her third birthday, the kid is showing signs of a sense of humor. We were in the car with the kid, discussing what to have for dinner, and my wife told her that we were going to have lamb, peas, and couscous.

kid: Dad, would you like some hotto-potaddo for dinner?

dad: [Decides to play along.] Sure; that sounds good.

kid: Would you like some hotto-potaddo for dinner, Mom?

mom: [Decides to play along, too.] OK.

kid: Hotto-potaddo for you, Dad, and hotto-potaddo for you, Mom. I will have lamb and peas myself.

I wonder where she learns this stuff.

Yesterday, we had the 20-week ultrasound for what, with luck, will be our second child. The news was good: fingers, toes, arms, legs, nose, heart, kidneys, etc., all present and accounted for in the usual quantities.

The first pregnancy was textbook normal, but we had a bit of a scare early on with this one in the form of a statistically abnormal nuchal translucency (NT). NT is computed as a ratio between measurements in an ultrasound, and large ratios are correlated to trisomic chromosomal abnormalities like Down Syndrome. We went ahead with a chorionic villus sampling (CVS), and the results showed no abnormalities. It was a long couple of weeks waiting for information after the NT result.

Looking at the prospect of testing, the amount of hard information available to the prospective parent is limited, even from a "genetic counselor" or physician. I asked about statistics and studies around NT and CVS, and the best that the caregiver could manage were the usual statistics — without even the false positive rate! I'm more interested in looking at the actual studies and statistics than most folks probably would be, but I don't think it's too much to ask people to give correct explanations and provide reference materials. Come to think of it, I'd like to see all scientific and medical research data available as open source (CC By-SA, perhaps?) and freely available on-line. (It looks like this is aligned with the mission of the Science Commons.)

The Sneetches is the kid's superfavorite book right now, and I've read it at least twice per bedtime (excepting the story about the two Zaxes and the bit about 23 Daves) every night for the past week. The obvious message in the book is about superficial differences and tolerance.

Call me cynical or jaded from doing a tour of duty as an entrepreneur, but I see another message in the book:

Stars, schmars. You want to be Sylvester McMonkey McBean.

While I'm fully prepared for whatever "the terrible twos" means for the kid, we had an entirely civilized father-daughter outing this past weekend, which is a far cry from some of our experiences past. She did largely as she was asked, where I mean things like not running around in the parking lot, not jumping into puddles, not climbing into the faux tide pool with the starfish. (The first stop on our father-daughter day out was the Seattle Aquarium, which was both overly crowded and just OK. I was spoiled by visiting the Shedd regularly in Chicago.) The kid's tour de force for the day, however, was sitting through an entire meal. Without being belted to her chair.

It was a great experience to just sit and have a conversation, albeit about whether or not bumblebees bite and what color lights are on top of police cars and fire engines.