Acceleration

So my boy Gaven is now officially 9 months old as of the 11th, and I have noticed him changing in leaps and bounds. It appears to me as if he is learning at an exponential rate, and picks up something new every day. He has just started crawling, which was a monumental change on its own and already he has begun balancing on his knees and pulling himself upright on tables to peer around. It is for certain that he will figure out from here that he can simple walk place quicker. A funny note that he has learned this at 9 months and the coincidence is that at 9 months I was walking as well. Ever wonder if any of these types of things could be genetic?

He has recently learned he can call things by name starting with me! That is right I have a new name “Dada” and could not be prouder. At first everything was dada, but we quickly played some reference games like tickling dada and tickling Gaven ...poof he now understands “Dada” is me. Makes parents hearts warm when they can recognize this.

Gaven is now also doing an adorable thing when you say hello to him. He will begin waving and saying “Hiya”. He kind of clumsily flaps his one arm like a bird ... and the Hiya is distorted... but you can tell by the instant smile on his face that he is ecstatic to communicate with you.

Gaven also popped his first tooth and accordingly always has his fingers in his mouth now feeling it, almost like he is feeling to make sure it is still there. I can watch him put all his food onto that side as if he understands that the tooth will help. He is now eating real “people” foods and loves some of the same things that I do like Salmon!

One of the things that absolutely astonishes me is the understanding of photographs, or rather when a photograph is being taken. If you turn the camera on him and begin to focus, as soon as he sees that telltale orange light the camera uses to autofocus with.... he begins smiling and posing! I find it hard to believe that he understands that this is normal practice, and can only attribute this to him watching what others do when the camera is turned on them.

All of these things truly amaze me, and somehow refuel my beliefs in humanity. To all those parents out there reading this... what are some of the things you can recall your child doing that simply astounded you?

I want to take a quick moment and apologize to all the readers for the lack of posting. I have had some fairly substantial items in my personal life taking precedence and eating up some extra time lately. They have all wrapped up, and nothing but good news will come from it :-)

I will find some time in the morning and write something worth reading ;-)
Till then... sleep tight all

Diversity of Readership

Recently I installed a analytics tool to help me better understand the traffic flows to and from this site. Special thanks goes out to Shannon Smith of http://shannonesmith.blogspot.com/ for helping me with this, much appreciated.

I wanted to quickly share the diversity of the readers locations with you, letting you know who your fellow blog readers are. It is quite a wide ranging group, spanning several Continents, Country's as well as many Cities and Towns.

As I spent many years traveling the globe in my past jobs, I have made great friends all over the world. I will be sending out invitations to my blog in hopes of having them join in our discussions, and providing a global perspective. Here are the places we have to date visiting the site ( at least since I installed the tool) I invite you to pass the blog link along to others you might feel would enjoy reading. My hopes are that with a larger group of readers, we will stimulate an environment for great conversation, discussion and even debate. This will help us all understand global perspectives with greater ease.

http://kristiankataila.blogspot.com/

Country's
Canada
United States
Thailand
British Virgin Islands
United Kingdom
Australia

Cities

Oakville
New York
Georgetown
Burlington
Etobicoke
Ballwin
Denton
Phuket
Washington
Tampa
Brooklyn
Owensboro
Anaheim
Chorley
Woburn
Richmond
Brampton
St Paul
Honolulu
Mississauga
London
Kenner
Mountain View
Hamilton
Sydney
Addison
Burnaby

Monthly on the first day of each month I will be posting the cities list to watch how we grow :)

Science and the Economy

Alright, be forewarned I am going to touch on a sore subject that I have seen cause many arguments over the holidays. And no I did not bring the subject up, but did see this happen many times so I figured I would get your opinions on the matter.

So here we are in the midst of a complete global economic meltdown. The price of commodities is dropping uncontrollably, usual benchmarks like oil, precious metals, even currencies are all over the map, switching from record highs to rock bottom lows. This has brought many hedge funds, pension funds, amongst other index's to drop drastically in value as people loose faith in there ability. The end result..... people hard earned money has simply "disappeared" overnight.


Half a world away is one of the worlds largest joint scientific project LHC — short for Large Hadron Collider. How large is large ? This continuous loop is 16 miles underground of complex scientific equipment designed to accelerate sub-atomic particles to the absolute brink of know speeds, and then have them collide.This incredible project has taken over 20 years and 8 Billion dollars to complete. So when it fired up in September of this year and failed almost instantly, you can guess people were disappointed.

http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/

So here is the question I heard everyone get so angered about. In times like these when the world is suffering through a recession or even worse a depression, should we continue to spend on scientific projects?

Now ... I am going to avoid all temptation to spill my guts onto this page (believe me that is extremely hard to do) as I really want to know your thoughts. I want to understand what you think about the situation, and more importantly why. I love to understand others points of views, so I will bite my tongue in hopes of hearing some of your thoughts out there.

Please click the comment section and simply jot down your thoughts for me and others to peruse. I know we have lots of readers here, with over 330 page hits, and 40 unique visitors !

First Dip

Today was a another first for my little guy Gaven, his very first swim. We went to the local pool and prepared for what was to be baby's first dip into water (except bath time of course)

You never know what you are going to get from the little guys when you get them into the water, some cry, some scream and kick frantically, while others just seem to not care at all. Gaven certainly fell into that later category. We got him into the water, he just looked around studying it and all his surroundings, not seeming to mind at all.

As Gaven gets older I notice that he is a curious little fellow. Old work friends from Thermadyne mentioned it in his first photos I had sent back to them that he is always more interested in the camera, or rather trying to figure out how it works then anything else. He seems to be a "studier" or inquisitive baby ... always trying to figure out how everything works. I suppose this means that he will take everything apart like I did as a child frustrating my parents :-) (Man the universe has a sick sense of ironic humor )