Reasons my son is crying

He doesn't like Google Effects.

. . . especially not the glasses.

He really didn't want the glasses to slide onto him again.

We spent the next half hour in this pose waiting for him to fall asleep.

(Thanks Leslie for reminding me of these pictures from last month!)

Seeketh not her own

The other day, I was talking to a friend of mine in the ward, who implied that the ward is kind of cliquish. Since I live in the part of the ward that could be considered the "cliquish" part (the part with the densest population of members), it kind of pricked my heart. I mean, it's great to have neighbors and friends so close by, but are we forming these relationships at the expense of others?

That conversation made me realize that I needed to be a better friend not only to her, but to a lot of people. Then I started thinking about people I felt "responsibility" over in the ward and in my life. My made-up definition for responsibility was "I should be doing things more with these people." Or, "If I made a bunch of cookies, these people might feel left out if I never gave them any." My list consisted of my immediate family, in-laws, those I visit teach and visit teach with, ward members who live by us (especially those in the same parking lot as us), non-member neighbors who I regularly interact with, people with kids the same age as Joseph, people who moved into the ward with little babies because I did that last year and it was the hardest thing ever, friends who don't have kids yet and might feel marginalized because our ward because is so kid-full, Kevin's home teachee in hospice, investigators, childhood friends I still keep up with, and Kevin. (Kevin would feel very left out if I made cookies and didn't give him any.) And then there's another group I still care a lot about but do very little for -- all the other people in the ward (especially kids in Primary), that grandma who walks around all the time who only knows how to say "Hello" in English, maintenance guys, friends from BYU, friends from high school, cousins, cousins-once-removed, etc.

So yeah. There are a lot of people to take cookies to. But honestly? I don't know that my heart is that big or that my cookies are that delicious. Although I crave social interactions because toddlers aren't the best conversationalists, I'm still an introvert at heart. Sometimes I just run out of questions to ask people. Sometimes I just feel awkward around people and would rather not reach out because I'm going to trip over my words or because I've got a child to chase around. Sometimes, I remember that charity "seeketh not her own" and I feel exhausted just not "seeking myself."

But the thing is, I know some of these people really do need good friends. Certainly not everyone needs social interactions all the time -- I still remember the time in high school when I was eating breakfast and was feeling surly because it was early and wanted to be left alone and a girl sat down next to me and said "You look like you need a friend!" and it took all my self-control to be friendly back -- but in general, I think people appreciate and even need friends. Some people really are too nauseous from morning sickness to cook for themselves. Some people really are feeling incredibly homesick. And so I continue to try, even though I don't know how much my inconsistent efforts help. (At any rate, they can sometimes keep me from being self-absorbed, which I suppose is a lofty goal in and of itself.)

So, how do people do it? How are some people friendly and inclusive to everyone? How do you take care of the people you know you ought to take care of but not neglect other friendships? If you do take the time to be friends with everyone, how do you form strong friendships instead of dozens of weak ones? How do you avoid being cliquish, especially when you find people you really get along with?

And on a related note, do you think being extroverted is an important part of being a member of the Church?

How my toddler is already a master electrical engineer

During the last few months of my master's degree, I would alternate my time looking up at the whiteboard to take notes and looking down at my belly to watch my baby move inside me. As he kicked, I sometimes wondered if he was paying attention to my professors. After all, babies can hear what's going on outside the womb.

Well, after several months of observation, I am pleased to report that Joseph must have been paying attention all along because he has already mastered several areas of electrical engineering. For example:

1. Basic Physics. In order to do any real electrical engineering, you've got to have your physics down. And Joseph does! Like a miniature Isaac Newton, he knows exactly how gravity works. It goes down. Everything, from balls to cheerios to cups of water, all follow the same basic rule. Along with this understanding of gravity, it appears he also has an understanding of the potential energy, U, of each of these objects. At least, that's my guess for why he announces, "Uh-oh" (ie U0) each time one of these experiments takes place.

2. Electricity and Magnetism. After you take your mechanics class, you've got to know your electricity and magnetism. And, judging by how much joy he gains from turning the lights on and off and pulling magnets on and off the fridge, I'd say he's pretty much there.

3. Stochastic Processes. Stochastic processes, or random processes, are at the heart of signal processing. Everything from compressed sensing to information theory depends on modeling the oh-so random world around us. And Joseph is certainly good at randomness, especially when it comes to food. Chicken might be okay one meal, but definitely not the next. The same goes for bread, strawberries, peas, milk, and basically every other food he eats. When you look at acceptable foods over time, the graph resembles white noise, a random signal. Naturally, the power spectral density of his food-acceptability curve is N0, or, in other words, "No!"

4. Coding Theory. As information theorist extraordinaire Claude Shannon proved, if you pick a probability of error and a rate of transmission less than capacity, there is an encoding and decoding scheme which will have error less than the chosen probability of error. In other words, if you're willing to work for it, you can get people to understand you. Right now, our communication takes place in a noisy channel because of a variety of factors, including a lack of fluency in each other's languages. However, Joseph is nothing if not persistent, and he overcomes the noisy channel by increasing the rate of transmission. That is, he knows how to follow me around saying, "Cracker? Cracker? Cracker?" in the hopes that I will someday decode his signals correctly.

5. Feature Detection. There are a variety of transforms out there used to identify features such as edges, corners, and even blobs. And somehow Joseph has managed to build those into his own brain. Take, for example, his use of the Radon transform. For weeks, every isolated line segment was a "Dih!" (stick), and upon this classification was usually picked up.

Nowadays, his transform of choice is the Hough transform, used to identify circles and spheres. Once recognized, it is classified as a "Baaaaahh!" (ball). From pumpkins to the moon in the sky to the letter "O," he has got the Hough transform down pat.

6. Detection and Estimation Theory. There is not an airplane nor helicopter nor bus that can go by without our notice. Joseph is a master at threshold detection. And then, once the object is located, he points to it the whole time it is in his sight. Must have an internal Kalman filter.

7. Machine Learning. Right now, Kevin's PhD uses a lot of machine learning, which is basically teaching a computer to learn from data. This is done by giving it lots and lots of data to help it recognize patterns. Since machine learning is about teaching a computer to think like a human, it's kind of silly to say that Joseph is good at it. I mean, of course he's good at learning to think like a human. He is one!

But, he is sure good at it. I mean, sometimes a computer needs tens of thousands of samples in several dimensions to figure things out. Then there are these huge matrices full of all this data that the computer has to somehow make sense of.  On the other hand, Joseph has probably only seen things a couple hundred times and has no matrix to place all the data (that we know of), and he's already got a lot down. Recognizing patterns? You bet! He knows that sunscreen + shoes = outside, for example. Following directions? He knows not only how to do what we ask, but also how to disregard us.

8. Electronics. Laptop, camera, cell phone, vacuum -- you name it, and he knows how it works. All the wiring and integrated circuit boards might still be a little too abstract for him, but he knows the most important part: If you turn it on, then it works.

So, as you can see, Joseph is well on his way to being a fantastic electrical engineer.

Or maybe he'll be a firefighter.

See also: How electrical engineering prepared me for motherhood

The USU 28th ward

The Primary Program is coming up in our ward, so we've spent the past two weeks in the chapel after Sacrament Meeting practicing. Primary is always fun regardless, but it's especially fun to hear the whole big group, some in tune, some horribly out of tune, but all of them very loud.

Being back in Primary has brought back lots of memories of my days in Primary. In particular, seeing all the 4 and 5 year-olds (there are tons, especially compared to the whole senior Primary) has reminded me of me back when I was that age.

Back then, our family didn't go to our regular family ward but instead went to the USU 28th ward. My dad was in the bishopric of that married student ward from the time I was almost three to the time I was almost six, and so for three years we would drive past our regular church building to the one by Willow Park Zoo.

I don't remember much about the first year, but there is a snapshot etched into my brain. There I am, standing in the nursery, surrounded by a few other kids. There were toys and snacks.

And then my memory jumps to a classroom however many months later.

"This is the only true church," my teacher says.

"But what about my grandparents' church?" I ask. "Or the church we used to go to?"

"This is the only true church," I vaguely remember her repeating.

Well, it made sense. I mean, this was the building for the USU 28th ward:

Light colored brick, beautiful white steeple, early 90s architecture . . . it had to be the true church. Much better than our regular building on 100 North that we drove past each time:

(And if you don't think this looks too bad, it's probably because it's been remodeled. It used to have a lot more dark brown to it. Even with the remodel, the windows still aren't all that pretty.)

Or, heaven forbid, the church we would drive past right before we got to ours:

I never liked the rock covered front. It always reminded me of throw up or something. Even though this was an LDS building, there was no way it could be as true as the beautiful USU 28th ward building.

§

Since it was a married student ward, our whole family was invited to attend. However, since most of the couples were relatively newly married, the kids got sparser as we got older. Some kids would weave in and out for a semester or two, but Leslie and I were the fabric that held the Primary together. We were the Primary.

Little wonder, then, that in later years, I would always be the one to answer questions in Sunday School. When you are the only student, you have no choice but to answer all the questions.

Of course, sometimes there were other students, and they always ruined things. One time a teacher asked what we liked to eat for breakfast. "Coffee cake!" I announced. The other girl in the class looked at me with disdain. "Coffee is bad for you." I tried to explain that it didn't have coffee in it, that you were just supposed to eat it with coffee, and she repeated her mantra, "Coffee is bad for you." I wanted to explain that we weren't the ones drinking coffee, but by then my teacher had moved the lesson along.

Or the time in Sharing Time when we spent the first bit of the lesson talking about teeth. Some boy had something to say about losing teeth or cavities or something like that. I didn't have lost teeth or cavities, but I did have teeth. "I have four sharp teeth!" I told everyone, referring to my canines. The Primary president smiled and said that was great. Later my mom said we weren't really supposed to talk about sharp teeth in Primary. I felt like the Primary president had betrayed my trust telling my mom about conversations in Primary. It wasn't her job to know what we talked about.

§

Music was a very big deal in Primary. I think most of the pioneer songs we learned were during the summer we spent in La Canada when I was five, but we canvassed basically every other section of the Children's songbook. When you have two or three little girls who like to sing, you can get through a lot of songs. And sometimes they even let us play the piano for the songs. Leslie learned "Reverence is Love" and we all got to sing it.

Occasionally, our family would do musical numbers in Sacrament Meeting, songs like "A Child's Prayer" or "Mother Tell me the Story." We would all fight to be the one in front of the microphone, not believing my parents that the mic would pick up the sound even if we weren't breathing into it. No stage fright issues from us, that's for sure.

§

By the time my dad was released from the bishopric, Leslie, Kaylie, and I were the only kids in Primary. Our chorister Sister Moore was so sad to see us go. "We won't have anyone to sing to," she said. "Just ghosts." The idea of ghost Primary kids was so sad, and even a little scary. The ghosts wouldn't hurt her, would they? It didn't occur to me that they would probably release her and disband the Primary. That's even sadder than ghosts.

And so, one week, we only drove a couple blocks rather than a couple miles, back to our church with ugly orange fabric on the pews and 70s-style decorations. After Sacrament Meeting, I went to my class for the first time. It was full of neighbors and friends who I knew from school and play, but it was a little awkward seeing them at church where I'd never really been before. The lesson was on being a good friend, and there was some role-playing. I got to act out the part of the new person, and other people acted out the part of being nice. Even though we were just pretending, it felt so real, and I suddenly felt so welcome there.

Ugly building or not, I guess the church was true here, too.

Bubbles and crackers

Someday I might be able to make a video with all of his current words (when I actually made a list, there were more than I was giving credit for), but in the meantime, here are a few words and a few signs that we've had fun with lately:

Any requests for obscure words should we teach him next?

Helpful

Sometimes I think about parenting techniques God uses and if any of them are the same I use.

For example, today I was about to start cooking dinner when I realized that unless I did something, Joseph would spend a lot of time asking to be held or tugging on my pants. So I decided to let him help! I put him in his high chair and gave him a random bowl and strainer and some Cheerios. And then gave him an official looking spoon and asked him to stir the bowl. He got very excited about the prospect of helping. While I was over cutting the onions, I reassured him that he was being extremely helpful, which, technically, he was. This trick didn't last too long, but you take what you can get.

Anyway, I wonder if God ever does the same thing with me. Like I'll get to heaven and ask, "So, did me indexing actually do any good?"

And He'll say, "No, not really. You were pretty bad at it. But it sometimes kept you distracted from reading the comments, so it was better than nothing."

But who knows? Maybe some things here and there I do will be good in the long run. I mean, Joseph heard my phone go off tonight and fetched it for me without me even asking.

That actually was pretty helpful.

Doomed

When I get into the zone, I actually really enjoy cleaning, especially organizing. I like having a place for every paper and toy.

But then real life happens, and things get disorganized. And then I lose track of things.

Yesterday, that happened again. I was planning to run some errands, but I realized when I was heading out that I didn't know where my keys were. I had used them earlier that morning, so I knew they were somewhere in the apartment.

So I hunted, and hunted, and hunted (and prayed). And finally after fifteen minutes of searching, I found them in the diaper bag (which I had checked twice before). I guess I had dropped them in there instead of into my purse. Phew. Then I realized that I still needed to find the celery I was going to give a friend of mine. The day before, a neighbor had given us more celery from his garden than we could hope to use, so I thought I would share some. I mean, nothing says true friendship like celery.

But I didn't know where it had gone. So I hunted, and hunted, and hunted again. Checked the fridge, checked the trash (you never know), checked the diaper bag. Nothing. Meanwhile my apartment was getting muggier and muggier and I was getting sweatier and sweatier from looking so hard, but I knew there was no real point to turning a fan on because I'd be leaving soon. Finally after ten minutes of searching and sweating, I decided that nothing says true friendship like not giving people celery, so Joseph and I decided to go out and say hi without celery in tow.

When I told this story to Kevin last night, he said, "Oh. There was a bag of celery in one of Joseph's toy containers. I was wondering what it was doing there."

Guys. It's obviously hard enough for me to keep track of things without someone else actively squirreling things away. Since Joseph has also recently discovered the joys of the toilet and trash can, I have a bad feeling it's only going to get worse.

I'm doomed.

Eine kleine Nachtmusik

Dear Moragh,

Thank you for teaching me piano lessons all those years growing up. As a small token of gratitude, here are a few videos showing the love of classical music continuing into the next generation.

Love,

Kyra.

But seriously. It is so fun to watch Joseph dance. It's been great to see it change over the months. From the head bobbing in these videos to the tap dancing and everything in between, Joseph dancing is kind of the best thing ever. It's been great to see the changes to his style in just the past few weeks, and I have a feeling it'll only get better.

So, without further ado, I give you Classical Music with Joseph!

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We now return to your regularly scheduled programming.  (Okay, this one doesn't have great dancing, but it's sort of funny anyway.)

Next up, a Beethoven duet!

And last, but not least, here is a non-classical piece (but hey, at least they're Canadian). As you can see, his dancing incorporates a lot more of his arms now, indicating a potential future career as a music director.

We hope you've enjoyed Classical Music with Joseph. We will take requests for future pieces to be performed.

Family and food

Hey, September's over, which means the Proclamation Celebration is technically over.

But it's only barely over, so that means I can talk about my family one last time (ha), especially in conjunction with . . . GENERAL CONFERENCE!

I have to say, my favorite memories of conference have always been at my aunt Elaine's house. During the Sunday morning session, she would let us gorge ourselves on her amazing cinnamon rolls and orange rolls and ham and cheese rolls, just in time for us to listen to Elder Hales or Elder Scott. And by listen I mean read their talks later in the Ensign because we were in a food coma.

That memory got me thinking about my Moon family (my dad's side of the family) and how cool they are. They are good at a lot of things, but if I had to narrow it down, I'd say they excel at pretty much everything. Painting, acting, ballet, singing, decorating, sewing dresses and Halloween costumes, crocheting, making magnet boards in the shape of adorable things, woodwinds, running marathons, painting Calvin and Hobbes onto shoes, writing fiction, motivational speaking, lacrosse, photography, and a myriad of other things that I'm forgetting.

But one of my favorite things about the Moons is how good they are at food. Maybe it's because cooking is the only domestic thing that I can foresee myself being decent at so I pay more attention to it, whereas everything else I look at in amazement with no clue where to even start.

Oh goodness. My aunts are so good at food. Every family gathering had delicious food, often things that I had never even considered before but that tasted delicious. From salads with amazing dressings to pies that could feed the whole of Nigeria, from authentic tamales to perfect parfaits, they know how to do food. (And it always looked gorgeous, which is another bonus.)

Although most everyone appreciates good food, I wonder if we realize just how much it can bring people together. We laugh about the dinner before the Relief Society broadcast, but it really does enrich the overall meeting. There's just a happier atmosphere at any activity when fresh fruit is available.

Even if we appreciate the taste of good food, it's pretty easy to overlook the work that goes into it. It hasn't really been until this last year where Kevin and I have had to fend for ourselves for nearly every meal that we began to understand how much work it is to plan a meal, budget for the food, cook it, and clean it up. And that's only with 2 adults -- these family gatherings can have around 50 people! I can scarcely get my mind around it. And yet my extended family would do that regularly, and even thrived on feeding other people.

What am I trying to get at? Well, first of all, thank you for feeding me all those years. It tasted good. Second of all, I really feel like nothing is temporal with God, so every labor of love involving food will be another blessing on your head in the next life. Third, even though food in and of itself cannot provide spiritual nourishment, when it's coupled with spiritual nourishment (including time with family), that is what I consider a fullness of joy.

And last of all, I think I need all those sweet roll recipes for this Sunday.