PuKe MaStEr

We are slightly coming along with the puke master. First it was almost impossible to leave him alone, while eating, studying or just sitting in front of the computer. But now, when attaching a rattle to his arm, he seems to be satisfied and does’t cry so much at least not as much as before. When he wants to cry and starts moving his arm he hears the noise of the rattle and automatically silences. Another thing he started doing recently is to turn over, from lying on his back to lying on his stomach. If you combine both options you are almost able to leave him alone for an hour and eat and actually work with your computer. The next thing would be to install a sensor for the wetness of the underlay, otherwise one has to face the puke master in person.

 

Next week the East-German coalition is coming again in order to take care of our son. I am already looking forward for the sweets as well as to more quality sleep and work time.

Beautiful fluid dynamics

If I see such beautiful videos or figures I know why I started to be involved in fluid dynamics, although what I do can’t be presented in such nice videos. Not yet at least

Detlef Lohse’s groups (known through many other award winning fluid videos, e.g. the sound of the snapping shrimp or other ones) published this work recently in J. Stat. Mech. and provided some other nice videos to it. Thanks to imechanica for bringing this to my attention.

Babies can be embarrasing

Everything went fine the last two and a half months, but today I think our son made us some enemies. He just woke up and started screaming like hell. His clothes were very wet and warm and he screamed more than during the time of his peak colic times. I changed his diapers, but he still continued screaming, so loud and disturbing, that even the neighbours woke up. You might remember the recording I presented some time ago, that was almost nothing against his crying or screaming attack from just now. I hope this is not the beginning of some strange neighbourhood relations, where one communicates via Morse code. Now, he is drinking and I am making some Valeriana tea (Beruhigungstee?) to calm down. I don’t know how to look in the eye of my neighbours anymore, not that we speak so much with each other, but still what will they think of us? That we torture our baby during the nights to our pleasure? Anyway as soon as the tea is at a drinkable temperature I will try to “resleep”. If I wouldn’t know that he hasn’t started to think I would think that he would simulate the pain to get our attention, but enough of that I am just angry and needed to abreact.

Swedes are funny!

Although hard to believe, Swedes are funny. I mean if my high-school and university time in Germany was fun, than almost anything can be fun. You might remember the funny clips in Swenglish I posted view weeks ago. Today I found this clip, which is from my favorite TV comedy show Kvarteret Skatan. It is not the funniest one, but at least with English subtitles:

Right now I am quite busy trying to become acquainted with a Stereoscopic PIV system, organise our stay in Italy over the summer, get a conference paper and my first journal paper ready as well as learn how do deal with a son, who still pukes around and doesn’t listen to me. On the bright side, he sleeps more than 4 hours during the night. Great Success!

Apropos conference paper: Does anyone have experience with WORD templates? I am not a fan of WORD, unless for personal use. But for a conference it is rather embarrassing to use a WORD template, where figures and equations look so fake and destroy the layout. Is there anyway to get the line spacing right in WORD without making the equations too small. I don’t wanna write my own LaTex template for this particular conference.

“Peeing on daddy” contest?, part 4

Although I gave quite early up to count the incidents of peeing or pooing on daddy or other relatives events I was thrown back to this issue today. Our son stopped peeing on us, since my mother was here. I suspect the fact, that he didn’t like that I held him under the water tap in the basin each time he filled up his diapers. Both mothers told me that babies might not like to be “shocked” with water, so I stopped. But now, one week after my mother has left I started again to hold him under the tap and clean him, if the content of the diaper was way above average. This happened just a half hour ago and additionally he peed on me, so I thought lets wash him, what I did. Just washed him put him on a towel and started drying him he started to both pee and poo on me. I thought, that can happen one a month, so I washed him again. And what happened shortly after that – before I had started to wind him -? He did the same again! I washed him again and decided not to hold him under the tap again; at least not this month. If I could just understand him or discern his needs. I feel more like this guy here:

Vävtejp

I use vävtejp quite often, but knew it under its wannabe nerd English word silver tape, which is the literal translation of its Swedish counterpart, namely silvertejp. I use it mainly, because it is quite strong, but I didn’t know that it could even be useful for parents who might need to keep their infants in the right place, like illustrated here:

(Thanks elbarto for bringing this to my attention!)