toothsome.
Mary-Alice has started teething with a vengeance, very suddenly. I guess I should be grateful because Pippa started when she was only four weeks old, according to my journal. Man. I was so enjoying my sleep. I'm looking into trying a teething necklace on her. Wrap it around her chunky baby thigh under her sleeper during the night, so there's no strangulation or choking hazard at all. I don't know if it'll work, but I figure it's worth a try, if I can borrow the necklace from someone.
I know it might be the placebo effect, but unlike most skeptics, #1 I don't scorn and detest the placebo effect as if the placebo effect spat in my cornflakes, and #2 I don't confuse "there doesn't seem to be any reason why this would work" or "the explanation usually given for why this works can't be true" with "this doesn't work." See also acupuncture, German studies on.
(Basically the official German government studies found that real acupuncture was no more effective than sham acupuncture. Victory, cry the skeptics!.. except the study also found that both real and sham acupuncture were more effective than drugs and physiotherapy, holy smoke. To me at least, the German studies suggest that the mechanism of action for acupuncture is not what TCM practitioners have traditionally believed and taught, and underlines the difficulties with trying to find a true control placebo when studying alternative medicine. Tangent over.)
Now the question will be: Pippa got her first tooth about 5 months. Will Mary-Alice get her first tooth at 7.5 months?
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I know I've written about this before, but it is really crazy how I basically go the whole day hardly drinking at all (except a little at meals), and then when the kids are both in bed, suddenly I realize I am DYING OF THIRST, and I drink like six tall glasses of water in the ~two hours before going to bed. Like a camel.
I know I should carry a water bottle but honestly I'm so weighed down already when I try to go out, I can't imagine trying to carry a water bottle of any decent size too. I thought I was weighed down with just Pippa's stuff, now I gotta carry stuff for both of them.
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A couple days ago I went to a local Chinese fresh noodle shop (ie they sell the raw noodles, dumpling wrappers etc for you to cook, along with some frozen prepared dumplings and similar. The particular area this shop is in has a number of Chinese shops that have little to no English signage in them, so it's often an exercise in my ability not only to read Chinese, but to read slapdash Chinese handwriting. One little trick is that frequently the signs advertising the specials are in Chinese only! So if you don't read Chinese you may or may not know that this or that is on sale. I saw some of the specials also marked in English but not all. Anyway.
I bought a pound of fresh egg noodles, the kind for making chow mein, and tonight I tried to make it, despite not having a wok. (I know I need to get one but Gordon says, rightly, we shouldn't get anymore kitchen stuff until we organize the kitchen stuff we already have... so I don't know when I'll get a wok. Doomsday.) It didn't turn out too bad! It tasted pretty much exactly like strip mall Chinese food, and I know that sounds like damning with faint praise, but I really think that's not a bad start. Nothing burned, and nothing broke apart, and nothing stuck to the pan, and the vegetables were neither raw nor mush. Victory, I say.
I know it might be the placebo effect, but unlike most skeptics, #1 I don't scorn and detest the placebo effect as if the placebo effect spat in my cornflakes, and #2 I don't confuse "there doesn't seem to be any reason why this would work" or "the explanation usually given for why this works can't be true" with "this doesn't work." See also acupuncture, German studies on.
(Basically the official German government studies found that real acupuncture was no more effective than sham acupuncture. Victory, cry the skeptics!.. except the study also found that both real and sham acupuncture were more effective than drugs and physiotherapy, holy smoke. To me at least, the German studies suggest that the mechanism of action for acupuncture is not what TCM practitioners have traditionally believed and taught, and underlines the difficulties with trying to find a true control placebo when studying alternative medicine. Tangent over.)
Now the question will be: Pippa got her first tooth about 5 months. Will Mary-Alice get her first tooth at 7.5 months?
---
I know I've written about this before, but it is really crazy how I basically go the whole day hardly drinking at all (except a little at meals), and then when the kids are both in bed, suddenly I realize I am DYING OF THIRST, and I drink like six tall glasses of water in the ~two hours before going to bed. Like a camel.
I know I should carry a water bottle but honestly I'm so weighed down already when I try to go out, I can't imagine trying to carry a water bottle of any decent size too. I thought I was weighed down with just Pippa's stuff, now I gotta carry stuff for both of them.
---
A couple days ago I went to a local Chinese fresh noodle shop (ie they sell the raw noodles, dumpling wrappers etc for you to cook, along with some frozen prepared dumplings and similar. The particular area this shop is in has a number of Chinese shops that have little to no English signage in them, so it's often an exercise in my ability not only to read Chinese, but to read slapdash Chinese handwriting. One little trick is that frequently the signs advertising the specials are in Chinese only! So if you don't read Chinese you may or may not know that this or that is on sale. I saw some of the specials also marked in English but not all. Anyway.
I bought a pound of fresh egg noodles, the kind for making chow mein, and tonight I tried to make it, despite not having a wok. (I know I need to get one but Gordon says, rightly, we shouldn't get anymore kitchen stuff until we organize the kitchen stuff we already have... so I don't know when I'll get a wok. Doomsday.) It didn't turn out too bad! It tasted pretty much exactly like strip mall Chinese food, and I know that sounds like damning with faint praise, but I really think that's not a bad start. Nothing burned, and nothing broke apart, and nothing stuck to the pan, and the vegetables were neither raw nor mush. Victory, I say.