Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

We took Maxim for his routine pediatrician check-up today. Everything was smooth and nice. He has gained almost half a kilo in the last month (now: 10.4 kg) and has grown almost 2 cm (now: 78 cm). He got his next vaccination too. Yet another one will be given to him on the next visit, in about a month’s time. I hope they help…

Maxim has got his first haircut today. Don’t worry, that wasn’t either from me or Olga. We got some professional help.

Maxim was puzzled at the beginning, but that he got bored and turned somewhat grumpy. No major crying though.

When we brought him back home, we realized that there was a bigger change in him, not just a haircut. He didn’t look like a baby anymore. Instead, he was a boy. The style of the haircut suggested some relation to the US Marine Corps. Quite a change I should say.

Anyway, it will grow back and we won’t be cutting it anytime soon. Let him have the hippy fun.

Album location: /photos/2006/2006-03-14_Olga_Birthday/

Album location: /photos/2006/2006-03-12_POTD

It is sometimes difficult to communicate the fun and excitement of parenting to those who don’t have kids. Especially when talking about small things. Adults take A LOT OF things for granted, and they don’t realize to what extent they do until they see a child acquering those grants, working hard for each of them on a daily basis.

Let me give you an example of the most recent Maxim’s development milestone - a pyramide. Even if you don’t have any children, you’ve probably seen them a billion times - small plastic or wooden pyramids of brightly-colored rings on a stick.

When any adult sees this thing, it is immediately obvious to him what is the purpose of the said toy. Disassembling the rings from the stick and then assembling them back onto it in the right order. TADA. That’s it.

We’ve been watching Maxim trying to figure it out for the last three or four month.

No adult probably has enough imagination to occupy himself with such a toy for three hours. What in the world can you do with it? Here are a few examples: turn the whole pyramid over and over all its axises, drop it, drop it in such a way that rings come off, pick up each ring one at a time, pick up two rings simultaneously - one in each hand, pick up rings differently based on their colors and sizes, suck those rings, bite those rings, attempt to pick up more than two rings simultaneously (possible, but needs a lot of figuring out), drop rings, throw rings (a lot of fun!), combine rings with other toys, combine empty pyramide stick with other toys, suck pyramide stick, bite pyramide stick, knock yourself on the head with pyramid stick, knock yourself on the head with each ring in each possible order and then repeat the procedure with two rings simultaneously, hide rings, hide rings forever, find rings, and so on and so on and so on.

It’s not that he couldn’t have figured out how to put rings on the pyramid stick. It’s just that there are so many ways to play with this toy that it is difficult to single out any particular one of them.

But we finally go there. Now Maxim got interested in putting the rings back on the pyramid stick. And he can even combine them in the right order. Wow!

A note for those of you who don’t have kids: pyramide is this kind of toy that stimulates child’s mental development. Apparently, it can be so hard on the kid’s brain, that often kid would avoid this toy alltogether. We know a few kids who are much older than Maxim and who haven’t yet figured out the pyramide or tried to do so and lost interest.

Last paragraph in one sentence: we are breeding a genious!

This is my response to this post in Sanjay’s blog. I originally wrote this as a comment, but before I pressed “Submit” button, I thought that it would be better to have it here, with all the crosslinks.

Sanjay noticed that pictures like the one of Maxim on his birthday are a cool new way of saving height measurements. That is instead of using old ways of pen, rule, and wall. He regrets only that there is no date and time information on the picture.

Well, that’s not a problem at all, my dear friend! Most of the modern digital cameras save a lot of meta information in the image file. With right tools that information is trivial to extract (Google search for “EXIF”).

I put a bit more thought into the idea and realized that it can actually be much more fun. With data and time of the image available from the image file itself, we are missing only one bit for a complete picture - the age of a child. Since there is no automatic way of getting it, a human interaction is necessary.

And where there is human interaction, there is social interaction. Flickr comes to mind. Consider this for a moment:

Parents make pictures of their kids against a height meter. Then, they upload these images to Flickr. Then, they tag these images with three tags. One tag for the age of the child, say “age14month” or “age2years”. One tag for the height itself, say “76cm” or “132cm”. And one additional tag to make these pictures easy to find, say “kidsgrow”. Maybe an image pool or user group would be a better way of goind about it.

With setup like this, there is a central location, where all such images are stored (backup). People can then easily find all pictures of their own kids, as well as other kids of the same age or the same height.

There are also a whole bunch of third-party applications that can utilize data from Flickr, like, for example, fd’s Flickr Toys.

How do you like the sound of that?