Twice In One Day

Blogging....that is. A first for me. I've spent the whole day at a coffee shop in Kerrytown and have found it to be a place that brings out my desire to write. It's a Sweetwater's Cafe located just across from Community High School in downtown Ann Arbor. The coffee here is excellent (which is high praise coming from a die-hard Dunkin Donuts coffee fan) and the ambience perfect for studying and writing.....smells of coffee beans fill the air; there's just enough traffic to provide an occasionally interesting conversation to eavesdrop on; the cafe opens up to a wonderful European food market and I'm seated next to a large window looking out on a picturesque snowy Michigan afternoon.

I studied a little game theory this afternoon (Bayesian Nash Equilibria) from my trusty Fudenberg & Tirole text and am now about to jump back into writing. I'm working on a paper for a "Social Enterprise" class I'm taking at the business school on ways corporations can successfully enter markets at the base of the (economic) pyramid (ala Prahalad, Stu Hart etc). If I'm reasonably happy with it, I'll post a link.

Ok....enough procrastination. That really can be a problem for me. Rackham (the graduate school) offers a workshop on How To Beat Procrastination as a Grad Student which I really need to take. Let me make a note to sign up for that.....tomorrow.

Let It Snow, Let It Snow.....Let It Snow

It's snowing in Ann Arbor today. Actually it's not too bad by Michigan standards (4-6 inches) but it seems worse than it is because it's coming down pretty thick. I shoveled the driveway this morning and before I was done it was starting to pile up again. I was shoveling near our front door when I heard a faint "Dada" (which, in actuality, was not all that faint from inside the house....not at all) coming from the window and found Elijah (now 15 months) standing next to our front door (inside) with his face pressed up on the glass watching me shovel. Definitely one of those I-love-being-a-Dad moments.

He's unbearably cute at this age. He's a real chatterbox.....so far he can respond at ease to the following questions/prompts:

Dada: One, Two...
Elijah: Teee!

Dada: Dada went to....(works just as well with Mama)
Elijah: Coo! (translation: school)

Dada: Your mama looks.....
Elijah: Goo (translation: good)

Dada: Who do we pray to?
Elijah: Jee! (translation: Jesus)

Dada: In Jesus Name We pray
Elijah: Men!!! (translation: Amen)

Dada: Ready Set,,,,
Elijah: Go!

He's obsessed with babies these days. Whenever he sees a picture of a baby or (even better) a real baby he exclaims BEHBEE at the top of his voice. He does this even with kids that are obviously (to us, at least) older than him. When we sit down to read a book....any book.....he intently searches for pages with pictures of babies on them. I guess balls, bow-bows, cows, bananas (pronounced Manamanamanamana in Elijahspeak) are old news now.

First Crawl

Yesterday Elijah crawled for the first time (at least, as far as we know) and it was the perfect Father's Day present. He was on the floor of our living room with all four of his grandparents, his aunt (Sunita) and I watching. He badly wanted to play with a pop-up book that was just out of his reach. He got up on all fours as he has done for weeks now and reached out for the book. For the last few weeks whenever he would get to this point, he would look up at me and then retreat to a sitting position. But yesterday he moved forward. His little knees moved one in front of the other and his arms moved forward towards the book. His coordination was remarkably good for his first crawl (in my unbiased opinion) and he kept his balance fairly well.

We got him to repeat the feat a few times, but he could only go a few steps forward before his arms or legs got tired. I'm sure he will get stronger over the next few days opening a whole new world of exploration (and mischief) up to him. He has had his eyes set on a stack of magazines under the coffee table for some time now and has even managed to roll over to them once or twice and get a taste. He also is intent on tasting the leaves of a plant that sits just next to the couch in the living room.

He also gave us a huge laugh later in the day. We keep an eye on him when he's sleeping through our video monitor, and at one point he had disappeared from the screen. We didn't hear any crying or cooing so we assumed he was still asleep, but we had no idea where he was. Just then, we caught a glimpse of his head brush by the camera; then his fingers and hand reaching for it. Finally his head (which looked larger than life) came into view and filled the screen as stared right into the camera - apparently he had finally sit up in the crib and was examinging the little green light that had been hovering over his crib since we brought him home. Of course, later in the day I caught him trying to chew on the power cord for the camera.