March 2024

Evelyn competed in the National History Day competition this month. She was super not enthused about it, but she did it anyway. Her topic was X-rays and how they changed history. She did not win, which she expected, but she was awarded a “Judge’s Recommendation” award, which she did not expect. It was funny when I told her. Her reaction was pretty clearly one of horror until she was assured that she wouldn’t have to go on to state. She was ready to be done. She knows a lot about x-rays now, though, you should ask her about them sometime.

Ivan went to a board gaming conference called Saltcon. He went with his brother, but had several friends that went too. He hung out mostly at the board games section. Heat was his favorite. Ironically he learned how to play a game he’s owned for over a year, and that was fun. It only took a weekend conference and now we can play it with our friends!

In other news, Avery got to go on a retreat with the youth in her youth group. She got Chick Fil-A (score!), but her stomach hurt most of the time (boo!). Rachel was really involved in teacher appreciation week at the elementary school this year. Who knew teacher appreciation was such a party? Catered lunches, gifts, all sorts of stuff! It was a lot of time, but actually pretty fun. Martin and Hazel have a new hobby as well – catching chickens. They’re quite good at it, and they appear in Grandma’s kitchen with a chicken every so often when we visit. We can’t tell for sure if Grandma is amused, but she doesn’t seem too annoyed and the chicken visitors don’t stay long.

We decided it’s finally time to grow our family again, so we added a little red subaru impreza :) No, we can’t even handle pets, a car is as exciting as we get. We are now a two car family! Avery is pretty excited, and she’s already driven in it. Unfortunately, nearly as soon as we bought it the engine light went on, so we jumped right into car ownership both feet in. We’ve decided the car needs a name. Suggestions welcome. Here’s a list of the current contenders. We’ve decided, I think, that the Sienna will be called Whaleshark, due to a current obsession of Avery’s. She loves whalesharks with a passion at the moment, so the van gets to be a marine animal. We’re also taking bets on how long Avery’s current obsession lasts.

Name contenders for the new car:
– Ladybug
– Ladybird
– Octopus
– Scarlet
– Carlet (you know, because it sounds like Scarlet, but means little car…)

Dancing, Dancing, We’re All Dancing

Now that we’re not sick anymore (hallelujah!), we find ourselves dancing.

Hazel’s rehearsals after school rehearsals for the last several months paid off at her play performances. She was fabulous as a water dancer.

Avery asked a boy (!) to her high school’s girls’ choice Sweethearts dance. They did all the things: trampoline park, lunch, pictures, homemade pizzas, dance, and games afterward.

In calmer moments, we made bird feeders with some friends. Bird feeders are one of our favorite things in Winter time.

It’s been a mild Winter, and we’ve survived January, which feels like a major accomplishment every year. Some of us are definitely vocal about being ready for Spring. I’m really enjoying eating all the soups, though, so I’m okay with a couple more weeks of cold.

Random fact of the post: books we’re reading!
Homeless Bird by Gloria Whelan
Geronimo Stilton
Winter by Marissa Meyer
Cinder by Marissa Meyer
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling
Blood Meridian by Cormack McCarthy
The Staff Engineer’s Path by Tanya Reilly
Notes from the Underground by Dostoyevsky
Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy

January 2024

Hi everyone! Here’s what’s going on in our home lately.

Rachel got her braces taken off. They worked! Her teeth don’t wear together anymore and she has eaten so many nuts, now that she can chew them without worrying about breaking any brackets. The retainer situation is not so great, but the orthodontist says we’ll make a new one in a few weeks and maybe that will help

Avery has her learner’s permit and has started driving. It’s so exciting for her and also a little scary. She got a Garmin for Christmas and she gets a few extra intensity moments on days we go driving. She’s already planning how to raise money to buy a car. We’re pretty proud of her.

Ivan cut his hair. Shaved it all off. He gets petted on his head a lot now as it’s growing in all fuzzy and soft.

Evelyn and Hazel had a vaulting show. The theme was the Polar Express, and they were not upset at all that their costumes were pajamas. They both did really well and no one froze. It’s fun to watch them. They work so hard and it pays off at the shows.

We got a 3-D printer for Christmas. We have printed snakes, chopstick holders, an octopus, various mathematical spaces and models, fish, snowflakes, and Ivan’s head. We’re having a good time and would love ideas.

A snowstorm dropped several inches of snow. Our snowman fell over, sad day. Now we’re working on a fort or igloo, we’re not sure which yet.

We’ve played with friends, cousins, had dinner with neighbors and worked on cleaning and projects. On to the new year!

Hugs at the doctor’s office

Playgroup Christmas Party for Martin

Periodic Update on the Periodic Table

Well, it hasn’t been that long since my last update. At least from a certain point of view.

I recently received in the mail, a new book by Youhua Li titled, “Learning Mathematics Can Be Addictive“. It’s written in Chinese so I can’t actually read it, but looking at the graphs and equations I can tell that it covers lots of interesting mathematics. It’s meant to be a popular book rather than a textbook. Most importantly, at least from the perspective of my ego, it has (a translation of) my Periodic Table of Finite Simple Groups on the inside of the dust jacket. I think it’s a really cool idea — you can pull it out and use it for reference. You know, when you’re … doing a thing … that needs a periodic table of finite simple groups. Thanks Youhua for sending me a copy!

I also neglected to mention another book with the PToFSG in it. It’s named “Algebraic Structures, Class Guide” by Águeda Mata and is written in Spanish, which I can in fact read. Unfortunately, it appears to be out of print, so you might have to attend the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid if you want to find a copy. Águeda was kind enough to send me a copy a few years ago which I greatly appreciate.

It really is about the people you meet along the way.

Periodic Table Take II

This year, almost in time for Father’s day, I got a metal copy of My Periodic Table of Finite Simple Groups. I was contacted recently by Carl Edman who wanted to make one for himself, and asked if I would give him permission in exchange for a free copy for myself. There has never been much interest in a commercially produced poster, but I always thought it would be neat to have something to point people to. Moreover, he was willing to donate any profit he makes from the sales to a charity, so I really couldn’t refuse. So, if you want a metal poster to hang on your wall, check it out.

It’s been just over 8 years since I finished the Period Table of Finite Simple Groups, so I thought I should take a few moments to reflect a bit. My post about the PToFSG has consistently been the most popular page on this blog (much to the consternation of my wife). Now let’s be clear, we had less than a thousand “visitors” in the entire year of 2019, so we’re not talking real popularity here, but it has been a little surprising to see some of the places it’s shown up. As my wife says, “You’re like famous and stuff.” Here are the places where I know it has appeared:

• I submitted to reddit/math – Everyone was very nice.
• It showed up on reddit a few other times, often with some “discussion” of whether it was laid out in a sensible way. I never found out about them (I don’t read reddit much) until comments were closed—but perhaps that’s just as well. Several people want a more logical layout of the groups (for which I can’t blame them), but I’m not sure such a thing can really be done to everyone’s anyone’s satisfaction. However, I have thought of making an interactive version that could be rearranged by several different criteria. Who knows if I’ll ever get around to it.
• A fascinating (and accessible) lecture by Cheryl Praeger about shuffling cards.
• A Numberphile interview with the late John Conway about the Monster Group.
• A Visual Group Theory lecture (slides). I would advise anyone interested in learning the basics of group theory to watch this series.
• An Epic Math Guy video, a blog post, un blog en español, an advertisement for the GRA programme (where Cheryl Praeger’s talk was given), a student help guide at the Polytechnic University of Madrid, a shirt, and various lectures and such.

Anyway, that’s enough bragging for now. Suffice it to say, it’s been more popular than I hoped for. It’s been wonderful to get to talk to a few practicing mathematicians who say they have used it during their research. I honestly never thought it would actually be useful!

Martin – 1 year

This little guy had a birthday! He loves being one, he’s not going to lie. He’s a big boy now, and he can climb up the stairs and whine and people will bring him back down. He can stand all by himself. He sleeps all night long and he can eat peanut butter now. Life is good! Except when you try to dress him up. Nobody should have to put up with that!

Martin loved his birthday. Except for the cake. He loved the cake from a distance. Especially the candle part:

It was the eating it part that was a problem. No good:

Maybe next year we’ll put frosting on it or something. Opening presents was great. Throwing wrapping paper around is fun and he even unwrapped part of some of his presents on his own. His sisters were happy to help with the rest.

Martin is growing, growing. He’s been in 12 month clothes for probably a month or six weeks now. He’s so much fun to watch. He loves to pull things out of drawers, buckets, cabinets, between the fridge and the wall, anywhere you can put things. Occasionally he will put something back in a bucket, bin or storage space, but his favorite, by far, is pulling things out.

He’s getting his 1 year molars and those are bugging him some. He mostly sleeps alright still, but he’s a little clingy and cranky. He has learned to stand on his own and when he does, he flings his arms out wide and arches his back like it’s a total thrill to be on two limbs. Either that, or he’s trying to imitate a falling cat.  He also can take a few steps. His sisters swear he took 7 once, but I’ve only seen 3 or 4. You can decide if you trust their counting…

Recently he has discovered that he can put smaller things into bigger things. He found a chapstick and was putting it into a small food container the other day. He couldn’t get it in every time and it was fun to watch his concentration as he tried to get the chapstick to go into the container.

He can climb up stairs, but is scared to go back down them, so he usually gets to the top and then turns around and whines or shrieks until someone goes up the stairs and brings him back down. He knows how to go down the stairs, but has fallen down them, so they scare him. And someone is almost always willing to run up the stairs and carry him down, so, why not?

Martin knows how to say one word: yeah. It’s his answer to any question. Avery in particular has a lot of fun with this. “Martin, do you have long blonde hair?” “Yeah.” “Martin, am I your favorite?” “Yeah.” He says it in different tones occasionally, but any time anyone talks to him he answers “yeah.” He understands more, though. For example, the other day Avery was telling me how well she had done on a test at school and I said “Good job!” and Martin started clapping. He loves clapping. He claps for himself all the time, and sometimes he claps for Avery when she does a good job. My favorite is when he claps for himself while he’s eating. For a week or so he would pause in the middle of eating his food to clap for himself. He has also clapped for himself for throwing my socks in the bathtub. He’s working on that self esteem.

 

 

 

Martin – 10 months

Martin is growing, growing! He now weighs 21 pounds! He’s learned a lot of new tricks lately. His most exciting one is probably learning to crawl up the stairs. He thinks that’s pretty fun. He also knows how to pull himself up to standing now, which means anything on low tables and on the second shelf of the cabinets is within his reach. Hello baby proofing!

One funny thing he does is climb up the cabinet handles. We have one set of drawers in the kitchen cabinets that has four drawers and therefore four pull handles. He grabs one and then the next and just walks his way up the handles with his hands until he’s grabbed onto the top one. The top one is so high, though, that he can barely reach it and he stands there on his tip toes all stretched out holding onto that top drawer pull. One day the drawer started to open while he was standing there holding onto it and he started to slowly slide backward over his feet until his body was at this slant, like a slash mark on a keyboard with his feet up close to the cabinet and his head about 6 inches away from it. Luckily I was standing right there and pushed the drawer back in before he fell back on his head.

Our experiment with dairy was not very successful unfortunately. I started eating dairy on Martin’s 9 month birthday and by about a week in he was having reactions to it. It was a little hard to know for sure if it was the dairy, because our whole family seemed to be sick the three weeks after I started, but he would be sick and still have dairy reaction symptoms between being sick. So no dairy for me for a few more weeks. Which leads me to the little stinker’s next adventure… I left a cabinet open to let him play with the lunchboxes on the bottom shelf. Well, it was really quiet over there, which means trouble, so I looked over at him and he had gotten a valentine cupcake from the second shelf of the cabinet and spread it everywhere! Pink frosting and cupcake crumbs all over him and the floor. And… cupcakes, of course, have both dairy and eggs in them. So he ate I think about a third of a cupcake, dairy, egg and all. The next morning was kind of messy. But, after a week of cleaning out both of our diets, he’s starting to get back to normal, and luckily he doesn’t get cranky when I have dairy anymore, just all weird in his stomach and diapers. We’ll try eggs in a couple weeks I think.

Martin’s a happy little guy. he likes to play with toys, but his favorite thing to play with is paper. Anytime he finds a paper on the floor he tears it to shreds and eats it. He also really likes throwing things. I try to play the game where he gives me a toy and I say “Thank you!” and hand it back, but when I hold out my hand he just throws the toy. It isn’t working so well. He recently started a game where he shakes his head back and forth and then I copy. He thinks that’s really funny and repeats it over and over. He also really likes it when his sisters do silly things. His sisters really like “Pancake Robot” and have Alexa play it at dinner sometimes and then they dance. Martin thinks this is hilarious and laughs and laughs. Last night they were pretending to chomp a carrot in a really exaggerated way and he thought that was hilarious too.

Martin – 7 months

On his 7 month birthday we discovered three new teeth in Martin’s little gummy smile! Evelyn was playing with him on the ground when she saw them. When we looked we could see three new chompers and it looks like a fourth is trying to break through. That puts him up to 5 (almost 6) teeth!

Martin is pretty proficient at sitting and is getting brave about reaching for things while sitting. Sometimes he reaches so far that he plops onto his tummy. Then he cries because he doesn’t like being on his stomach and someone has to go sit him back up.

He’s a really busy little guy. He grabs at everything. One thing he really likes right now is to be put down on the floor next to a chair or stool. He likes grabbing at the legs and cross bar parts of the chair and pulling and pushing on them. Today he grabbed the cross bar that goes between the legs of our dining chairs and pulled it toward him until he lost his balance and tipped backward. Then he held himself tipped back, but up against the bar until his bum slowly slipped from underneath him and he was lying underneath the chair, still playing with the legs and parts of the chair.

Look! I finally have some hair!

The poor kid really likes his toys, but is starting to get kind of bored with them too, I think. I took an empty body butter container from him recently and gave him a rattle instead and he cried and cried until I gave him the container back. The body butter container was newer and more exciting I guess.

Solid food is going well. He loves oatmeal, rice cereal, pears, and cheerios. He likes corn, spinach mixed with other things, peas, carrots, avocado, peaches, puffs, and pie crust (he stole that one from his sister while she wasn’t looking). He doesn’t like green beans as much, but still eats them sometimes, and he’s decided he doesn’t like beans anymore. The food seems to agree with him too; he’s getting some pretty nice cheeks and a double chin. We’re all pretty happy about that. He and Mom are still on a dairy and egg free diet. The gastroenterologist said we can try one or the other of those at nine months. Thanksgiving and Christmas are going to be interesting…

His favorite things are probably being held by his family, being thrown up in the air and being tickled. We can always count on tickles for good laughs from him. We all love him bunches and he’s really a happy little guy, even when he’s teething. Every once in a while though, he’s just had it:

Martin – 6 months

Martin is 6 months old already, and we have had him around for a whole half a year! He’s such a happy kid. A lot has happened in the last two months.

At his 4 month visit he had dropped in his weight percentiles, which worried the doctor. He had had diarrhea for a couple weeks so they told me to try giving him formula to slow down his digestion and probiotics to try and help the diarrhea. If it hadn’t cleared up in a week, they said to bring him back in. So the next week we were back at the doctor’s office and when we weighed him he had actually lost 4 oz. We started trying all sorts of things at that point and they referred him to a pediatric gastroenterologist.

I would just like to say here that we have one stubborn kid. Both doctors told me to try and get him on a  bottle to get more calories in him and he would not have it. We tried 6 or so different kinds of bottles, three different kinds of formula, and an eye dropper. No go. He screamed and screamed and then after he was done with that, he played with the bottle with his tongue and refused to drink any of it. We went back to nursing every two or so hours, and tried baby oatmeal. After another week he hadn’t lost any more weight, but he hadn’t gained any either.

The gastroenterologist said that he probably just needed more calories and to put oil in his cereal and try to get him to take more formula any way we could. He gave me ideas for making more milk and told me to stay hydrated and eat enough protein. He said, if it wouldn’t stress me out too much, that I could try eating less dairy, soy and egg since those are the most common food allergies in babies. So we tried a million things and did weekly weight checks and he started growing! His tummy slowed down and he started gaining on the percentile charts and hasn’t stopped. He was down at the 3rd percentile for weight when he lost the 4 ounces and he’s now back up at the 46th about a month and a half later. He loves baby oatmeal, and it seems that if I eat eggs he gets diarrhea, so I am currently on a dairy and egg free diet. We can try one or the other again when he’s 9 months.

He’s been a happy baby since I quit dairy at 1 month, but since he’s been gaining weight, he’s been happier even. He’d been happy, but wanted to be held a lot, and now he’s fairly content to sit in a chair or on the floor and play with toys for a while several times a day. And now he has nice chubby thighs and a double chin. We’re so proud!

He learned to roll from his back to his front this month, and he thinks that’s pretty cool because he can reach more toys that way. This last week he’s really gotten good at sitting up by himself. He likes that a lot, and when we lay him down he stretches his head up like he wants to do a sit up and he’d really rather be able to see the world from sitting. He’s a busy little guy, always grabbing and playing. Don’t try eating with him on your lap – your food will soon be in your lap with him.

We’ve started feeding him other foods. He likes peas, oatmeal, cheerios (when he can get them in his mouth), and beans. He didn’t like green beans or squash and we’re still working on pears. He really likes to hold onto a baby carrot and gnaw on it. Don’t take his carrot away unless you are ready to be yelled at. Feeding him is also sometimes hazardous, because sometimes he likes blow mini-raspberries with food still in his mouth.

Martin is very friendly. He smiles at everyone. He loves it when people talk to him and isn’t too bothered by other people holding him. Unless he sees Mom. Then he sometimes gets upset. Sometimes he will go to other people, though, even if Mom is holding him. He likes to look at people and grin at people. He also LOVES to give hugs and slobbery kisses. It’s pretty adorable.

He also got two new teeth! They came in around 5 months and they’re pretty sharp. Just ask his sisters; they’ve gotten their fingers caught in them more than once. So now he can pull hair AND bite! They still adore him though.

First Week of School

We survived the first week of school! And it wasn’t even too painful!

Avery is starting 5th grade this year and loves her teacher. She tells me every day that today was good because she has her for a teacher.

 

Evelyn is starting 3rd grade. She wakes up and groans “I’m not going to school!” every morning, but she gets there and tells me with a smile that school was “awesome” every day when she gets home.

 

Hazel started preschool this year. She is doing an online preschool and a home preschool where we rotate between people’s houses. She loves them both.

And here they are all together.