Aidan No Like It

I'e developed a growing list of things I "no like". Here's a "Top 10" list:

1. Shirts with buttons
2. Daddy's shirts with buttons (except the parrot shirt)
3. Jammies that don't have Thomas on them
4. Thomas videos
5. Anyone other than Thomas or Percy on my train tracks
6. Peanut butter in any form
7. The tomato plant in the blue pot
8. Wearing a cowboy hat (though it's great when Daddy wears one)
9. Daddy and Mommy eating dinner when they could be playing with me
10. Sun in my eyes

Working the Ranch

Over the weekend, Daddy invented a new game called "working the ranch". In this game, we each ride one of my big horses. I ride the bouncy horse while Daddy rides the big stuffed horse my Uncle Ted gave to me. Daddy puts on his cowboy hat to work the ranch. Then we line up the "stock" in the pretend valley below us. We have all the usual livestock---cows, sheep, horses, and donkeys (actually all the donkeys are Eeyore)---as well as some unusual stock as well---zebras, bears, rhinos, and mice. Daddy says that our ranch is in the Santa Ynez mountains. He asked me how many acres we have on the ranch. I told him four acres, which seems like a lot of land. Daddy says that on a clear day (and it's always clear at the ranch) we can see the city of Santa Barbara and the Pacific Ocean. I like to ride my horsie down to Santa Barbara and sometimes take a swim in the ocean. The other animals like to join me there as well. It's fun to work on a ranch.

An August day in Santa Cruz

Here are some pics from the day Mommy and I visited Clara (about 19 mths old) and her mom, Cheryl in Santa Cruz. We enjoyed getting our toes wet and throwing stones into the waves and then went on some rides on the Santa Cruz boardwalk before returning to Clara's house.

You'll notice that there are several odd photos that Mommy took looking down at Cheryl, Clara, and me from the Ferris Wheel. I was very excited at the prospect of riding the Ferris Wheel since Maisy and friends ride one in my book, Maisy Goes to the Fair, but the size of the actual Ferris Wheel was too imposing, so I asked Mommy to go alone while I watched fromm below.

The final two photos were taken by Clara and me, respectively.

Old School Graphs

  Mommy and Daddy (mostly Daddy) were watching the Republican Convention tonight. Since I did not find this amusing, I ran off to the office to get Daddy's math book. I opened it to look at some of the graphs then I got to work at my blackboard. While Mommy and Daddy were busy watching Zell Miller, I fashioned the graph you see above on the blackboard. This is my version of what Daddy calls a sine wave---I call it an "up-down one" [graph]. When Mommy first noticed and asked me what it was, I told her it was an up-down one. She quickly got Daddy to show him too. He was delighted. He told me,

You rock little dude!

As I danced on the couch. The photo above is actually me making some improvements to my up-down graph.

Later that evening, I made an official computer version of the up-down graph. Here it is:

 Daddy says that for those who are interested, the formula for making this picture, which I typed in myself (Daddy told me what letters and numbers to press) is y = 4 sin x + 3 cos 3x.

The Joy of Math

Daddy has some quite interesting books that I like to look at. Recently, I picked up a book about doing mathematics using a computer program called Scientific Workplace. What attracted by were the pretty pictures on the front cover of the book. Daddy read to me the part of the book on making two and three dimensional graphs. We would look at a graph together, and I'd tell him what it reminded me of. We saw graphs of mountains, butterflies, spirals, seashells, and lots of other things. Daddy told me that the formula for each graph is like a kind of instruction manual for how to draw the picture. In some cases the instructions were so simple that I could do them myself. The pictures above were graphs I made with just a little help from Daddy. The one for the ball I made by typing the number "1" on the computer. Then Daddy helped me to guide the mouse to a command called "Plot spherical" and I clicked the mouse. "Yay Aidan!" I cried when the pretty graph of the ball showed up. Then I made the picture of the cup you see on your screen. Here I again typed the number "1" and Daddy helped me to click "plot cylindrical" to make it. I love making pictures on the computer. By the way, for you math nerds out there, Daddy tells me that my pictures have the official math names unit sphere and unit cylinder.

I liked math so much that I found another one of Daddy's books, a guide to Mathematica, and plunked the book and myself down on Mommy's lap for story time. While Mommy looked at the pictures with me she didn't know how to make them on the computer. I guess that's a skill for Aidan and Daddy.