February 2020

You can see more photos and videos of February in the Google photo album linked here, or by clicking on the photos above.  It's been very cold so most pictures are indoors, with the exception of one random day that was warm so Becky took Alex to the park.

Alex has made some real progress in the last couple months with his communication. He's added maybe a couple dozen words to his vocabulary for things he likes or wants or has been taught in therapy. You'll see some video of him saying "roll roll" for a game we do where we wrap him up like a baby burrito and unroll him. We are working on getting him to say more words spontaneously. For example, if we are watching a cartoon (or a grown up show) he doesn't want to watch, he has become very adept at saying saying "change the show" in his own way (chay-cha-cho). Which is much better than him just yelling in protest like he used to do. He can also say many letters of the alphabet by imitation, and quite a few he can say by recognition. Hopefully I'll have better videos of that next month to share. Receptive language is still a big challenge and we still has a lot of work to do of course, but this progress is really great to see. In other Alex news, his obsession with tractors finally seems to be waning. I'm not sure what it will be replaced with yet, but he is showing more interest in the alphabet and also iPad games (but that's nothing new).

Becky continues to be the powerhouse driving Alex's progress, staying on top of his therapy program, and keeping him happy all the nights when I'm not there. On top of that, she is seeing progress with her clients - other kids with developmental and speech delays - that she has been working with. Meanwhile, she is also handling the ridiculous amounts of paperwork and insurance phone calls and battles with past service providers that mishandle billing and so on. 

Our church was hosting a Valentine's Dinner activity with babysitting provided, so we decided to get dressed up and go. While there, we ran into the Baldwin family who we knew from church and neighborhood in Arizona. In fact, the teenage daughter was Alex's occasional babysitter for a time when he was 7-8 months. As it turns out, the husband took a job in the Woodstock area of New York not long after I took a job out here. It was great to see a familiar face so far from what was once home.

Work at Binghamton University is still going well for me. Administrative tasks continue to roll onto my desk as much as ever. I'm planning another Ignite talks event on my campus if I can persuade enough grad students to participate. As coronavirus news goes viral, I do find that I miss my former life a bit as a researcher in the virology lab at ASU. When MERS and Zika broke out during that, I felt a surge of motivation as the work felt urgently important. February marks 2 years at this job for me, and I've been very grateful for how well it's worked out. With Becky and Alex being apart though, I probably won't stay here forever. In the meantime, I am keeping myself occupied on the weeknights running the AirBnB from our home. It continues to be a popular lodging destination in the area, with most weekends getting booked and some weeknights too (in which case I have to stay in the basement). One weekend in February though, I was happy to host Becky and Alex as guests for their 3-day weekend. Alex was pretty excited to revisit his old stomping grounds, and we got to have some friends over for dinner.

In other news, I got mentioned by name in a news article in The Atlantic about the age-old importance of washing hands with soap and water in this modern age of pandemics. You can read it here. It came about from a tweet I wrote in response to something the journalist said on Twitter. I follow him because I like to read his articles about health and medicine.