For Halloween this year Everett had two choices of costumes: duck or elephant. The duck costume was not a popular choice,

so we went with the elephant.

During preparations for trick-or-treating Everett had his first chocolate bar, and he enjoyed it so much that for the rest of the night he would hand every piece of candy he received to us and say “open?”. He has now learned to identify candy from seemingly impossible lines of sight, such as an opaque bowl of it on the kitchen counter.

In the month of October we explored more local activities, this time curling and Rummage-a-Rama. The former is something we have known of for a long time, mainly from the Olympics, but it always seemed like some exotic and distant activity, like herding reindeer. It was also something we have heard a fair number of jokes about. When we found that the Wauwatosa Curling Club is just a short walk from our house we decided to visit them for their annual open house. Based on proximity we assumed that curling was something that everyone here did, but as it turns out we don’t know anyone who curls, and from asking around it is clear that we don’t know anyone who knows anyone who curls. Nonetheless there was quite a turnout for the open house and the accompanying open bar (if you have been reading this blog for any amount of time it should not surprise you that the curling club has their own bar). Shown in these photos are Klaus and Sanket, two of the best curlers in my lab.

Rummage-a-Rama is a periodic event held at the Wisconsin Products Pavilion at the state fair park, which is somewhat ironic because most things being sold inside seemed to be made in China. Our friend Marcy gave us a glowing review of it, but as it turns out we don’t need any more rummage.


With regard to curling and the rummage thing: I’m glad we went, and I feel like I got both of these things out of my system. One thing that became evident during both of these events is that Everett’s activity level now precludes us from carrying him around like some kind of travel accessory. A couple years ago during a family match of Dance Dance Revolution, Cress commented that Chris displayed a great economy of motion. As far as we can tell this is not something that Everett inherited. During the last few weeks we have watched an explosion in the speed and range of his mobility. He seems to move with little regard for metabolic efficiency. Quite the contrary, he engages in a lot of high energy, high entropy activities, which is fine as long as we don’t have to chase him around in areas that are not babyproof. It might be possible to create a device that could capture this energy and sell it back to the power company, but I’ll leave this for a future blog entry.