Month 6 day 3

Hey Mathbaby,

I was reading this article (link) , and I thought it was funny.

You have no idea how cool you are.
I played pat-a-cake with you in-utero. I felt for your hand on the surface of mathmommies belly. I patted it once. You patted back once. I then patted it twice. You patted back twice.

In mimicry you showed as a 7 month old fetus that number was meaningful to you.
You didn't know it, but you were counting before you were born.

Currently you are almost 50% your lifetime socially advanced - they say you are doing things that babies who are 1.5x your age typically do.

I love you math-baby.

-mathdad

Month 5 Day 23

This is you at zoo-lights.

You are holding a light in your hand. You wanted to take it away, and maybe put it in your mouth to see what it tastes like.

Its a privilege to show you wonders, and wonderful things.
Thank you for the opportunity.

I love you dearly, you cute little math-baby.

Month 5 day 19

So you are eating solid food - you poop stinks now.

You are still having issues with the bottle - sometimes you drink 9 ounces, sometimes 3.
We need to get a handle on that.

Today you meet your foster-grandma. Second time in your life. She will hold you, tickle you and make you giggle (you have such a delightful baby-girl giggle) and feed you. Its amazing of her to fly halfway across the country to spend time with you and your math-mom. Its good, healthy, girl-bonding time.

We might set up (or upside-down) a christmas tree (fake) and string popcorn and decorate it. There is more room for presents under this one, and less stuff for little hands to grab at a low level. On the other hand-its harder to get things to stay on the tree.



So I'm in the market for movies that inspire you. I want you to know you can be great - and not be dumbed down to the level of sheep. Here is the current list:

• Anne of Green Gables (but not Anne of Avonlea) link
  
• Akela and the Bee link
  
• Nim's Island link
  
• City of Ember link
  

Its good to have strong female characters - written to have (and use) their brains and to be courageous and valiant. It does not require dumb male characters any more than a great male character requires a stupid woman.. they are not mutually exclusive. Good examples should be credited as such. Weak caricatures of human beings, like most modern movies, and nearly not worth mentioning except as to avoid emulating.


Here is a halloween picture of your math-momma and some of the extended math-fam.

The little chili-pepper in the middle is you. The pirate-queen there is your math-mom. Your auntie and cousins are behind you and to your right.

Month 5 day 7

Wow you are a handful.

You are starting to eat solid food. You are hungry to walk, to crawl, to talk. You want to do and be everything that the people around you are doing and being.

We were having weight problems with you again. It is likely related to you going to mathwife's grandmoms funeral. You had a lot of fun that week, but you also did not eat much. You came home and caught a cold. You are also teething.

You are an amazingly well behaved baby. You are happy. You tell us when you need to sleep. You dont yell and scream. You put up with us feeding you, and frustrating things.. like you have the hand of a great grace on you. I hope you are a gracious, joy-filled, and loving little creature.

Your mathdad is working hard. I work 9-5 M-F and come home tired. I also go to grad-school part time. Although I'm in an engineering program - I am thinking about transferring to an Applied Computational Mathematics program.

I hope to teach you game-theory when you can talk, so you can make good decisions with the data you have. The best laid plans of mice and men... we will see how that goes.

So I realized the other day that your position makes you somewhat blinded to whether or not I love you. You always experience that your math-parents love you. Thats your zero-mark, your baseline. What we call daily affection - thats where your measurement zero's in on. So my new challenge is to balance how I show you love so that you can actually percieve it. How do we do that. Do we have to do things intentionally to vex you, to leave you feeling less loved, so that your baseline for understanding that we are loving you is closer to actuality?

I guess these are the brick-walls that we have to drive through when you are a teenager. Tis the season, mathbaby - enjoy gumming sweet potatoe pie, mashed potatoes, and playing with your math-cousins.

Month 3 day 3

Hey Mathbaby,

Its been a busy while. I work hard at a job now and we don't see so much of each other.

Your math-mommy is homeschooling your cousin (my niece) in math.

She was getting A's and B's as a 5th grader in Arizona public schools but (sadly) did not know her times tables or what a noun was. She is doing so much better with homeschooling.

She is very wild at heart.

You are growing quite a bit. I have so many data points that I have not entered into the spreadsheet. You are almost, but not quite twice your birth weight.

You have such a cute dimple. You are awake and look at the world quite a bit. You have a fascination with lightbulbs and fans. I dont know if its the contrast ratio or the motion.

What a beautiful smile.

Your gas is really being a problem.

Its out next big challenge to tackle.
Also I would like to eventually track your length and use that to predict your adult height.

Day 43

Here is your current weight-chart.
We have better data on your weight.
When I made a time-step adaptive RLS the averaging improved significantly.
Instead of each data point being averaged with equal weight, points that were very close in time have less weight. They cant artificially load the chart.



So we were talking about abstinence and purity at a bible study this evening.
The idea of some punk kid wanting to use you in that way... grr.
I want to protect you - give you only the best.
The only way to do that is for you to be part of that process. If you dont buy into the idea then its a lost war and the only thing left is the hurting..

So Im thinking that a revisit to the 50's dating game might be useful.
I think the dummies in public policy have poor metrics. They say that if both the boys and the girls pursue then everyone has equal tactics and everyone wins. I think that instead of having what you think you want, when you think you want it... that long term health and wellbeing of the relationship (and the heart) might be an interesting metric. When I was a child I knew what I thought I wanted... but it was not what I really needed. I pursued folly.. thats not profit but loss.

We have some amazing pictures of you. I hope that you find them cute.. whether or not you find them flattering.


You are smiling and laughing now. Look how alive you are.

Your mommy thinks that you are cute in this outfit.





Look at that.
Cuteness that bends space-time.

I love you math-baby!







You look both goofy and happy with your tongue sticking out.
Look at your big blue eyes.
And your goofy smiling face.




Precious and Priceless.

A noble (superheroic) woman is donating milk to help you live well.
Two have.. but currently only one is.

You do not work well with formula.
We tried it ... and you did not poop for 3 days.
You had a lot of abdominal pain, and cried a lot.
You had a lot of gas... you could have been confused for an 85 year old man.
Your mom was only producing about 0.5 fl oz per nursing.

Mom's production is slightly up, but your growth corresponds with the donation.
You were at day 25 and had not reached birth-weight. Now you are growing.

Here is a chart of mommy's estimated production.

You can see that she is having historic highs in production.
You can also see that they are about 1/3 of what you need to live, and grow and stay healthy.

If you ever give me a math-grandbaby girl you should consider naming her Laura or Kim.

Day 29

So you are improving in weight.

Here is your raw data.
You were heavy at birth, likely because with an epidural they pump mom with several extra liters of water. You absorb some of that too.
At day 4 you were 6 lbs 10 oz.
Your actual birth-weight is likely between those two
Notice that the early data is sparse.
We weighed you less frequently.
Here is the last several days.
We weigh you before and after every feeding.
The scale is accurate to 0.5 ounces.There is noise in the signal.
There is uncertainty in the scale.
There are variations in your weight.

What is really going on?

So I use RLS (recursive least squares) to get a better feel for the trend.

I used a low learning rate (0.15), an intermediate one (0.8), and in the spirit of SOR and a Hamilton method, one with a learning rate above one (1.5)

You were not gaining weight. An amazing friend of my wife gave her some of her own stored breast milk. We are supplementing and you are gaining.

Note that the low learning rate most characteristically parallels the centerline of the data.
Trimming out that part of the data and fitting an equation to it yielded a good aproximation of your growth rate for the last 3 days. You have been gaining 0.11 lbs or about 1.75 oz per day.

According to kellymom you should gain on average from 0.55 to 0.85 oz/dy but you can go a little lower or a lot higher and be okay. Breastfeeding-essentials says the same.

You are growing, little girl. Thats important.

Oh, we found a portable safe carrier for you for around the house. We can put it in the center of our bed and not roll over you, or worry about it. You seem to find it womb-like, and you sleep well in it. We covered it in a beautiful baby-quilt that my grandmother made for you.

Next time I will try to show you how we figured out what you need in the way of supplemental milk to keep a good growth rate. I will also try to have more amazingly cute baby pictures.

Day 26

You are not gaining weight. Its really hurting your mom ... it breaks her heart to think she can not give you every good thing you need... especially those fundamentally mom-only things like a good dose of breast milk. Your grandma has spent years telling your mom that she does not meet the standard and is un-feminine and un-female. This is being hard on her.

We are taking teas of fenugreek, fennel, and thistle. We are pumping, and your start-to-start nursing time is every 2 hours. Its not helping.

The thyroid is highly responsive to stress. Both an abundance or a lack of thyroid negatively impact breastfeeding. We are going to get thyroid levels checked as soon as possible.

Weight charting and least squares will hopefully follow (fallow) in a few days.

Day 14

You are coming alive...

A rockstar-mom that I know (J'Anne) said they "wake up" after 2 weeks.
It could be your bootstrap is complete. You look around.

It is the trippiest thing to have you lay on my belly and watch my face. You have eyes that are nearly all pupil.. so blue they are nearly black. Its hard to separate the pupil from the iris.

Its good to know that you find me un-booring. I was watching a teen be mortified that her mom shared pictures of sleeping-teen with coworkers. I thought about it for a while and I think she (the teen) has some deep insecurities. Her sense of self is weak so approaches the unknown with an axiomatic sense of fear.

I hope you have a sense of self that is not governed by fear... or too much pink.

Day 9

Its been nine days. You are still beautiful.

... and terrifying

This is a picture of you
you are 1 day old here
you are in your mathdaddy's hands

It took 6 tries to get this right
you were so very small

I never knew that latching was so hard.

Align mouth & head to breast

time wide-open with push toward breast

maximized areola capture

don't occlude the nose

its as hard as docking the space shuttle

no wonder post-partum psychosis exists

nobody trains mom to dock the shuttle

but at 3am with 2 hours of sleep in the last 48

with a baby who doesnt know how.. she is expected to perform

or pay the price in greater lack of sleep.

Is this against the geneva convention?

When you, mathbaby, are looking by touch it is called rooting.

Your proportional control coefficient is way to high

you have many overshoots and oscillations

I have lost the exactness of your eating and pooping models

to lack of parental sleep and my ability to lose documents

to complexity of interactions in adaptive breast let-down and your adaptive hunger

The gynecologist did not want to hear about fourier filtering.

I will tell you about it.
I know the day you were concieved.
... without even using fertility-friend

We recorded these temperatures (detrended).
notice the small range

notice the noise in the signal

notice the discrete measurement levels

Saturday mornings we slept in all the way to 7am. Notice the temperature spikes? They are artifacts.

I fast fourier transformed it

I truncated the series

removing high frequency information - Saturdays don't show

leaving longer-term trends - the ovulation does show

I picked a 5-term approximation

Here is the improved curve and the original. It is not a bad fit

We though ovulation started at day 17. It really started at day 14.

it was the last day of the ovum..

You were conceived on the 17th

Some say life starts at birth.. before that you are tissue.

Some say life starts at conception ... before that you are dna
I say life starts at joy... you were conceived in joy

Baby girl, you were wanted.

We loved you before we ever met you.

You belonged with us before you ever saw light.

Your mommy and mathdaddy love you, baby girl!

Day 2

You were born on a friday.
The wife pushed - the doctor pulled, and somehow you came out.

You are my baby girl. I am afraid of you, and still love you ... terrified.
7 pounds, 12 ounces.
19 inches.
cute enough to deform space-time.
... terrifying.


I tried to prepare for you with programs.
That was not the time.
There is a time to write a program, an analytic tool.
There is a time to just hold a tiny desperately peaceful baby, and let her rest in her daddy's hands.

Today you are home, and are confused.
Tabula Rasa except you know three things ... hunger/full, comfort/uncomfort, sleep/unsleep.
Still learning to suckle... how does the mammary gland work?
Now is the time for programs.

I tracked your numbers.. eating, pooping.
Least squares fits are not so useful on the direct data, but they are relevant to the time steps, the numeric first derivatives.
How long between diapers? How long between nursings?
The mean is useful, but my data is so sparse that a median does not say much.

You prefer to eat about every 3.5 to 5 hours.
Still learning how to nurse.
Still trying to operate a breast... get good latch.
You have tasted colostrum.. pre-milk.
You don't like formula.

You calmed down when I put my finger in your mouth. You sucked on it like it was a pacifier. I think that confused you. There is a difference between a pinky-finger and a nipple. Your sustenance comes from the latter.


You poop about every 3 hours.
A victim of metabolism and small size.
It is no longer meconium.. its from actual digestion.

You pee about every 6 hours... but with an upward trend.
You gotta get this nursing thing down. There is always some confusion in the beginning.


I can hold you in my numbers as well as my hands.
I can find out what you cant say..
- when you will need a diaper change
- when you will be hungry
- if you are having "enough" or not
I hope you grow up and learn to love pi, and programming computers.
I hope you have an IQ, and don't have an unhealthy fascination with pink.
Know how to rebuild a carburetor, and numerically solve Navier-Stokes.
Know what a true friend is ...

You came with a manual. Its encrypted. Im decoding it.
It says that my job is to be a superhero for you. I need to provide, nurture, and protect.

I love you baby girl.
Please grow up loving God.
Please stay away from unhealthy people, and the things of darkness.
Don't make the stupid mistakes of your parents.. and grandparents.. and great-grandparents... and...