### More Owen Pics

An apple a day keeps the dentist away! Or so they say. Too bad we found out he has 3 cavities. This is our bad since we didn't start brushing his teeth regularly until it was too late. You live and learn, right?

Owen: Tooth brushing king. Note two-fist technique. Plaque doesn't stand a chance!

Owen posing for Calvin Klein. Owen wears big-boy underwear almost exclusively these days, requiring a diaper only for number 2 and bedtime. Almost there...

Cindy said…
Erin,

Don't let the dentist put a guilt trip on you. The same thing happened with Lindsay - and the dentist said, "You mean you haven't been brushing her teeth?" I freaked- but when I told her regular dentist, he said her teeth close together and she probably had a high acid count in her saliva. And she never had another cavity. Don't let them get to you!

Cindy
mama mia said…
Really Erin,
no guilt,cause until you could hold a toothbrush and do something valuable with it, it was not a regular routine to have much tooth brushing going on..and you guys had different tooth issues, very few cavities...
Now Owen looks like he can get into the battle of the tooth decay..love the crown prince look.
mom
blissful_e said…
Love the pics. :)

Great work with the toilet training - sounds like you might be spared the joys of batch diapering when your second boy arrives.

Regarding cavities, I have been brushing Calliani's teeth during her bath for a while now. But I'm not sure how much good it will do... the only children's toothpaste available at our pharmacy here in Egypt was labeled 'cola.' Hm.

### On the Height of J.J. Barea

Dallas Mavericks point guard J.J. Barea standing between two very tall people (from: Picassa user photoasisphoto).

Congrats to the Dallas Mavericks, who beat the Miami Heat tonight in game six to win the NBA championship.

Okay, with that out of the way, just how tall is the busy-footed Maverick point guard J.J. Barea? He's listed as 6-foot on NBA.com, but no one, not even the sports casters, believes that he can possibly be that tall. He looks like a super-fast Hobbit out there. But could that just be relative scaling, with him standing next to a bunch of extremely tall people? People on Yahoo! Answers think so---I know because I've been Google searching "J.J. Barea Height" for the past 15 minutes.

So I decided to find a photo and settle the issue once and for all.

I then used the basketball as my metric. Wikipedia states that an NBA basketball is 29.5 inches in circumfe…

### Finding Blissful Clarity by Tuning Out

It's been a minute since I've posted here. My last post was back in April, so it has actually been something like 193,000 minutes, but I like how the kids say "it's been a minute," so I'll stick with that.
As I've said before, I use this space to work out the truths in my life. Writing is a valuable way of taking the non-linear jumble of thoughts in my head and linearizing them by putting them down on the page. In short, writing helps me figure things out. However, logical thinking is not the only way of knowing the world. Another way is to recognize, listen to, and trust one's emotions. Yes, emotions are important for figuring things out.
Back in April, when I last posted here, my emotions were largely characterized by fear, sadness, anger, frustration, confusion and despair. I say largely, because this is what I was feeling on large scales; the world outside of my immediate influence. On smaller scales, where my wife, children and friends reside, I…

### The Force is strong with this one...

Last night we were reviewing multiplication tables with Owen. The family fired off doublets of numbers and Owen confidently multiplied away. In the middle of the review Owen stopped and said, "I noticed something. 2 times 2 is 4. If you subtract 1 it's 3. That's equal to taking 2 and adding 1, and then taking 2 and subtracting 1, and multiplying. So 1 times 3 is 2 times 2 minus 1."

I have to admit, that I didn't quite get it at first. I asked him to repeat with another number and he did with six: "6 times 6 is 36. 36 minus 1 is 35. That's the same as 6-1 times 6+1, which is 35."

Ummmmm....wait. Huh? Lemme see...oh. OH! WOW! Owen figured out

x^2 - 1 = (x - 1) (x +1)

So $6 \times 8 = 7 \times 7 - 1 = (7-1) (7+1) = 48$. That's actually pretty handy!

You can see it in the image above. Look at the elements perpendicular to the diagonal. There's 48 bracketing 49, 35 bracketing 36, etc... After a bit more thought we…