Baby now definitely signs "milk".

I mean, definitively. It's toooooo coooooool.

And she's invented a sign for "tickle". At least, I assume that's what she means when she tickles herself after I've been tickling her, or upon hearing the word "tickle". I hope that's what she means, and not something like "Help, I've been infected by an alien parasite bent on ruling the world" or anything like that. If she *does* mean she's been infected, well, that parasite is a bit closer to enslaving humanity - the baby has learned to cruise around.

...

Yeah, my days have been boring lately.

Here's something. A while back, Moggy told me that when people go on and on and on about their babies *coughcoughcough* she likes to think/say that her cat "does the exact same thing!". And she's right - cat toys and baby toys are very similar.

How about this - when Evangeline wants to bring a toy or (clean!) sock from one area to another, she bends down and picks it up in her mouth. And carries it in her mouth as she crawls from place to place.

Yea, verily, my niece is a cat.

I thought of something just now I hadn't thought of in a while.

I used to never talk to cashiers or anything. If I went to a fast food place, I would write out my order rather than talk to the person. My family was delegated to order for me in restaurants (and, to an extent, still is).

I really don't like talking to people I don't know. Partially because I don't like talking to people I don't know, and partially because I have a tendancy to be misunderstood when speaking, which is embarrassing.

Knowing how badly I view my handwriting, you can understand how much I really didn't want to talk to people.

I have, in the past few years, begun stammering in uncomfortable situations. This made Latin class annoying, to say the least. I wonder, now that I think about it, if this is connected with my having effectively "lost" (through choice and apathy) the option to simply not talk to people.

As to which one is worse, well, who knows? At least I *can* do things like call and order food on the phone now, even if I still don't *like* to do so.

So, there may be 50+ planets in this solar system. Or 12. Or 8. Or none at all. Or a million.

Not that it matters. Children everywhere will still be taught that there are exactly, precisely, unarguably nine planets, because My Very Energetic Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas, and why else would she have done that?

It really doesn't matter. Whether Pluto is a planet or not, it's still the same ball of ice rocketing around our sun. And no matter if we start calling those thingies out there planets, they won't suddenly become larger or fancier or worth noting, no more than they already are. Nothing about them is going to change just because we change their designation. And nothing about the solar system is going to change - we aren't going to "gain" planets just because we call them differently, though somebody just today made that mistake to me, trying to tell me that we had "found" new planets. Of course we didn't, we already knew they were there!

When I was a kid, I couldn't get a diagnosis of autism. Lots of people who can get that diagnosis now could not have gotten it then. But the diagnostic criteria changed, for a lot of things, in one fell swoop.

The same logical error I mentioned above applies here as well. Just because we have more people diagnosed with autism now than we did ten or so years ago does not mean that the actual autism rates have gone up. There's no way to compare the real numbers from then and now, because the diagnostic criteria have totally changed (among other things)!

But we still get to sit around and listen to boring rhetoric about plagues and epidemics.

Don't fall for it. What we're looking at is diagnostic tinkering, nothing else. It's useful, good for people to have accurate labels - but it's not a cause for alarm. Think a little, would you? That's all I ask.