Lately I’m fascinated by how my girls are imitating us. Anna has always copied our speech patterns and many of our behaviors that you would expect, but some things are striking when you see them mirrored by a child.

I bought Anna a digital camera for her fourth birthday; as far as she knows, all “real” cameras are digital. She gets her camera out every now and then and takes a picture, and there’s nothing particularly notable about her use of it. However, when she was around my “studio equipment” recently, she wanted to take pictures of me with my SLR and strobes, having me pose with different props, making different expressions, and doing the sort of “active” photography that I do when I’m taking set portraits. I found it really unusual–I think it’s a good thing, but for some reason it felt sort of weird too.

Anna has lately been more interested in cooking, which I think will suit her well. She’s a very conscientious kid, so she’ll probably be using the microwave and stove (supervised of course) before too long. Tara, on the other hand, we could probably rent out to a product safety testing lab; you can watch her for any length of time and see that there’s some “MacGyver meets Dennis the Menace” sort of hijinks in her future.

Parenthood, like life, is a continuum of making choices of varying difficulty. At this moment, Jennifer and I are struggling with the problem of Tara’s ear infections. Tara has gone through something like eight rounds of antibiotics for cold-related infections, and although the ear tubes are done something like two million times each year, we can’t help but want to get at the source of the problem. Tara was treated for her first ear infection two weeks after going into day care. We really like our day care, but the fact is that it is full of other germ-laden children. Tara, more so than most children, puts everything in her mouth, which makes her the ultimate germ magnet.

We have considered putting Tara in a situation with less children, but finding a nanny is difficult, expensive, and scary. Also, we’d really hate leaving our current day care because we like our provider and her family a lot; Anna spent three years there. Further, it’s tough to expend the effort and taking the risk of changing things without actually being able to spend more time with Tara. I’ve resisted Jennifer’s notions of nannies and au pairs primarily for this reason, but I’m getting to the point now that I’ve got to entertain the idea because we absolutely have to do something to get Tara more healthy.

We’re investigating a couple more options lately in earnest, and I really hope that a good solution presents itself.

In software engineering, there is a concept dating back to the sixties, called the “second system effect.” The second system effect is the second try at solving a problem, the one where you try to fix all the shortcomings of the first solution, and is generally doomed to failure. This is true because the second system is too ambitious too succeed. It suffers from “feature creep,” in which every little feature anyone could think of makes its way into the system, destroying any sort of conceptual integrity that might have been there. The added complexity makes it unstable to the point that it’s not usable or secure. The second system is dangerous, and to this day, you should never buy version 2.0 of any software program. Stick with 1.0 or wait for 3.0.

I have been writing software for a long time, and I generally try to avoid the second system effect by jumping directly to version 3.0. Actually, that’s not true; I generally write the first version in a quick-and-dirty manner, and quite often leave it at that. But if it is a piece of software with any importance, one that will be in use for a number of years, I find some faults with it. I think of all the things that are missing. Then I begin to write it again. The trick is not to finish writing it again, because I know it’s going to suck; I just work on a design and carry out the implementation until I see the warts start to bubble up. Then I stop, and try to learn what would have made the second version a failure. About half the time I decide that 1.0 wasn’t so bad after all, and the other half of the time I write the third version with less ambition and more wisdom.

The pattern of the second system is visible outside of the world of software. If you look at any situation long enough, you will see its flaws and shortcomings, and seek to remedy them. Do so with too much ambition and you will fail; in trying to please everyone, you may end up pleasing nobody at all.

At this time in my life, I’m facing version 2.0 of a lot of things and wondering at what point it will become obvious that I’m being too ambitious. There are a number of changes going on where I feel like I have an opportunity to start fresh, which is both good and bad. The bad part about starting fresh is the tendency to be too greedy. I have a lot more experience in the world of software with realizing when I’ve bitten off more than I can chew, and that it’s time to scale back if I want to succeed. In life, not so much. Sooner or later I expect the warts to start surfacing, and hopefully it will become more clear to me what really needs to be fixed, what solutions are worse than the problem, and what was best left alone in the first place.

I’ve mentioned this before, and I can’t help but think that it sounds presumptuous to do so repeatedly, but I’m going to do it anyway. I don’t want anything for my birthday. I already have pretty much everything I want that comes in a wrapped box.

Since I feel that some people will feel obligated to get me something, I have wrestled for the last couple months with trying to figure out some non-gift suggestions. My first thought was for charitable donations in my name, but I honestly could not figure out any cause that was particularly meaningful to me; this is not to say that there aren’t worthy charities out there, I just have some trouble identifying with them.

Next, I thought maybe a phone call or card would be nice. Actually, I still think it’s not a bad idea, but it sort of nonspecific.

Tonight, I was inspired by the phrase, “it’s the thought that counts.” So my question is, if money was no object, what would you get for me? It seemed sort of cool because I do know some rather thoughtful and creative people who would come up with some genuinely creative thoughts. Then, I thought, it’s still sort of materialistic. What if time were no object? A little more interesting, but then I think it begins to get into the territory where most people would rather just buy something at the store than do all that thinking.

So, I’m back to nothing. Don’t get me anything. I have just about everything that I could want, and the more I get, the more difficult it becomes to appreciate what I have.