Happy Birthday!

Send in a better picture Britt! Happy B-Day!Happy B-day Daniel! and Happy B-Day Adam!

Happy Birthday Daniel!!!

Ok so I know that this is a day late but we were busy... Any how we just wanted to let all of you know that Daniel is 1 year old. If you want to read more about what we have been up to there is more info on our blog..
Hope to see your comments there. I will try to post some pictures this week from his party.
Love ya
Adam, Betsy, and Daniel

Valley Middle School Chess Champ!

Sam participated in the Valley Middle School Chess Tournament on Saturday, March 28th. After placing 11th in the school tournament the week before, he had no problem defeating the other school champions to take 1st place in the District. As a result, he also took his team to 1st place.

Temple Day!

TEMPLE SEALING!!!

Alex and Jazmine are getting sealed to our family!

Saturday April 11 at 12:00 in the Ogden Temple.

Anyone who wants to go needs to be at the temple at 11:30.

If you want to go and can go, let us know so we can get a bigger room if we need to thanks!

Birthday

I just wanted to say Happy Birthday to Josh, we love you.

Belated Birthday wishes!

Ok, so as I crawl out from under the rock. Here are the Birthday wishes I missed.

March 3-HAPPY BIRTHDAY ANNA! (she's the one on the left but I absolutely LOVE this picture so I had to use it)

March 4-HAPPY BIRTHDAY BECKY (though I heard that she prefers to be called "Becca" now?)
MARCH 19th (HEY that is today! I'm not late for this one) HAPPY BIRTHDAY Kyle!
and because Spring is a very busy time for me at work (at least for now while I have a job in the school system). Here are Birthday wishes for some coming up!

March 22-HAPPY Birthday JOSH!
I'll try and get on to post a picture for Brittany for her birthday (MAR 29) and I am positive Betsy has a better picture for Daniel's first birthday (Mar 29) than I do. But for now I have to go get ready for a stake meeting.
Oh and if you want to see what Frank has been up to lately check out our blog at kastenlife.blogspot.com I have a video of his "dance" taken at our friend's birthday. I would post it here but it takes a REALLY long time to upload videos.

OH and Congrats to Ross and Cherry, Cade is beautiful! Happy BDay to Melody and KC (sorry I missed it but glad others jumped in). I like the new background too Rachel, good luck with the job interview. ANd WOW! Anna I am so impressed that you are presenting at a conference. THat is really cool! I too would love to hear about the "adventures in poop".
Love you all!

Update: About Anna by Anna

Thanks for the post Dad, although I'm not sure why you said I "declined to show us a picture" since you never asked. :) In any case, this is a picture of me and my boyfriend Chris at a party at a friend's house in January.

Here's the info on our study that's being presented at the SRCD meeting:

People often modify their speech when speaking to infants (using higher and more varied pitches than normal speech, this is sometimes referred to as "motherese." Our professor (Rebecca Brand) has done work looking into a similar phenomenon with regards to how people modify their actions to infants, termed "motionese."

Our study was designed to learn more about how mothers might modify their demonstrations of objects depending on the child's age and the type of object being demonstrated.

In our study we analyzed videos of mothers showing several different toys to their infants (6-8mo and 11-13mo). Moms demonstrated several different functions of each object in whatever way they wanted to for as long as they wanted to. Three of the objects had a clear goal (like pushing buttons and sliding buttons to open a lockbox and get a key) and three of the objects did not have clear goals (like a collection of little magnetic pieces that fit together in a ball-like shape).

We found that for the objects without goals, the moms were more likely to repeat a single action over and over again. Whereas for objects with goals, moms were more likely to demonstrate actions in a sequence. This is likely to be useful in helping babies develop their understanding of sequences as well as cause and effect. Moms of 11-13mo babies also spent more time demonstrating objects with a goal than moms of younger babies, possibly indicating that moms are sensitive to the attentional capabilities of their children.

I worked on this project throughout the school year last year with the other student authors, and over the summer with the 2nd and 3rd authors. I was the student who was mainly responsible for putting together our submission to SRCD, so I got to be first author.

I'm really excited to go to the conference and meet all the big-shots in developmental psychology!

In the mean time I'm plugging away at my current research for my thesis. I'm studying social cognition in dogs, along with one other psych senior. We're conducting separate studies, but since we're both using dogs, we run our participants together. You can try to check out our website here: Reed College K9 Research Team but some people have had trouble viewing it (I think Firefox works best).

What I'm studying specifically is whether or not dogs have the ability to tell what is new and old in the experience of others. From my bio on our website: "This ability to separate what oneself has seen from what another person has seen is an important developmental milestone in toddlers and is part of a set of social cognitive abilities that psychologists call "theory of mind". The ability to understand what is new and old for another person has not been successfully demonstrated in chimpanzees, but previous research in canine social cognition suggests that dogs may have this rather advanced ability!"

Phew! I hope that was enough of an update! I guess if anyone is interested I can post about some of the...adventures...we've experienced while conducting our study with dogs.

Anna

Anna turned 22 earlier this month but hasn't given us a recent picture. Here however is a glimpse of what she'll be doing in the next few weeks. Convenient that she gets a nice trip to Denver. We're proud of you Anna. Put up some more details of your study. Love Dad


SRCD Biennial Meeting
April 2-4, 2009 - Denver, Colorado


(2-096) Poster Session
Poster Session 7

Convention Center: Exhibit Hall B, Friday 10:20 am - 12:00 pm
145. Structure in Mothers' Demonstrations to Infants of Objects With and Without a Salient End-Goal
Anna J. McGee, Jonathan F. Kominsky, Kristen E. L. Briggs, Aline Michelle Grueneisen, Tessa Orbach, Rebecca J. Brand


Welcome to SRCD

The Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) was established in 1933 by the National Research Council of the National Academies of Science. The history of the Society's origin and evolution parallels that of the academic specialty of child development. [more]
SRCD Today

The Society is a multidisciplinary, not-for-profit, professional association with a membership of approximately 5,500 researchers, practitioners, and human development professionals from over 50 countries.

The purposes of the Society are to promote multidisciplinary research in the field of human development, to foster the exchange of information among scientists and other professionals of various disciplines, and to encourage applications of research findings. Our goals are pursued through a variety of programs with the cooperation and service of our governing council, standing committees, and members.

Melody Sings

BY popular demand, here are Melody and Gavin in their premier public performance, the opening act of the Terra Nova 2009 Talent Show.

Enjoy

New School Picture

Here is Kleigh's New School Picture

Happy Brithday KC - Again.

Still my favorite picture.

I couldn't figure out how to add the picture to a comment ...

Happy Birthday KC!

love ya,

Mom

happy birthday kc

just wanted to wish kc a very happy 26th birthday. hes thrilled hes no longer eligible for the draft.
this is the best pic i have of him. he seems to think its more fun to hide from the camera. this pic is from 2006 or 2007 from when he deployed.
happy birthday sweetheart kleigh and i love you
jenn

Happy Birthday Melody

Melody turns 15 today (about 4pm). She's so excited she stayed up all night, posting on Facebook at 4am. Here is the cake Michele made for her birthday party. Taking ideas from the Food Network cake show. Melody got a guitar for her birthday (a few weeks ago) and is performing in the high school talent show this coming Friday.

Melody, have a great year.

Love Dad

As requested . . . pictures

Cade Alan Wolf

And if anyone wants to see his official hospital announcement, it's at SkyLakes.org or:
http://www.newbabynews.net/hospitals/skl13/public/showBaby.pl?babyID=h13-7392

Happy Birthday C.A. Wolf

No pictures yet but;

Cade Alan Wolf
Born Friday, March 6th 2009 at 4:26 am
Just shy of 8 lbs and over 20” long
Congratulations to the proud parents: Cherry and Ross!


(Patti, you missed a few birthdays. )