Boys’ report: 28/3
The last month has been dominated by spurts of growth from both boys. Ike’s has been rather alarming. As previously noted, he doubled his weight shortly after the last monthly report, and has continued both to pack on the weight and to aggressively hone it into solid slabs of muscle. Though it may look like pudding-y flab, don’t be fooled: he’s like a sumo wrestler, eating and crushing and grimacing with no remorse. If he ever manages to move, he’s going to be unstoppable.
But he can’t move, which is more convenient than one sometimes recalls. It seems ludicrous even to think of it now, but there was a time when Adam could not roll over, and therefore could not get into a crawling position, from which he could not stand up, or walk, or hurtle himself around the apartment and onto sharp-cornered furniture in a howling sulking fit over not getting a Barbie
Ike, you seem to have other tastes. You relentlessly work out, toning and strengthening the back, neck, shoulder, and abdominal muscles you will need for accomplishing everything listed in the paragraph above, not to mention kicking the ass of your role model in all of it. There must be some special pediatric terminology for this phase, but I’ll just call it the ‘trying to hurl myself out of caregiver’s arms’ period. It’s scary how often you nearly achieve this goal, but as we don’t have a mop, I wish you’d stop it. Or just start walking already and seal our sorry fates.
Your mother will probably destroy me for not putting this part in the first sentence of the story, but your sleep patterns have markedly improved this month. You seem to be getting the hang of the nighttime schedule, the one where ‘sleep’ is higher on the priority list than ‘eat’. Or ‘grunt painfully in effort to fart’. And this is despite the fact that your appetite is not diminishing. On the contrary, one would be forgiven for thinking we are methodically starving you so that you can grow up to become a world-class jockey and support us in our dotage, so avid are you for the teat. Well, except for the fact that you look much like a sumo wrestler. Yesterday your mother cruelly positioned you perhaps two centimeters off from optimal and you latched on anyway, immediately producing a small but livid hickey in a spot I have but scant access to. I felt envious and jealous and proud all at the same time.
So there is talk of adding formula to your diet, to accelerate the sumo training and strike terror into your brother, which cannot happen a moment too soon.
Despite all the exercise and this constant hunger, you are turning out to be a highly congenial baby. This month you began smiling and have pretty well not stopped, except when your brother slurms you with his over-zealous kissing, when your grins turn to furrowed brows of consternation. You lie there and coo and wave your massive limbs around and barely make any fuss at all no matter what we do to you. This is nature’s way of keeping the species viable, because if you were at all like your baby-fox-in-leghold-trap of a brother was at three months old, you’d both be in the Dumpster
While Adam’s been expanding his expertise with his vast collection of Thomas
- OWN! OWN!
- Papa do dis!
- “Ai wuv yu”
- “Enopee ee-aitch!”
Actually, your alphabet skills are moving along very quickly in a way that makes us more smug than feels right, so we find it somewhat comforting that you can’t always remember where the alphabet actually begins. But you love the song and ask for it constantly. Other favorite songs of the moment include the utter horror that is the theme to the BBC kids’ show “Big Cook, Little Cook” and “Kamma Meeah”, which is triggered by finding or assembling Legos
Red, gold, and gree, eee, eeen.
Adam, before I begin with this part, I just want to say that we are deeply appreciative of your efforts and extremely proud of the progress you have made on the project we began over the long Easter weekend. I also want you to know that the internet as your parents knew it will no longer exist by the time you are 10, so don’t worry about your father’s lack of discretion or anything like that. Of course I am talking about Operation: Soggy Crotch.
In the last monthly report I mentioned ever-so-passingly that Adam was beginning that inevitable move toward that one true hallmark of civilized behavior (no, I am not talking about linking) — toilet use. The voiding captured in that photograph was a one-off, a fluke, a flash in the pan. But in the last few days, real strides have been made. On the Saturday before Easter we rolled up the carpets and bought all the paper towels in aisle 7, along with 900,000 pairs of tiny boy briefs. We rolled up our sleeves and got out the candy.
Yes, candy. We had the brilliant idea of rewarding you with Easter candy each time you achieve success in potty usage. We figure that there is no way there could possibly be any long-term psychological repercussions of causing you to associate your earliest experiences of genito-urinary control with pastel-colored sugary eggs and gigantic anthropomorphized rabbits. If your first deuce in the potty is rewarded with gushing parental approval and a chocolate bunny, how could that possibly be a bad thing? How? HOW?
We’ve been doing the “chocolate bribery toilet training” thing with M & Ms, and it works well. No sooner has she sat on the bowl and started to tinkle than she squeals “chocolate, blue one!” (although she never seems to mind what colour she gets).
Comment by Simon — Friday 13 April 07 @ 10.21 MDT+2.00
Whoa – just saw the little Belgian flag next to my name. Cool.
Comment by Simon — Friday 13 April 07 @ 10.22 MDT+2.00
Glad to know we’re not the only ones in danger of warping their little minds with bathroom treats.
You like the little flag, I hope? It’s turn-offable. This guy is indirectly responsible for that little innovation. Gotta keep it fresh.
Comment by sgazzetti — Friday 13 April 07 @ 11.06 MDT+2.00
Wow, great post! Nice usage of the <acronym> tag and the second person when describing Ike.
Comment by Erik R. — Friday 13 April 07 @ 13.01 MDT+2.00
Next time you want to freshen up your blog, you might try a Flickr Flash Badget Wordpress Widget. :-)
I only stopped using it because of a routing problem with my server making outbound connections.
Comment by Erik R. — Friday 13 April 07 @ 13.06 MDT+2.00
Actually, if you could come up with some kind of icon that denotes “British, but married to an Italian and living in Belgium”, that’d be cool.
Comment by Simon — Friday 13 April 07 @ 13.51 MDT+2.00
We’ll get right on that, Simon.
Uh, you do realize that for that plug-in to work, both you and Paola will need to have chips implanted, right? Inside of left elbow seems to work best.
Comment by sgazzetti — Friday 13 April 07 @ 13.56 MDT+2.00
Love the picture of Adam sitting and ruminating in the living room (?)! to be able to sit on one’s ankles! Oh, what flexibility was possible at that age. If I tried that position now, I’d be 911-ing for a team of chiropractors to massage me into an uncoiled position.
As are your usual standards, your repartee on progressions into childhood are gems. I imagine you in a white lab coat, taking notes on a clipboard and murmurring into a tricked-out iPod your subtle perceptions, minimizing the observation’s effect on the actions before you.
Comment by DarkoV — Friday 13 April 07 @ 15.42 MDT+2.00
I’m with DarkoV; This is, once again, a pleasure to read. I look forward to these each month in fact.
I should probably get out more.
Comment by Jane — Friday 13 April 07 @ 22.17 MDT+2.00
It’s nice to hear words of appreciation for these pieces I write so utterly selfishly. The boys grow so fast and so enjoyably that I fear that if I don’t take notes it will pass us by and be gone forever. Which of course it will in any case.
I have long been a great fan of the <acronym> tag, which is like the Mickey Rourke of tags if <anchor> is the Bruce Willis of HTML. Sorry, that analogy is an 18-year-old indirect reference to a memory of a ghost of a joke and is for exactly one person (tell me if you see it, Rashid).
The white lab coat of DarkoV’s imagining is actually a vomit-flecked fleece pullover.
Jane probably should get out more, but then again, our not getting out more (or at all) is how and why these things get written in the first place.
Comment by sgazzetti — Friday 13 April 07 @ 23.15 MDT+2.00
Sweet lens baby baby…
Like we didn’t miss you enough already.
You betch yer a__
Comment by gaoo — Saturday 14 April 07 @ 22.32 MDT+2.00
The way you describe Ike reminds me so much of So. Except the farting; for us, that didn’t start until he developed his insane love of hard-boiled eggs. But he was all muscular and doing push-ups all the time, and he still is. He’s buff. He has baby buns of steel. 36 inches and 36 pounds already! By the time he’s 13, we’re no longer going to be able to afford to feed the little booger. He will have to learn to hunt with the wolves.
Comment by jdog — Sunday 15 April 07 @ 22.49 MDT+2.00
Very, very cute!!!
Comment by Stephen — Tuesday 17 April 07 @ 21.35 MDT+2.00
Mr. Sgazzetti,
This picture? Is this a completely unadulterated picture, i.e., no Photoshop clean-up/brightening of the sky, the trees, Adam’s features? Or was there any of this happening?
Just wondering, cuz the colors are so vivid. Compliments to your skills, your camera, your son, and Slovenija’s clean airs.
Comment by DarkoV — Wednesday 18 April 07 @ 21.51 MDT+2.00
DarkoV: Posterized tulips nothwithstanding, we do minimal editing as a rule. This is out of laziness/busyness more than any sort of principal. If we do open a picture in an editing program, it’s likely to be for routine cropping, straightening, and perhaps a little exposure adjusting, rarely anything more extensive.
I had to look at the data Flickr maintains to see if I had made any changes to this picture, and it appeared that some minor adjustments were made. iPhoto (which I use for most quick editing) preserves by default the original if you monkey with anything. Here’s the unaltered picture as it exited the camera:
A quick look tells me that any changes were pretty minor; maybe I tweaked the contrast or brightness a little.
I’m glad you like it. While we LOVE our primary camera (a Pentax *ist DS — yes, that name is daft, but it’s a GORGEOUS camera to work and play with) I think the magic of this particular shot is in the lens: I took this photo with a 50mm f/2 lens that is old, humble, and battered. But it’s lovely glass, and the fact that it is fully manual forces you and the camera to work a little harder to eke a good picture out of it. Thanks for appreciating our work!
(It doesn’t hurt if the kid is cute to begin with. Perfect spring sunshine helps, too.)
Comment by sgazzetti — Wednesday 18 April 07 @ 22.44 MDT+2.00