isoglossia — pending reconstruction

This month we haven’t had a lot of time to get much of anything done, as so much of our time and energy has been taken up with saying to each other “oh my god, this one is so fat ” and “how did he get so MASSIVE?” and “honey, would you please take this enormous baby from me before my arms SNAP OFF?” Not unrelated: there can no longer be any denying the fact that my head is becoming host to hairs that are grey. So thanks a lot, both of you guys. Your mother doesn’t have to worry about the greying of her hair, because she informs me every seven minutes about how she is losing her hair so rapidly that she will be entirely bald by [fill in some date that will have already passed by the time this post posts].

Not entirely unrelated to the whole greying sentiment: a friend’s comment on the above picture recently was Fast-forward 15 years to you and Magda coming back from a weekend away and finding the boys in the midst of a kegger–they’ll be wearing the exact same expressions.

Somehow, 15 years seems optimistically distant.

The temptation is strong to stay with the black-and-white theme, but I don’t think we can sustain it. Could you live without seeing the lovely leafy-green shade of Adam’s front-room potty?

The potty training mentioned in last month’s report has been a resounding success. The rugs are back in place (funny story about that, actually, you’d never guess what happened) and Adam, you are nearly letter-perfect with the whole toilet usage thing. You hop out of bed in the morning and proudly announce the status of your overnight diaper to be “dry and bone” before releasing the A.M. floodgates. Mishaps have become extremely rare and marked by a level of distress that indicates how deeply invested you are in the whole potty thing. Either that or how utterly we have warped you psychologically. Already. You also display a pride in each deuce you drop that is frankly pathological.

“DROP DOOOOOOOOCE! ”

Additions to your vocabulary this month include ‘wipe bottom’ and ‘turtle-head’, though you have yet to learn to differentiate between the crayoning and non-crayoning varieties. Sorry, were you eating?

It turns out that “Operation: Soggy Crotch” was something of a misnomer, and you manage to keep dry and bone nearly constantly. Still, minor mishaps do occur sporadically. We have found that teaching you to dismiss this phenomenon as “sweaty pants” saves a lot of changes of underpants.

A few weeks ago we took you to Ikea to buy a gugalnik. Even though you remain sticklike, you’ve finally outgrown your favorite pastime of stripping my legs of hair and connective tissue through your game of BOUNCE!BOUNCE!BOUNCE!PAPADODIS! So we did the only logical thing and drove two hours to buy you a piece of plastic to replace your father.

You had a great time giving the thing a lengthy test ride at Ikea, but the real fun began when you brought it home. You’ve got a special little non-slip area rug for localizing the gugalnik, and you proceeded to push it to its limits, rocking it up onto its very ends in an attempt to launch yourself into the troposphere through its sketchy Swedish rocking motion, while howling, “ADAM ROCKIN’ OUT GOO-GOW-NIIIIIK!” For like five minutes, and then you go back to my hairless, swollen ankle. So worth it.

By the way, your hideous mouth scar has nearly disappeared already. These days you maintain a selection of bruises that gives you the look of a banana that’s spent a few too many days at the bottom of the rucksack. You still haven’t learned the true meaning of Crackatoa.

On the phonetics front, you’ve learned to pronounce your brother’s name, so ‘Ike’ may disappear as one of his many nicknames. Edging it out is newcomer ‘Turducken’, which Magda didn’t believe existed and had to Google, which results appalled her. APPALLED. I hope that the pictures will afford adequate explanation of this name.

For the metaphorically challenged, we also call him ‘Fatman’ a lot.

Alek, you really are amazing us with all this growing. These reports need a little more to go on, however, so this month I’d like to mention only briefly that we’ve been supplementing your diet with formula and that you seem avid enough for whatever’s on offer once your mother’s generous bounty has been drained. You seem impatient to amass the necessary strength to get mobile ahead of schedule, probably so you can sabotage the gugalnik to extract your revenge for all the facial licking Adam has been subjecting you to lately. You’re pinned there in the bibka, able to do nothing more than wave your little sausage arms around ineffectually, occasionally punching yourself in the face while your brother hovers moistly above you. It must drive you mental.

With help from your mother, you’ve been working on the basic foundations of any reasonable martial arts training regimen, things like rolling over, sitting up, not having your head bob back and forth like a sunflower in a stiff breeze, those kinds of things. You’re progressing nicely, and already have gone through lots of changes. Last month I mentioned what a good sleeper you are, and that continues, mostly, to be true.

You could still work on the independent fart, Ike — this is a skill not to be underestimated, but overall you’ve been on a course of constant improvement. Our favorite development in this area has to be how enthusiastically interactive you’ve become lately. In your first four months of life you have already mastered the play-with-me smile and good-natured laughter, and have even begun singing us little songs here and there. Although there are still two months left in the hospital’s six-month exchange program, we’ve already decided to keep you.

Huge thanks go to your mama for doing so much work with the pictures again this month, including taking many of the better ones. And Flickr has improved the slideshow interface, just in case you can’t live without seeing 50,000 pictures of Adam making the sour face.