That boy ain't right

my son is trying to murder me

Let me count the ways:

1. Braining me with blunt objects.
   

   I was lying on the floor, playing with him, when he careened off around a corner, laughing. I rolled over, idly playing with one of his toys, when I heard him careening back. I rolled back over to find my son, insanely laughing, holding the TiVo remote in his hand, which he chucked directly at my head. He then laughed at me as I lay there groaning.

2. Braining me again with a door handle.
   

   It was my morning to take care of him and make him breakfast. However, I'd forgotten to do my business before addressing his needs, so he was running around the house while I groggily had my moment, sitting on the pot in an extremely tired fog, head hung down low. He walked in the bathroom, obsessed with the toilet paper a little, and then wandered over to the tub to look at his bath toys. I hung my head down low again, and looked up only to see the grinning face of my son as he sent the doorknob slamming into my head, Iraqi-prison style. He ran off as I sat there groaning.

3. Slicing my nose open.
   

   I don't seem to learn. I was lying on the kitchen floor, playing with him. Although I was wary about blunt objects being hurled in my cranial direction -- at least I'd learned that much -- he didn't need any sort of weapon, as he took two of his fingers, inserted them in both my nostrils and gave a vicious, vigorous tug upward. Again, with an evil grin on his face. Since we'd been a bit neglectful about clipping his nails, I felt the drip drip drip of blood as I held my nose, groaning. It dripped all over the floor, and to add insult to injury, my son started playing in my blood.

4. Driving me insane.
   

   Last night, we made two grievous errors. The most severe first: we disrupted his nightly routine and put him straight to bed without giving him a bath first. The second: we put him to bed at somewhere around 9PM. Both of these in combination prompted 4 or 5 hours of solid screaming with zero letup. Eventually around midnight we both got a clue and gave him a bath and then put him to bed, but then he only slept for 5 hours before waking up again, screaming. Teething? No. Gas? Possibly, but probably not. Medical problem? Not likely, as he calmed down while watching "My Life on the D List" among other things. Creature from Satan's bowels? I leave it up to you, dear reader.

   He is asleep now, after having screamed solidly for about an hour -- M gave up trying to deal with him and just put him in his solitary confinement cell crib, screaming all the while. We're hoping he sleeps 5 hours or something, just for a little sanity. But both of us know it is not to be. He will wake up happy as if nothing had happened, ready to make another attempt on my life when I'm unawares. Joke's on him, though, since I may eat a bullet first or at least put up an ad on Craigslist for one healthy white baby.

Holy shit, kid. (Hello, Oedipus.)

how to be a nanny - do's and don'ts

DO:

• Make a big deal about how you want to be a chef, and that you'll cook meals as practice.


• Demonstrate all-round helpfulness by doing laundry, cleaning up after LM, cleaning rooms in addition to normal duties.


• Be very good with LM.


• Lull your employers into a false sense of security. Not enough to get yourself fired, but certainly enough so you can take them for everything they've got.

DON'T:

• Cook anything for your employers after the first few weeks. In fact, it's worthwhile to hint that your employers should be cooking their own damn selves. Eat expensive grocery items out of their fridge, and then concoct shopping lists that include still more expensive grocery items.


• Have the presence of mind to check on the laundry you're doing for yourself, presumably to save quarters. When the garage floods, it's very important not to tell your employers how this situation came about.


• Communicate well. It's imperative that you interrupt the workday of both parents to babble into the phone in a very high-pitched voice (rather like a squeeze toy), at a very high rate of speed. End all phone calls with "oksothishappenedsorrybyeeeee!!"


• Share the TV. It's very necessary to keep the entire history of Dawson's Creek and Oprah saved on the TiVo forever, even if you've seen these particular shows many times before.


• Demonstrate complete reliability. Make sure to call every so often and announce that you're sick that day. Keeps 'em on their toes. It's especially important to do this after flooding the garage the day before.

OK, maybe this sounds like the rant of some overly-privileged white suburbanite, but... damn.

things I learned over this past weekend

1. My son, in his element, looks like The Littlest Bond Villain.
2. Any male in our household will instantly be attracted to things involving lots and lots of water.
3. Although I did not learn this about myself this past weekend specifically, it was certainly reinforced for the umpteenth time: it does not take alcohol to make me embarrass myself in front of my own son. (The next logical step was sitting in it.)
4. Parents, perhaps in part because they have a right to be, are downright cruel human beings. For some reason, in this particular area of the San Jose Children's Discovery Museum, we saw fit to dress our boy in a headscarf, and he saw no reason to remove it. In fact, he completed his ensemble by clutching two miniature Chinese teacups, and then he set off running all over the area like some demented cross-dressing midget tea pusher. What I learned: my son has his daddy's 1) sense of theatrics; 2) manic/demonic energy; 3) lack of any shame whatsoever. Why the hell can't you run around in a museum with teacups and a headscarf, after all? The only thing missing was LM going up to other toddlers and asking if they had any tea for his bunghole.

coolest rubber duckies EVAR

I heard once (OK, it was on boardgamegeek.com, so it's definitely a self-interested source) that board games were "crack for smart people".

I should really stop looking at related links from that site -- mainly because following such links leads me to online toy stores that might get me to spend way too much money on my son.

For example, take a look at the rubber duckies listed here. Holy crap, I think LM needs a Space Duck, a Fashion Duck and a Quick Duck with a fast quickness.

Stuff like this would make anyone want to take more baths.

obnoxious cuteness

Spring into spring with our new selection of happy, non-teething babies! Frazzled, unshaven and tired parent free with purchase! (Limit 2 per household.)

(Ah, the advantages of working for a large retail company -- they may plan "kids at work" days poorly, but the photography facilities are top-notch.)

fingerpainting? or a meditation on the downfall of our consumer society?

Or both?

(There may be pictures of our young Jackson Pollock at work. Needless to say, I think I know how we're painting his new toy chest.)

*sniff* that's my boy...

Who knew -- if you sucker-punch the horrible and disturbing Boohbah in the stomach, it makes LM laugh hysterically!

Who knew -- if you make Elmo act like a codependent with psychotic abandonment issues, it makes me laugh hysterically!

Now, I hope, it's definitive

After a 45-min visit with the pediatric neurologist, we know the following:

There's no autism.
There's no retardation.
There's no deafness.
There are no sensory integration issues.
There are even no delays.

Finally (I hope), this is the end. Other than the fact that he's incredibly willful and is basically a stuntman child, he's just a quote-unquote "normal" boy in every respect.

My son's a goddamn Tiger tank.

He's so much of a tank that he runs around at parties with his pants off, viz:

Just like daddy!

little bugger's been moonlighting on us

...because apparently he's been publishing reviews as a food and hotel critic:

I'm sorry to say that our little boy is a lousy tipper, too. I don't know where we failed...

take that, dochole!

L just started crawling in earnest this morning. He's been threatening to for a while; he'll get on all fours, crawl maybe a step or two, think better of it and settle into his commando crawl again. Or he'll reconsider and just sit up.

Today was different. You could see the gears turning in his head; he finally got it, that he could just book his butt over to the other side of the room and play with drawers before Mommy or Daddy gets wise, if only he crawled there. He crawled at the physical therapist's office. He pulls himself to standing like he's done it for ages already, complete with an expression of absolute boredom on his face. He sequenced the genome for an endangered rodent. He picks things up off the floor after he's dropped them there. He puts blocks back in the plastic jug after he's gotten them out. (Well, maybe I was making the middle one up.)

He's so curious about his world and everything in it (particularly shiny things -- that's our magpie) that the PT said he's not retarded, since retarded kids aren't curious about their environment in the way that L is.

"Curious", maybe, isn't really applicable to L. "Attacks life with both friggin hands while making dinosaur noises" is probably more appropriate -- Mammamer now calls it his war cry.

My son has a war cry before I do? Awesome!

shards

I'm sort of on automatic pilot right now -- consider it blogarrhea -- as my coping mechanism of choice. Bear with me.

1. One of my favorite movies of all time is Robert Altman's Short Cuts, a collection of Raymond Carver's short stories stitched together in Altman's typical overlapped-conversational style. (Visitors to our place will notice the large poster hanging in our living room.) It's a movie about the awful things that people do to one another in relationships and marriages, maybe because of boredom or deep pain long remembered, and about how things can happen even in the safest of environments. After the trauma of going to see Munich (on our date night no less), I thought about how being a parent slowly strips you of the ability to render things in abstractions: that what's happening on the screen, even if engineered for maximum versimilitude, is still only a movie and not directly involving you. In Short Cuts, Andie McDowell and Bruce Davison have a secure and loving marriage (unlike almost every other relationship in the rest of the movie), but their 8-year-old son is hit by a car and dies after fighting for his life in the hospital.

   Andie McDowell made me cry every time I saw it. I don't think I can watch it again for a long time, especially as it hurts me even just typing it.

   There's a bit of typical Altman dark humor after that: this happens after she buys her child's birthday cake from the local baker. The baker, angry and drunk after not getting paid for the cake for such a long time, starts leaving anonymous and threatening phone messages.

   By the end of the movie, they find out who's been leaving the messages; Andie McDowell makes me cry all over again, with the fury of a grieving mother -- but what I really remember is that the baker redeems himself somewhat -- he offers them some of his muffins, saying that "eating is good at a time like this." It sounds less redemptive than it actually is, but it's the way he says it, as if he's offering up whatever he possibly can once he knows the enormity of what he's done to these people. (While it's somewhat of a weak plot device to tie all the separate story threads together, he also protects the grieving parents from the minor Los Angeles earthquake that ends the movie.)

Similarly, I don't think I can read some of what Carver wrote -- and damn it all to hell, he was one of my favorite writers. And fuck it, I have to bother myself by finding the particular poem that got made into that particular Short Cuts section: Lemonade.

The man could write, and he could write about grief (or maybe the male side of grief, anyway) like no writer I've ever seen.

I choose, now, to remember the Carver poem I had done in calligraphy for M on Valentine's day one year:

“Hummingbird”

Suppose I say summer,
write the word “hummingbird,”
put it in an envelope,
take it down the hill
to the box. When you open
my letter you will recall
those days and how much,
just how much, I love you.


He wrote that when he already knew he wasn't going to survive his advancing cancer. Although some may choose to read it as a dying man's desperate clinging to life, I choose to read it as a joyous affirmation of life.



2. Another movie I'm unsure about is another one of my favorites: Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth. Although the last section, in Helsinki, almost seemed like something tacked on the first couple times I saw it, it would probably be hard for me to watch it again, if at all: it's about the Finnish taxi driver and his wife making the decision to be emotionally invested in their premature baby's health, when it had little chance to live -- and both of them end up dying inside when their baby dies. And the movie even ends with sunrise in a cold, forbidding Helsinki neighborhood. The saving grace that'll get me to watch this movie again, every time: Roberto Begnini's section in Rome. All his hilarious talk about screwing farm animals and vegetables is one of the funniest scenes ever committed to film.

   Needless to say, see these movies before you become a parent, please.



3. Like the characters in Night on Earth, M and I have made the conscious decision to keep the faith, to disbelieve (oh, the irony of faith in disbelief) in spite of the fact that this Stanford evaluator may be right. We don't think so, though. Watch me as I move to anger: after talking more with M tonight, I find out more extreme craptitude and flat-out incompetence -- L's first Stanford evaluator actually did things with him; she played with him, handed him toys, interacted with him, rang bells around him, and was generally a cheerful grandmotherly type who put a lot of our fears to rest, at least temporarily. This particular evaluator (from what I hear -- I couldn't be there... fucking work) had the worst bedside manner straight out of Central Casting: when presented with a sick, squalling infant who'd just been woken from a deep sleep, she didn't interact with him but tested his reflexes and gave him a couple toys. When he understandably told her to fuck off in so many infant gurgling protests, she delivered her diagnosis. Then, with my wife and the nanny both in tears and wondering about our child's future, she patted my wife on the knee and told her that "we'll see him again in 8 months".

   And, just like the baker in Short Cuts, she eventually realized the enormity of what she'd done, and called my wife and tearfully apologized, over and over again. However, unlike Lyle Lovett, we suspect that she came to this realization not because she finally got a clue but because she'd been called on the carpet after conferring with the other specialists at the hospital.



4. And, to tie all this back to the expected slight narcissism: the last play I was in before we had L was Wit, by Margaret Edson. Of all the things I'm thinking about tonight, this resonates the most -- it's about how an educated, confident, even imperious and arrogant person can be brought to the depths of vulnerability, dependence and humiliation by disease and illness. Needless to say, it wasn't quite the fun family farce to end one's theatrical career on. The main character is a professor and noted scholar of John Donne (my favorite poet of all time), who finds herself with terminal cancer, being treated at the university's teaching hospital, where the staff are largely indifferent, and the local hotshot researchers (my character was the lead hotshot researcher, basically the villain) are more interested in her as a scientific curiosity rather than a human being with emotional needs.

   Go figure that we would be educated people, dependent on a teaching hospital to give us precisely this same treatment.



5. I've mentioned this before, but I need to say it again here: it would kill me inside if I couldn't read Lord of the Rings to my own son, as my father had done for me and my sister. Or that we couldn't become a game-playing family, as my family was during my tortured teenage years.


6. That said, I'm also struck by something that M's therapist had said to her: human beings are surprisingly and extraordinarily adaptable. This therapist knows of parents who have completely dependent children: they need to be carried out of bed in the morning, they need sponge baths -- these children need everything these parents can give, even when it seems these parents have nothing left. What you do in this situation becomes routine because you have no other option, and you get used to it as a result.


7. I still don't know where we're going in Europe, I guess. It's definitely not Italy, so it might be either Spain or Holland. (Regular readers of M's blog will get this analogy, and I'm too lazy to explain it now.) Not knowing is killing us, but I hope I'm slowly learning to be happy with wherever we end up. As my parents said tonight, it doesn't change their love of him at all.


8. There is always someone worse off than you. I'll spare you the stories that we've heard coming out of the support network, but they're heartbreaking. We were reminded of this before we even had a child: during our trip to Southeast Asia, we only had to walk around for a minute or two to be reminded of this every day. We were swarmed by child beggars at nearly every stop in Cambodia, and we could hear the odd sounds of instruments being played by victims of landmine explosions at the more popular stops. We only had to walk around this or that street in Hanoi, to find slum apartments clogged with extended generations of families, surviving off of dirty water and breathing filthy air clogged with exhaust. And of course then we'd go back to our four-star French hotel with its Christmas tree and officious staff, as if an entire nation of people was there for our convenience. More than a few of the places we visited, particularly in Thailand, were completely wiped away by the tsunami. I can barely even imagine the devastation and ruined lives of the people we'd seen, even just barely. And yet, in spite of all the human misery we saw back then, I wouldn't trade that trip for the world. It's one of the best vacations I've ever had -- it improved us as people, it strengthened our marriage, and I think I can honestly say it changed my life.


9. As a coworker of mine said to me after I broke down at work, mistakenly thinking I'd gotten control: "They shouldn't have said what they said. He needs you to be his advocate, now more than ever."


10. Although it may not seem like it from reading all this depressing stuff, I feel a bit better now after having written it. Really. I still need to process, but it's a bit better.
Posted by brian at 11:05 PM | Comments (0)

On Grief

In many ways, this space is a coping mechanism of sorts. While I may not go into any detail about what happens when we go to the pediatrician, or the strain of day-to-day life in balancing childcare with work while still remaining halfway sane, this collection of fart jokes and petty annoyances has had its purpose in allowing me to deal.

If you've been anywhere near this entry in my wife's blog, you know that reality took a nice big windup and left me a bit broken today. In typical form, I imploded at work, wanting to be somewhere else, most preferably out on the pier next to the building, in the driving rain.

Eventually, I slowly got the better of my emotions -- I'm still processing even now -- and am now damaged but alive. So are we all, I guess.

It might be a particularly American trait, and moreover a technologically-savvy American trait, of not only baring your innermost thoughts and feelings, but doing that to anyone who'll listen. I bring this up because for the most part this space has been for goofy shit -- like I said, fart jokes.

Now, I'm not so sure. I feel that there is still something that I might need to talk about -- but I haven't decided who it should be with. On the one hand, I'm getting an urge to write again, to process the avalanche of emotions I didn't think I would be required to understand and know, and therefore by doing that, whether through execrable poetry, fuzzy photography or both, fight this new pain in my life. Talking is curing, I suppose. That it may also be somewhat of a cry for help and sympathy, that other people might realize that I expected all this to be hard, but not this hard.

On the other hand, there is always the nagging doubt I have that my personal feelings are best dealt with on a personal level and nothing more. That this -- this outpouring of feeling, suffering, anger, hope -- has to end up being for my son's benefit and not my own. Now, mind you, I don't look down on the Divine Miss M in the least for baring her soul this way; it's just that I'm wondering whether my own grief should be publicly shared/tinged with slight narcissism/gaining support from our community of friends, or whether it should be more private, since I don't want anyone's pity and I don't want to hear the "I'm so sorry's" and "if you need anything's" right now, at least.

Simply speaking, I don't trust my confused mix of emotions enough right now to tell whether I want to talk about this or not in a public forum, with all 2 of you. That sounded needlessly hostile, but I think you get what I mean.

Needing sleep and a beer,

B

this is your brain on sugar

...any questions?

Yes, L's first birthday party was big enough that it had to span 2 days, covering all the relatives and friends we could muster, and all the cookies we could stuff ourselves with. We were dumb in this respect -- we had to prepare and clean for the arrival of something like 50 people over that time, and we didn't get a free moment to ourselves, except to get a movie night to ourselves at the local multiplex, for a movie we really shouldn't have seen (Munich). But I digress.

But L was a champ, though! He played and laughed and played some more, and socialized a lot with the babies there, and discovered that Textured Foods and Solid Objects are Really Fucking Cool to shove in your face, if such things are Cake, Cake, and OhmygodisthatmorecakedammitgivememorecakemorecakeMORECAKESUGARSUGARSUGAR!!!!11!! As is evidenced by the coke addict jonesing going on with the hand-shaking in the picture.

But I digress again. Aside from a brief testosterone moment of a few guys watching the game on the 2nd day, there were stratospheric levels of estrogen everywhere (oh the nurturing), no doubt providing contact pregnancies to the unsuspecting. (That picture is like a baby Rorschach test: some people see four babies cheerfully looking at their mommies from a crib. I see a hell of diapers and screaming.)

L was also kind enough to be incredibly photogenic throughout, even providing this moment: Richard Avedon, eat your heart out. (Yes, it's blurry. You try taking artistic pictures of a child in the throes of his first sugar high.)

you talkin' to me?

Because if you can't trick out your bike with a basketball hoop and a clownish sun motif, then the terrorists have won.

why daddy drinks

Mer has her own story of recent events in our house, but I have a few extra impressions from my side of things:

Monday night (my night): baby wakes up at 5. Not a good omen. Doable, but makes you grumpy, especially when you're spoiled by being used to said baby sleeping through the night.

Tuesday evening: watch Batman Begins. Good movie, but images of Scarecrow character are dim harbingers of what is about to befall us. Nightmare imagery cuts too close to home.

Tuesday night (her night): baby wakes up at 3. This is really starting to suck. At least baby is still generally happy, although signs of trouble are increasing. Coworkers are starting to notice hangdog expression, irritability, and impressions of computer keys on face. This would be a problem if other departments weren't more dysfunctional.

Wednesday evening: Sense of fear and trepidation pervades evening. Bad craziness.

Wednesday night (my night): aforementioned scene of horror, screaming and sleeplessness. Entertaining thoughts of jumping off bridges. Explain to wife that posting embarrassing pictures of baby boy on Internet does not even begin to compensate for what is befalling us now. Images of wife coming home, finding husband in puddle of booze and urine becoming more prevalent.

Thursday morning: both of us awakened by baby boy promptly somewhere between 7 and 7:30 AM, his normal time for greeting the morning with talking, singing and shouting. Changing of diaper reveals a stunning collection of little poo nuggets. Feeding goes uneventfully. Boy is laughing and happy, which actually makes my mood worse. During the 15 minutes it takes to shuffle from living room to bedroom, there are many reflections on where I went wrong -- how I came to this pass where I am considering committing seppuku with one of L's noisier, more annoying toys.

After a shower, am just barely functional (but, as here, favoring weird sentence structure), but dreading drive to work.

It's not as bad as when L was just a newborn -- between the round-the-clock shifts, mood swings, colicky baby, and M's mom as roommate, there were a couple times where I could actually feel my mind begin to slip away from me, which is a scary thing -- but L is on my bad side. He's grounded an extra day when he's 16.

pictures from NYE L is already apologizing for

L would prefer it if you didn't tell anyone about this or this. He got a little crazy with the formula and his various medications -- he read somewhere you could get a really killer buzz if you mixed one or two of them in your apple and plum sauce -- and the results are what you see here. (We think he heard something about the Japanese rabbit that balances things on its head and decided to try that for himself.) We post these as a warning to him: this is what happens when you have a really mean, mean daddy.

it's the joke that writes itself

So LM has to have a steroid medication in response to his wonderful catalogue of ear infections and colds.

I've taken to calling him "Mr. Schwarzenegger". It's a bit disconcerting as he's already shown himself to be a very strong boy -- I hadn't counted on him being able to bench-press his old man until he was at least 17. And there's also the already-documented 'roid rage quick-to-anger sorts of issues.

The other disconcerting thing is that this medication, just like every other medication given to small children, is meant to have some sort of candy flavor. This time, I'm led to believe, it's an orangey sort of flavor. He sees right through his antibiotics (chalky bubblegum), preferring instead to wail, scream, and spit them all over himself and anyone standing within 5 feet of the medication explosion. His Dimetapp (mediciney grape) goes down far more easily. Invention idea: medicated Now 'N' Laters.

I will now ingest my NyQuil (mediciney black licorice).

closure

Of all the mommy blogs that Mer consults regularly, there was one that had a nice turn of phrase to describe what life is like with an autistic kid.

Before the child arrives in the world, it's as if you're planning to go on a group trip to Italy with your closest friends. There are all the things you do in anticipation of the trip, and you're openly salivating at the prospect of going to the market stalls in Florence, exploring the Vatican's catacombs or climbing the hills in Sicily. Then the child arrives and it's as if you suddenly find yourself alone in Holland.

Holland has its charms, to be sure -- tulips, windmills and Rembrandts -- but it's not the trip to Italy you've been planning so long for, and the one all of your friends are talking about.

Your life is always tinged with regret about missing out on Italy, but you can't let that regret consume you, or else you'll miss what Holland has to offer you.

All of the foregoing is basically a long, roundabout way of saying L's occupational therapist came today for an extended session, where M asked her many questions (through bleary eyes and plenty of sneezes, no doubt). The prognosis: very good. We were congratulated for having the presence of mind to get him checked out early (because the feds end the program once the kid turns 3): props to the Divine Miss M here. He will require lots of therapy, but our little boy will be just fine, just like other little boys, when he is around 3, maybe even earlier when he's around 2. In some areas, such as fine motor skills, he operates at around a 5- or 6-month level; in other areas he operates at an 8- or 9-month level.

All therapy is good therapy. I will be able to do two things with my son every dorky dad wants to do: play games with him (starting at around 3) and read Lord of the Rings to him (starting at around 5).

So we'll be going to Italy after all, but the airline's lost our luggage and we've lost our passports. We've got 1 credit card and some walking money, but our phrasebooks were in our luggage when it got lost.

But to me, travel is all about those times when you're arguing with some comically bored functionary in a government office in broken Italian, when night is falling and you're already on your 2nd day in Italy. (I've never been, but I imagine it's an EU law that any trip to an EU member country must contain this type of interaction with governmental agencies.)

Or it's when you're horribly jet-lagged in Avignon, France, stuck in a heroin-jag hotel next to a major highway, watching what seems like babies eating feces on TV at 4 in the morning. (Yes, this really happened.)

Or it's when you get falsely accused of dumping water on a cop, from 13 stories up in your Tokyo hotel. (This too.)

Sure, there's the temple to Poseidon at Sounion, the Hanoi open-air market, the old city walls and Arab market of Avignon, and the little Shinto shrine around the corner from the pachinko parlor that will change your life. But travel, just like life, is defined by the little setbacks along the way. Besides, the therapists (and me) will be roughhousing with him: fun in the name of therapy. Don't get me wrong: the therapy will be intensive and it will be hard, sometimes.

But I know that through it all, he'll be the happy boy he's always been, and he's got us to help him get through it.

take that, autism!

It's official: after the Stafnord specialist's diagnosis (well, after a series of 5 specialists including an Irish social worker, a dancing bear, a developmental specialist, a physical therapist and a trained monkey with a toy piano -- actually, I was lying about the bear and the monkey), it can finally be said, with a *final* degree of certitude, that Mr. L does not have autism.

He came through like a champ.

However, he is still BabyZilla (although not his prom date Maggie's size... that's just freakin HUGE... ok, let's just call him Jr. Zilla). Still 90-95% for both height and weight. The developmental specialist called him "the heaviest thing on the face of the earth." Big words to live up to. However, the adjective the other specialist used to describe him was "flabby".

I believe this gives me full license as a father to call him "fatty" or "fatso". Or at least come up with some version Baby Boot Camp.

Celebrations are in order...

a few words from L

,l
hjnblk[k,[p. ]
k '
; b lb ygh m

(Bang! Bang! Mongo SMASH!)

my child is turning into a zombie

I hadn't known he was already in a state of putrefaction and reanimation...

...but consider this:

1) The red eyes and mouth full of gore
2) BRAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNS!

lunch nudity!

teething!

I'm waiting for the book

...that will be written 30 years from now, or the guest spots on Montel or Dr. Phil, showing what a horrible horrible parent I am.

I get really visceral, cackling thrills out of putting my son into embarrassing positions, or at least treating him like my own living action figure.

Maybe it's my own perverse revenge on him for screaming in my ear (after throwing up on my shoulder, of course) at 3 in the morning. He's asleep, after all.

Or maybe it's that with no positioning at all, and no intervention on my part, he goes and flips me off in his sleep:

I've produced the littlest gangsta.

choose wisely

Choose one:

Choice A:

Choice B:

21 weeks

Mer promptly took this to work and showed it to everyone.

In proving that "everyone" acts like they're 12 just as I do, most people said that the leg in the picture was actually an enormous penis.

In fact, we decided not to find out anything about gender. However, at various times I thought I saw the tiny meat and two veg... and at other times I thought I saw the three dots that would signify girl bits.

Everything's normal. Placenta, cervix, umbilical cord, feet, heart, head, hands/fingers -- all good.

Mer does, however, have a baseball-sized fibroid that will likely require a C-section, which is just fine by her. She has other fibroids that swim around in there; none of them are affecting fetal growth, however.

I guess everybody's kid looks like the Star Child from 2001 at this stage. One thing's for sure, though: this kid is doomed to have an enormous schnoz, just like either mommy or daddy.

Hee... wait 'till you get a load of daddy, little one!

rhythms

Above all else, I hope you love life and learning. I hope you're infinitely curious about the world and that you recognize that there's beauty there behind all the ugliness and misery.

You're a restless sort; like me, maybe you have a bit too much sugar in your system to begin with, or like your mother, you're wondering whether you left something on, or something unsaid, because you're tossing and turning around in there. Maybe like someone in a dream, but I don't think it's a bad dream. You're highly active when you sleep in there (although you've surprised the hell out of me with just how active you are, I don't think I should be surprised -- after all, you're my child), and you don't really like us eavesdropping on you.

But we do anyway.

You sound like a shortwave broadcast from an alien race, or maybe the engines from a particularly insistent undersea submersible -- which, really, is what you are to begin with. The probabilities are staggering: the right chemical elements, the right electric charge, the right chance meeting of molecules, the right adaptations over millions of years, the right asteroid falling, the right adaptations in intelligence, the right migrations, the right turns in history and social upheaval, the right people falling in love, the right sperm meeting the egg on the wrong night...

...I've done the math and I'm convinced I was drunk on the night you were conceived, little one. Your father, while intelligent, funny, and damn sexy, is neither rich nor does he set the best example at times...

...but we wanted you pretty badly, and now you're here. Stop tossing and turning a little and get some rest. You'll need it, because the world is an extremely frustrating place once you're in it. Sometimes the only sane response really is to take a crap in your pants. And then you drool a little, say a few words of "ooogy dabadadadadada", and then you can face the day. It's not that easy, but it's a start.

We love you, and we can't wait to meet you. See you soon,

Your goofy dad