Tuesday, August 23, 2005

L'enfant de Mille Visages

I've pretty much given up trying to get a "nice" picture of our son eating lately. For some unknown reason, the high-chair transforms our child into a kind of rubber faced Red Skelton or Jim Carrey character.

See for yourself: these were all taken in a single sitting of breakfast at my inlaw's in Cambridge. Scroll down to see them all.














This is just a sampling. I have 47 shots in total: no two are alike. And believe it or not, for the most part, he was having a good time.

Thursday, August 04, 2005

Overheard Parents on the Upper West Side

Here's a few of my favorite overheard parental conversations I've heard around the neighborhood:

By the elevator of a West End Ave. apartment building:
Exasperated Parent: We've got to do something, and I mean now. This school is failing our kids. There's no structure. They're not learning....[there's] no math. They're certainly not reading anything. It's simply unacceptable...[I mean] what are they doing there all day, playing?
Incredulous Parent: Well it is PRE-school.

At the top of a snowy hill in Riverside Park:
Sincere Parent: Now son, before you can sled down the hill can you remember what daddy taught you about the coefficient of friction?
Forlorn Son: Waaaaaaaahhhhhhh!!!!

Whether these examples are symptomatic of the Upper West Side MPYCs (Mature Parents w/Young Children) or simply our proximity to Columbia University, I don't know, but at the risk of sounding discriminitory, I am beginning to feel like you can be too smart and/or too serious to have kids.

Wednesday, August 03, 2005

Tooths




We have been living in hell. 3 of the last 4 nights have been a scream-fest as our son has his top 4 teeth coming in simultaneously.

12:45am
wife: I'm going in there.
me: No way. He's been screaming his head off for an hour. How much longer can he go?

The answer is: 2 more hours.

They still have not broken through. Pray for us tonight.

**UPDATE** 8/09/2005

One tooth has barely broken through. Though not as severe, we're still getting our 2am scream-fests.

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Things kids eat.


Ever since I spent a year in Australia I've kept a jar of Vegemite in the cupboard. From time to time I spread a little on toast and pretend that I like it. After reading an interesting post by daddytypes.com about kale and veggie booty and funky flavors kids like, I tried the vegemite out on our kid. I had the camera ready to get one of those precious "yuck faces" he makes when he eats something he hates. Much to my suprise he gobbled up the whole slice of toast (cut into bite sized pieces, of course) like it was candy.

That was a few weeks ago. He eats it every day now.

Go know.

Monday, August 01, 2005

Let's catch up....Shall we?

So the kid is 17 months old now and I'm just starting the blog so there's some back story.....

He was born March 1, 2004:


My wife gave birth naturally, which is a pleasant way of saying "without the benefit of modern medication." I was heavily medicated during most of the labor due to a variety of phobias and hospital-related anxieties, but managed to clear my drug-addled head for the delivery.

To the experienced child-rearer we had a rather unremarkable infancy--to us however, it was one freak out after the next.

For the first 3 weeks or so we just tried to get a handle on things. It's kind of a blur, but I do remember both my wife and I rejoicing in the fact that ours was not an "ugly baby" and we hypothesized about whether parents with "ugly babies" either could not admit that their baby was hideous or couldn't see that their baby was hideous.

Looking now at pictures of our "beautiful baby" may shed light on the real answer:


Here is our son at about 5 weeks old. Basically he got the worst case of baby-acne ever....ever. My normally unflappable friend Jake visibly recoiled upon first gaze at my son during this dark period.

Fortunately it only lasted a few weeks and he was cute again:



See, here he is at about 8 weeks and as good as new.

At about 4 months old, he started sleeping through the night and my wife began to emerge from her miasmic sleep deprived haze. What we didn't realize just then was what a phenomenal sleeper he turned out to be. We probably averaged 12 hours a night from then on. After 7pm or so we actually functioned like normal humans for the first time in a 1/3 of a year. We ate dinner together, renewed our subscription to the New Yorker, and occasionally rented a movie. Other than the odd illness or bad dream, he has slept through the night ever since.

I don't remember exactly, 6months?--my wife'll yell at me about this one, he began eating solid food.


He ate well from the start and continues to eat well. He certainly should; he was named after one of the great eaters of the 20th century, my paternal grandfather.

OK, he sleeps well, he eats well. Sounds like a perfect kid, right..? Well, not exactly. There has been plenty to stress about. We've covered his "Pizza-Face" period, not to mention the part where I was sure he was deaf after he failed his first hearing test at the hospital (he just had a little fluid in there, it dried up and he's fine.)

He had a fat phase:



After that, it was the teeth, or should I say, lack of teeth. He didn't have a tooth in his head until 14 months. At 11 months I was mildly worried. At 13 months I was googling such terms as "baby dentures." The first poked through a few months ago. There was much rejoicing. Now, however, we've got 4 coming in simultaneously and he's been shreiking his head off for 3 out of the last 4 nights.

The most recent cause of irrational concern has been his reluctance to walk. Though he's been "cruising" for 6 months (moving around the house upright while holding on to furniture, walls, etc.), until very recently he has simply refused to walk unassisted.

Well, thankfully he started walking last week at 16 months old. And not a moment too soon, I was about to punch the next parent that shot us a pitiable look as their 11 month old danced around our kid crawling on the ground of the playground.

These days we're waiting of some more words, his newest "Wow!" offers little encouragement for multisyllabic communication in the near future.

Here's his current list: Daya (me), Mama, Uh oh, Num-Num (food), hat, hot, and now Wow. His animal sounds vocabulary is more comprehensive. He recently added the gobble gobble sound of the turkey.

That about sums it up to the present. Here is a recent pic:




The Original Goomy Person

I've had this blog for months now and haven't written a damn thing. There's so many blogs out there I kinda felt left out without one. Then I realized that my original website TuesdayNightPoker.com, which I started in 2000, actually was a blog--but before blogs were well...blogs.

So now I've got this new blog which I named "Goomy People" for no other reason than it's a private term of endearment my wife and I use with our son. Actually it's one of many that we use but it didn't want to name the blog "Poopy Duper."

Anyway, Here's the original Goomy Person:



This was taken 30 seconds after birth, March 1, 2004. He's 17 months old now.

Anyway, I wasn't sure what kind of blog this was going to be. These things generally cover a single subject like kayaking or plastic surgery or having a baby. There's a lot of great "baby" blogs. I read a few pretty regularly. I really didn't want to compete with any of them.

But I don't need to get my kicks broadcasting to zillion people out there. So this blog is for me and my wife and anyone else who stumbles upon it.

Enjoy.