Apr
3
This weekend, when I took a brief time out from breaking the website and frantically emailing my technically adept friends to spray little saliva foamballs all over their inboxes, I got out my battered copy of What To Expect the First Year, a book I read voraciously when I was pregnant but have mostly ignored since in favor of not stressing over “milestones” and “best-bet recipes” and “safety tips” (please, like it makes any sense to cover electrical outlets. How’s he going to learn if he doesn’t ram a metal fork in there at least once?).
Truthfully it has been a handy reference on a few occasions, like when I went flipping through looking for the DIARRHEA: (SEMI) SILENT BUT DEADLY? section. In general, though, the FAQ-style of the book makes me a little paranoid because it brings up so many issues I never would have thought of. I’ll read, “My husband is French, when should we start introducing both languages to our baby?” and I’ll start thinking yeah, when? Should we start NOW? even though as far as JB and I are concerned our collective grasp of a second language is limited to him being able to ask for the bill in Mandarin and me knowing how to say “Your brother fucks cats” in Spanish*–neither of which seem like useful phrases to teach the boy.
* Su hermano chinga gatos. Try it out on your brother-revering, cat-hating enemies!
Anyway, since Riley is now officially seven months old (my GOD, people) I thought I’d see what we had to look forward to in Month Eight, and according to the fine people at What to Expect Riley should be “eager” to start finger foods. (Then again he should be sitting unsupported, which he can’t yet do without performing a slow-motion, hilarious faceplant, but since he can expertly kick his father in the balls from almost any position I figure his overall physical genius is yet to be realized.)
In retrospect I should have placed some food within Riley’s grasp and let him make his own decision on what, if anything, to stuff in his mouth, but instead I slid a moistened Cheerio between his lips and waited for the inevitable expression of joy as he realized there was a nutritive world beyond mushed pears. “What do you think of that?” I asked him chirpily, and he responded by launching into a horrific coughing/gagging fit in an attempt to expel the now-sodden piece of cereal and JB and I both panicked a little and simultaneously lunged at him and thrust our hands in his mouth while Riley continued to hack and flail and after a heart-pounding moment or two I managed to sweep out the Cheerio and send it flying. Dog, who knows an opportunity when she sees one, snapped it out of the air with the accuracy of a hungry falcon.
Is there really a Parenting of the Year award? Because if deliberately placing a choking hazard in the mouth of your child doesn’t make you eligible, I don’t know what does.
In other seven-month news, Riley is greatly interested in both Cat and Dog now. He particularly enjoys watching Dog play Frisbee, upon watching her return the disc to the Frisbee-thrower he waves his arms and forms his mouth into an excited O shape. He laughs hysterically when he’s tickled under his arms, or if you pretend you are a shark with a taste for baby feet. He sometimes babbles when he cries, which is both tragic and funny as hell (“Waaahhhhh, ba blah wah blah baaaaa….”). He goes to sleep on his own, so instead of spending hours per day rocking/walking/stroller-pushing, we just put him in his room–either in his reclined bouncy seat or in his crib– tell him we love him, and shut the door. (The sleeping change has made a dramatic improvement in our quality of life, by the way, and while letting him cry by himself was tough at first I wish we would have done it months ago. He even falls asleep unaided at daycare now.)
His curiosity is a marvel to behold; to share his wonderment at everyday things like the spluttering startle of slapped bathwater, the scratchy texture and sharp green smell of a blade of grass, or the feel of a blanket freshly warm from the dryer, it makes me feel like I have the chance to learn about life all over again with a bright and innocent eye. What a surprising, unbelievable opportunity that is.
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As you may not have noticed until you showed up at work this morning an hour late, it was Daylight Savings this weekend, and since we hadn’t changed the kitchen clock since last spring, now it’s showing the right time again. Being lazy is AWESOME.
While JB has the sort of mind that can perform calculus, project manage thirty-five people, and visualize how a building must be constructed in order to maximize energy efficiency, the man cannot wrap his head around Daylight Savings Time.
“It’s spring forward, fall back,” I said on Saturday. “Remember? Spring forward is good, because it’ll be light out later.”
“So…wait, tomorrow it’ll be…wait. How does that make it light out later? I mean, what does this have to do with the sun?” JB had the same frustrated look he gets twice a year when faced with adjusting his watch.
“Okay. Right now it’s six. Tomorrow at this time, it’ll be seven. Make sense?”
“How can it be seven? It’s SIX.”
I relish the opportunity to laugh at him about this, because the rest of the year he can ruthlessly mock my inability to understand magnets, the TV remote, basic mathematics, and why he considers the MRE an acceptable camping item.
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Apr
2
Okay, hopefully the sidebar is working again for everyone. The image size I normally use for all the bazillions of baby photos I like to scotch-tape all over the internet breaks the layout in IE, which is both annoying and mysterious. The sidebar also gets fubar’d if I make the main content text any bigger, so….small text and pictures are unfortunately required. Sundrymourning.com: Now With Free Reading Glasses!
I ran the site through a validator, which essentially doubled over in contemptuous laughter and slapped its knees at the horribleness of my code, so it’s apparent that all my monkeying with WordPress’s templates produced some substandard results. However, until the part of my brain that lies dormant when it comes to making pie crust, parallel parking, and understanding web authoring technologies miraculously blossoms forth and startles us all, I haven’t got a chance in hell of making everything cruft-free. As long as you can view the pages and you’re not being redirected to an anime panda-porn site or anything, I’ll be happy.
Frankly, they are shocked I would insinuate that there is such a thing as panda porn.
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