Thank you to everyone who was a part of Benjamin’s birthday party tonite — and especially to the Matula’s for throwing it. It was wonderful to see you all! We’ve missed everyone, and it was great to have friends surrounding our little guy with love for his birthday.
A couple new things on the site for you to check out:
- Posts can now be rated. After the whole ClickComments fiasco, I’m a little gun-shy about putting this up, but this plug-in prevents multiple clicks from the same user, so hopefully this will be more useful for actual feedback. As before, this is for all of you out there (you know who you are) who read the posts, but keep your thoughts on them to yourself. Now you can let us know what you think without having to actually write a comment.
- The Flickr feed is updating with some pictures from Thanksgiving, and other fall events — as sparse as they may be.
- Here’s a video we put together of Benjamin doing a couple of his favorite things: wandering around the house, and watching the bathtub fill up. Its from the digi-cam, not the crappy camcorder, so although the white balance is better, the frame-rate sucks and I had to do massive adjustments to the audio to make it sound like we weren’t shooting the video inside a jet engine. Not our best work, but I figured I’d get it up there for the grandparents…
#1 - Forget having nice stuff
It may seem worthwhile to have an HD-TV… but the picture doesn’t really look that good when the screen is perpetually covered with grimy little hand prints.
And that sleek universal remote you’ve got that controls your entire home theater? It doesn’t work as well when a little monster chews the buttons until half of them don’t work.
As for your cutting edge laptop with a high-res 14.1″ display… well it doesn’t look nearly as cool when its covered with snot and caked-on bits of Cheerios…
Benjamin is 10 months old, and still growing like a weed. He is quite comfortable walking now, in most situations — wearing socks on a slippery floor is still challenging for him. He toddles around the house, crawling only to get into more tricky spots. Turning is by far the most amusing.
Next time you turn while you’re walking, think about how complex an operation it is. You probably turn your eyes, then your head, slightly in the direction you want to go, then with each step, you change angle toward your goal. For Benjamin, its not quite that easy.
Walking is something he does in more-or-less a straight line. If he wants to change direction, he has to come to a complete stop — which he does with his hands out in front of him, in case the stop fails and he ends up on the floor. Then, once he’s steadied out, he see-saws his feet, rotating his entire body, until he ends up roughly in the direction he wants to go. Once thats accomplished, and again, after he’s steady, he heads off in the new direction.
The whole operation would look kind of robot-like, if it weren’t so adorable.
This month also brought teeth — finally! While his younger friends have been sporting chompers for months now, Benjamin has been patiently gumming away at his food. Finally, while he was home in Canada, his two top teeth (usually the later ones to arrive) started to break through. This, combined with the upset to his routine due to travel, has led to a few rough nights lately, but the worst seems to have passed. Nic thinks the bottom ones aren’t far behind.
On top of his physical development, I’d be remiss if I didn’t record his emotional growth. I’ve been reading about Attachment Theory over my lunch hours lately, and have found it particularly fascinating as I’ve been able to observe my own baby boy against the theories of Bowlby, Ainsworth and their contemporaries.
Benjamin is quantifiably “Secure Attached” — meaning that, while he gets upset when mom (and/or dad) leave him in scary or new environments, he readily and happily greets us on our our return, and quickly finds the confidence again to begin exploring.
Although obviously I don’t have the resources, or the objectiveness, to study my child through an entire “Strange Situation” experiment, we’ve had plenty of opportunity to see how he handles going to the nursery at church, staying with a new babysitter, or even playing by himself in the living room, and I think its pretty easy to see that our little guy is emotionally secure and healthy.
In short, we are incredibly blessed to have such a happy and active baby boy. Its a tribute, of course, to his mom, who’s seized the role with a natural instinct that still amazes me, and frankly, to the sheer normalcy and well-adjustedness of both of his parents, and the quality of our relationship. These things themselves being a tribute to our own parents.
There has never, in my mind, been a better case for the traditional — and Biblical — design of a family, then what I’ve observed in Benjamin.
Anyone who would argue different, about the shape or value of family, or about the character of Benjamin’s parents, doesn’t have a clue what they’re talking about.
Now that Benjamin can get around on his own, the requirements for our jobs as parents has gone up a notch. He’s been crawling for awhile, and its still his primary mode of transportation. But when he combines his crawling skills with his standing skills, he can suddenly get into a lot more trouble.
The other day I witnessed him adding another skill: the pull-up.
We have two sets of bookshelves in our living room. The bottom shelves have long since been cleared of their contents — we discovered quickly that he was fascinated by them — but the upper shelves haven’t been a problem. Even standing up at full height, and stretching his arms as high as they go, he still gets barely more than his fingers on the shelf. Turns out that’s all he needed.
As I watched, he crawled over to the first bookcase, and clambered to a standing position on the bottom shelf. Then he reached up with his hands, firmly grabbed hold of the next shelf up, and began to pull himself up into the air.
Fortunately his weight (which I believe is mostly in his giant head) was too much for him, and he was only able to get his feet about 2 inches off the ground, but I was still amazed as he dangled there, grunting and trying with all his might to get the fascinating books and baubles on the shelf just out-of-reach.
I digress though, because this is a story about Poison Control.
I’ve observed about women, that many of them have copious amounts of moisturizing lotions, skin creams, and other slimy substances that they lather themselves with regularly. When you’re pregnant, you also add “stretch mark” cream to your repertoire. Nic has a whole night stand full of these creams, which Benjamin previously had been unable to reach.
The other day we were in our room, looking over our finances on the computer, while Ben played happily on the floor. We took turns checking over our shoulder with enough frequency to be confident that he was alright. I saw him, on one of my turns, clambering toward the night stand, but I didn’t really think too much about it — until I heard a sucking sound.
I walked over to examine what he’d found (he sucks on everything, so this isn’t unusual) and realised he’d grabbed a tube of “Vaseline Intensive Care Skin Soothing Lotion” or something like it, twisted off the top, and started sucking out the contents.
I immediately grabbed it from him — noted to my relief that it was pretty much empty — and turned it over to read the warnings on the back.
If ingested, contact Poison Control immediately
While Nic looked up the number, I actually put the tube in my mouth and tried sucking on it. Sounds weird, but I wanted to know if he would have been able to suck out any of the tiny amount left in there. I got nearly nothing, except a slightly more moisturized mouth.
Poison Control turns out to be an incredibly friendly and soothing service. I explained very quickly that our 9 month old son had been sucking on a tube of Vaseline, and asked if we should take him to the hospital (Nic was already packing a bag, just in case.) The lady on the phone was very re-assuring, and knew exactly how to handle the situation. The worst case scenario might be some coughing and gagging, if he’d gotten any in his lungs, and if it got bad, we could take him to the hospital. But since it was empty, and he showed no signs of congestion, she assured us that there was no reason to worry.
We now have the Poison Control phone number saved in our cell phones — something tells me this won’t be the last time we need their services — and our night stands are clear of anything even remotely interesting!
I guess this only gets more fun as he gets taller and more mobile…
Over the past couple months Benjamin has gotten more and more mobile. A little over 3 weeks ago he took his first tentative step. Since then we’ve pretty much had to trick him into walking — distract him with a toy or something so he doesn’t realise he’s not holding on to anything. Last week he could take a step or two, and this weekend he started to get a lot more confident.
I imported a ton of footage from the past few months, and rendered it out on this poor iMac G4 — I’m sure it nearly died doing it. Its been awhile since I worked the FinalCut magic, and I’m stuck on Express now, but here’s a brief history of our son’s locomotion skills. The best part is right at the end…
Lately Ben has been getting up earlier in the morning. This isn’t so great for mom or dad, but you’d never know it from talking to him. He loves waking up in the morning! He’ll usually play by himself in his crib, and work on a bottle for a half hour or so, but after that someone needs to come get him now.
This morning I let him roll around the bathroom in his walker while I showered and shaved. He was very interested in the shaving part, and stared at me with this WTF? face until all the shaving cream was off my face.
He’s not making much progress on talking — although he’ll often make noises in response to noises we make, and sometimes he babbles and squeals to himself while he plays. He’s very interested in his surroundings, and when we go for walks, he pulls himself to the edge of his stroller seat so he doesn’t miss anything. This weekend we went to the park for a picnic lunch, and he was brave enough to crawl off the blanket and onto the grass so he could check things out.
There is still no sign of a single tooth, despite the fact that most of his younger friends have two or more already. There has been copious amounts of drool lately, and whenever that happens we speculate that a tooth can’t be far behind… The lack of teeth doesn’t really slow him down though. 
He’ll eat anything you give him (or that he finds on the ground) and really likes chewing on apples — once you take a bite out of it for him. On the other hand, he’s getting a little more frustrating when it comes to actual meals — he’s got an attention span like his dad, and although he loves food, doesn’t have much patience for meal time, and getting him to finish a bottle when he’s not in bed is a daily battle.
His greatest achievement so far, though, happened on my way to work this morning. I got a call from an excited Nicole who let me know that Benjamin had taken his first step. We knew this couldn’t be long in coming, because he can walk, and even run, quite confidently when holding on to something. He frequently runs laps around the coffee table, squealing with glee. And he’s definitely ready to graduate from crawling — you should see him go! When he sees something he wants, he tucks his head down and charges for it. You have to run to catch him!
It’s absolutely terrifying how fast he’s growing up. Someone came over the other day and commented that he doesn’t look like a baby any more — he looks like a little boy. And its true! Despite his limited ability to communicate, and get around, he’s very much a little person now, and very much a wonderful little person too.
You know you’re a parent when:
You find yourself singing the theme song to Super Why — when its not even on…
At 8 months of age, our son’s intelligence is roughly on par with that of our cat, Daisy. He would even, if we let him, happily eat cat food. If you think this is an unfair evaluation of a human baby, consider these other notes:
All that said, baby Ben is a delight. He does squeal — with joy — whenever he sees one of us, and now that he’s on a bottle, he’s much more self-sufficient. He’s also growing like a weed, and this week Nicole had to upgrade his car seat to a much larger model. We are truly blessed with a healthy, happy boy.
Scott’s little girl, in the park last Sunday…
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