Malletrivia

Cheerios: they're everywhere you want to be

We started feeding Xander Cheerios recently. And now I keep finding Cheerios all over the house, instead of just the 6-foot wide circle around his high chair that food usually ends up in. It's almost as if he's trying to mark out a trail that he can follow later on. Or maybe he's just stashing food on the ground for later, when he's crawling around ... "Oh, hey, a Cheerio, what a nice surprise !"

Baby SEALs

Suppose that you are in charge of marketing for an athletic club whose membership, by and large, consists of white-collar professionals, many of them Microsofties. In other words, people who are fairly used to putting a positive spin on things, and won't necessarily blink at, for example, a gardener calling himself a "landscape artist". In addition, you think that many of the club's members are middle-aged men who pine for their by-gone youth, and are attracted to things that sound "hardcore" in some way. Even if it's only hardcore by proxy, through their children.

If you were in this position, you too might be tempted to advertise swimming lessons for kids as "Infant Aquatic Survival" classes. [No, really, I'm serious. I read it twice to make sure I wasn't missing something.]

Otherwise, what excuse could you have for picking a name that evokes images of children in their swim diapers [btw, if you follow that link ... "deadly E.coli ?" Which kid has "deadly E.coli" ?] dog-paddling around with their little toothless gums grimly clenched around serrated knives ?

I'm tempted to call the club and ask whether their "Infant Aquatic Survival" classes will teach kids to survive being attacked by a shark. 'Cause that's pretty much the most important "aquatic survival" skill to have ;-)   

Baby Metamorphosis

I think I'm beginning to understand what people mean when they say [about kids]: "they grow up so fast". In the last 4 months, Xander has:

- gained 8 lbs [an increase of ~88%, relative to his birth weight], and grown by 5 inches [about a 25% increase], which apparently puts him around the 90th percentile for both height and weight.
- learned how to roll over from his back onto his front
- figured out how to sit unassisted, at least until his head gets too far out of alignment
- started to eat solid food. He's not a big fan of apple sauce, likes squash, and is neutral about rice cereal [which is understandable, given that rice cereal tastes of nothing]
- begun cutting teeth; his first tooth is just starting to poke out of his lower gum
- started laughing, nay, squealing with delight
- acquired a large repertoire of nonsense sounds that make Christina and me laugh no matter how often we hear them

[In that same period of time, all I've managed to do is put on weight, get more gray hairs, and become really, really tired :-)]

I suspect he's going to start crawling pretty soon. Then the real fun begins. Actually, what will be fun is when he starts to sleep through the night, instead of his current 3-4 hours-at-a-time, often-interrupted-by-multiple-diaper-changes nighttime schedule.