Head back, eyes squinty

It may be baseball season, but the only averages we care about here in Dwyeropolis are ones we get at the doctor’s office.  Here’s how Ben stacks up against his peers:

Weight:  20 lb. 4 oz. (43rd percentile)

Length:  29.5 in. (88th percentile)

Head circumference: 47 cm (78th percentile)

He’s a pretty fluent crawler at this point but still resists the urge to try to pull himself to standing.  We’re pretty sure he won’t be walking quite as early as his sister was but since Pru showed no interest at all in crawling, that is probably to be expected.  All that means is that batting practice will probably have to wait until next Spring.  One thing he has on Pru at 9 months:  a tooth!

Check out the Flickr link on the side to see Pru’s budding photography and painting skills in action.

Cheeeeeese!

Pru’s yearly visit to the doctor was this morning and (thankfully) nobody kicked her out. Her check-up was uneventful and revealed nothing aside from the expected measurement progress. Apparently she was upset about the news that she would not be receiving any shots today because while the nurse was preparing Ben for his injections, Pru took one of the needles and pulled out the stopper. Result: fancy vaccine all over the chair! Obviously, being two really agrees with her. *sigh*

Here is how she measures up to others in her peer group:

Height: 34.5 in. (75th %)
Weight: 27.3 lbs. (50th %)
Head Circumference: 49 cm (85th %)
Name: Prudence (100th %)

Trog-baby Dwyer II

Benedict had his 4-month check-up at the doctor this morning. Things look good with the exception of his baby eczema and lack of appreciation of Wes Anderson.  (We’re working on both.)

The relevant stats:

Height: 26 in (90th %)
Weight: 15 lbs (50th %)
Head: 42.5 cm (50th %)

That length measurement will tell you the reason why he seemed to outgrow all of his clothes overnight — those overalls never had a chance!

His metrics reveal him to be an almost perfectly average little man:

Height: 23 inches (50th %)

Weight: 12 lb. 2 oz (55th %)

Head: 40.5 cm (50th %)

Close readers of the blog will recall that his sister at this age had a similar weight percentile, but she only got there by balancing out her ginormous head and diminutive body.  Ben is of more… usual proportions.

Happy baby after the break:

I’ll try to keep my newly revitalized blogging equally balanced, but it’ll take some effort. How much?

Thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis much:

With that in mind, we leapt at our chance to take her to a free showing of “KFP” at the multiplex at one of the local malls today. Our previous attempt to see a movie with her in the theaters, going to see “Be Kind Rewind” with Matt Alderman when she was about 3 months, had been a total disaster, and though she’d been good at our visits to the drive-in earlier this summer (we saw “Night at the Museum II” and “Up”) she seemed to appreciate them more as opportunities to bounce around the back seat and trunk of the car in her PJs than as cinematic experiences. We figured that if there were any circumstance that would constitute “ideal conditions” to try to re-introduce theater movie-going, this was it: a movie she was intimately familiar with and loved, an audience filled with other kids who would be forgiving of slight noisiness on her part, and a price tag that would make bailing easy if things went south.

So we headed out…

…and things were, actually, a decent success. She seemed to understand why we were there, since she repeatedly pointed at the screen during the oh-so-challenging pre-movie trivia and said “Po, Po.” And she was quite well-behaved during the first two fifths of the movie, paying attention and snacking on our small popcorn (which was gigantic! I understand why the large sizes are so oversized, but is it really necessary for me to be unable to purchase a bag of popcorn that doesn’t also double as a hat?). After Zheng’s visit to Chor Gom prison, Pru started to get a little restless, chiefly I think because she started seeing other kids get up for bathroom breaks and assumed that it was OK to just kind of wander around the theater (in the same way that she can play with blocks or walk around when watching “KFP” at home). So we had a couple of walking sessions after that, but each time she got it out of her system pretty quickly and returned to her seat without protest.

In sum, she’s not afraid of movie theaters now, and isn’t too bad about behaving herself. Does this mean “Ponyo” is in our future?

Sarah gave birth to our son, Benedict Ambrose Dwyer, just under two weeks ago, July 28, 2009.

At birth, Ben (or “Bender,” as he’s known around these parts) was 21 inches long and weighed in at 8 pounds, 4 ounces (almost too heavy for the newborns wrestling weight class). By his first official pediatrician’s visit last week, he’d grown an inch and had regained most of the “freshman 8 oz.” that the kids typically lose these days. A strong, healthy boy, who’s only real vice is that he snores at night. Just a little.

We apologize for not doing more posting to the blog. We’ll try to correct that going forward, for those not also following us on Ye Facebooke. In the unlikely event that we’re still not great about updating, all of the photos of Ben, Pru and the rest will be uploaded to our Flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dwyeropolis/

To tide you over in the meantime, assorted pictures of Ben and his happy family:

The reasons are twofold:  one, you will feel ridiculously hackneyed, and two, even if there is an intruder, the knife will do you no good.  If the intruder has a gun, then you’ve literally brought a knife to a gunfight, which works about as well as the figure of speech suggests.  If the intruder is unarmed, the knife will be a hinderance you’ll have to discard, since you probably won’t want to stab an unarmed man (even if he is an intruder) in part because (depending on where you live) you probably don’t have the legal right to.  The knife only does you any good if you’re facing down an intruder armed with a knife (or some other non-firearm weapon – perhaps a mace, or a tree branch) but even then, the odds are good the intruder has better knife-fighting skills than you.  It’s just an incentives issue.

Steer clear, pediatricians!