Dwyeropolis

Ben had his 2 month checkup last week. He’s healthy as a clam, and took his vaccinations like a man.

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:

(more…)

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He’s fine. I find it harder to blog about Ben than Pru at this stage, because she’s doing stuff, having all manner of toddler misadventures, whereas he’s still in the adorable blob area: he sleeps, he cries, he cuddles, he eats, he … anti-eats. All of it adorable, none of it notable. He’s as bad as his sister was about needing to be held constantly when awake; he naps during the day pretty well but sleeps less soundly than Pru did at this point and is much harder to get back down when he wakes.

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

Thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis much:

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…heavy use of our “Kung Fu Panda” DVD. Pru’s probably seen it over 100 times since we bought the DVDs in the Spring, almost entirely of her own volition. She knows the story by heart, laughs at appropriate (and inappropriate) times, and can successfully identify the protagonist as a “cat” (close) named “Po” (bullseye).

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?

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A note to all the would-be suburban dads out there:  when you go to explore a strange noise in your garage or basement or the like, where there’s a remote but actual possibility that you may be about to face down an intruder, don’t do what you’ve seen every TV or movie character do in similar circumstances  (when they don’t have a firearm or a baseball bat) and arm yourself with a large chef’s knife “just in case”.

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.

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Has any three-word phrase ever so perfectly encapsulated a man?

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Steer clear, pediatricians!

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Is this thing on?   Yes?  Good.

Just poking our heads in to say that our Albany relocation plan is thiiiiis close to being complete.  We’ve spent the last couple of days assembling Pru’s new (and first!) nursery.  Don’t worry – pictures and a fully staged room suitable for HGTV filming to come this weekend.

We’re liking things so far.  People are nice and neighborly, there’s a Wal-Mart and a Target right down the street, we have a pool… Nice, nice, nice.   Basically, Albany is a lot like Texas with nice weather and higher taxes.

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A question (perhaps for our Irish readership):  did the Provisional Irish Republican Army field provisional quartermasters?

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