Date: 11/10/08
Weight: 16 lbs 4 ozs — 77th Percentile
Length: 26.25 inches — 90th Percentile
Head Circumference: 17 inches — 76th Percentile

Monday was time for a health and wellness check as well as another round of immunizations. We now have empirical evidence to support our observation that Aidan has been growing like a weed over the last two months. Although we are happy to see him get taller and look more like a toddler, we are also ready for him to level off for a bit. If he grows another 2.75 inches we will have to switch from the infant car seat, which means no carrying him inside asleep from the car, nothing for him to sit in at restaurants, and us struggling to shoe horn him into the convertible car seat while in the car.

He can hold on to and reach for toys and has favorites that he reaches for first. He manages to pass toys from one hand to the other, but it is closer to ripping the toy out of one hand with the other than the orderly picture that pass conjures for most of us. Aidan loves to talk and will happily have a conversation with whoever will talk to him.

His leg and neck strength continue to increase, and Katherine and I are both waiting for the day that we can hold him with one hand and not worry about him flopping over and bashing his head on the ground. He is also getting very good at balancing himself while standing on his feet, but has not grasped the concept that he can hold on to stuff and stand up by himself.

Getting an evening nap in for him between us coming home later and later with work and trying to get dinner on the table has been a struggle, and something we will have to figure out to keep him happy.

The people at Charity Navigator obviously had similiar concerns and more drive to do something about the matter.

Check out the good, the bad and the ugly.

Some of my favorites are First Book and the DC Central Kitchen.

Aidan was a pea pod, and Murray was bumble bee. Katherine carved the pumpkin and a couple of neighbors commented on how cool much they liked it. We got around 50 kids, but still way too much candy left.

Will it be the O-Chili-Bama Burrito, or the McCain-Chilada Burrito?

Both will leave you not quite satisfied, both have more hype than substance and both are deceptively bad for your middle. However a choice must be made, and you don’t get to complain about the bloating and uncomfortableness that the next four years will bring unless you do your civic duty and vote.

Waiting in line on 11/1 to cast absentee ballots

• Month 3
• Month 4
• Aidan’s Room

I will try to keep photos coming in the coming weeks and months.

I am on the tail end of two and a half weeks off of work to watch Aidan, and help ease Katherine back into a nine - five schedule at her job. My employer is progressive enough to extend primary caretaker leave to (up to four weeks) to new mothers, new fathers, and parents adopting children. I had grand plans for these two and a half week, including some major updates to my website, fixing the moon and star lights in Aidan’s room, insulating the hot water pipes in the basement, coordinating quotes for new front and back doors etc. However, watching an infant is a full time job. I am lucky if I get the time to eat lunch, wash his dirty bottles, and run to the post office or grocery market in a given day. It is a good thing that he is a generally happy baby as long as he is fed, changed, and forced to sleep on a regular basis.

Aidan, is changing every day now. He can reach for items of interest to him, and spends 30-45 minutes at a time playing on his play mat at least once a day. He has also learned to suck his fingers / hands, and is rolling back and forth, but not quite making it from his back to his stomach. His baby hair started to fall out, but he is still left with a pretty good crop of hair. He prefers being outdoors to indoors and if he is cranky taking him outside usually quiets him immediately (as long as he isn’t hungry or wet).

As challenging as it has been over the last two weeks I am glad I took the time to stay home for him. To a certain extent I feel like starting Monday we will only be a part-time family with a family friend taking care of him during the day he will only see his mother and father at those hours of the night where he is the least happy and we have barely an opportunity to get to know him before it is bedtime. So, to take full advantage of our last four weekdays together… time to take Aidan for a walk.

I do hope to get photos up soon, but that is not going to happen today or tomorrow so I did the easy thing and uploaded a new video.

Its not a baby, it is an eighteen year experiment without a hypothesis.

And here is a view through the mirror.

If you noticed that his onesie is unbuttoned in the second video it is because he has mostly outgrown his 0-3 onesies, when they are buttoned they hold his diaper against his skin and he gets really annoyed with the smallest amount of pee in the diaper. We have plenty of bigger clothes, but the 0-3 month stuff is some of the cutest.

• Easy to follow the action while the TV is on mute. As good as closed caption is on some shows, the majority are very poor. My biggest annoyance is that a two word comment by one character will stay on the screen for 20 seconds followed by a one second flash of a paragraph response from a different character. On the positive side of the balance sheet for CC are the often amusing typos and homonyms arrangements that go across the screen. Here is a typical example that someone else noted for General Hospital One of the characters said to another, “You look worse than I feel.” Closed captioning read, “You’re the horse and I failed.”
• When you are distracted from a sporting event for twenty minutes to change a diaper or make a bottle, you can quickly catch up by looking at the score. Sure you might have missed the most exciting twenty minutes of the game, but you can continue to enjoy the rest of the game. Unlike missing twenty minutes of a drama, say Lost, and being lost for an entire season. As a bonus if you missed something important from a Football broadcast on NBC, John Madden will repeat the details every two minutes for the rest of the game.
• Rooting for your team is almost like real interaction with your baby. Yelling at your team for mistakes is probably a bad idea though.

Given all that, Aidan and I were excited for the start of the Redskin’s season last Thursday.

And this Video captures how we were both feeling at the end of the game.

Date 9/05/08
Weight 13 lbs 7 ozs — 91st Percentile
Length: 23.5 inches — 78th Percentile
Head Circumference: 16 inches — 71st Percentile

Aidan had his two month doctors appointment, which brought his first round of immunizations. There is not much worse in life than knowingly inflicting pain on your child (especially when one of the parents has to hold the child down.) This appointment had three shots and an oral vaccine. The oral vaccine went down just fine, but the shots were obviously quite painful to him, and he cried out after each one (including tears). By the time we put him into the car he was mostly recovered from the trauma, however Katherine and I were off kilter for the rest of the day. On the positive side his immune system is building an increased resistance to the following diseases.

• Diptheria
• Tetanus
• Pertussis
• Polio
• Hepatitis B
• Haemophilus Influenzae Type b
• Streptococcus pneumoniae
• Rotavirus

I also located my lost Samsung NV7 so I can start posting some poor quality video of Aidan. More picture will probably have to wait until we get our new computer (hopefully soon after September 9th).

Take 21

Now that Aidan is a month old, and my personal laptop bit the dust, the updates will probably be limited to once a month. However, I was working on his passport photo and figured I might as well share that with everyone. It took a bit of work to have him positioned looking at the camera on a white back ground and enough light to not need a flash.

Aidan is becoming more interactive every day and will now “talk” back when he is in the right mood. He continues to love watching ceiling fans and staring out of windows, and has decided that the screen print “Blown Away” by Marcel in our living room is worthy of hours of contemplation.

In other news, we should be getting a new Rinnai tankless water heater in the coming weeks to replace the failing 15 year-old 50-gallon gas model that we have now. In addition to being able to take a shower while we do laundry and wash the dishes, we are going from around 50% efficiency to over 82% efficiency. Good for the planet and good for my utility bills. The mostly dead laptop will be getting replaced once Apple announces the upgrades to its product line in early September.