Idiomatic Expression

Aidan is starting to find his voice, and yesterday he found himself in the mirror for the first time. Once he identified the other baby in the mirror he was very friendly and sociable. Now we need to find another baby of about the same age to see if he will talk to him/her as well.

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.

Since Aidan was born Katherine and I have found ourselves watching a lot of sports. First the Olympics, then the US Open, and now Football season. I have been a football fan forever, and some of my earliest memories are playing with the Redskins’ bobble head that was lost in one of my countless moves. Tennis, and the Olympics are a new phenomenon and I would suggest all parents of newborns or infants keep the channel tuned to sports for a couple of reasons.

• 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).