Nothing But Words

Kai and Eidan are enchanted with each other. If they’re in a room together, Eidan will usually ignore Maria and I – his eyes will follow Kai wherever he goes, even if Kai’s back is turned. And whenever Eidan starts getting fussy, we can say, “Kai, help!” and he’ll happily come over and do some silly song and dance for Eidan, and put a smile back on his face. Kai also doesn’t like going anywhere without Eidan. For example, yesterday I took Kai for a quick trip to the grocery store, and after about 45 seconds in the car he exclaimed in a partially facetious, maudlin voice “I miss Eidan!” He’s also generous with kisses and hugs for his little brother, which is nice to see.

Eidan is thriving – he had a check-up last week, and he came in at about 75th percentile for height and about 45th for weight. We started him on rice cereal a few days ago, and he took to it immediately, although sometimes we have to switch to a bottle because he gets frustrated with the comparatively slow pace of eating vs. drinking. He is a remarkably smiley and talkative baby: he’ll offer up a smile for just about anybody he meets, and he loves to talk. It’s especially cute when he’s just waking up – he’ll talk to himself (or us, if we’re awake enough to pick up him right away) for a good 5-10 minutes. It’s like listening to someone speaking in tongues.

At four years old, Kai is in the peak age range for obsessing over Christmas. I think we wrote our first Christmas list for Santa back in October, and we’ve revised it a few times since. He likes to write the lists himself, and since he knows his letters but doesn’t yet know how to spell, he asks me to help him spell each word.

Watching the old Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer show the other day, Kai expressed his first doubts about Santa. He didn’t have trouble with the notion of a guy in a red suit who lives at the north pole and brings presents to boys and girls all around the world on Christmas Eve, but he wasn’t buying the magic flying reindeer. I propped up the story with the voice of parental assuredness, so he let it go. Then I started to wonder if it makes sense to try to get kids to believe in Santa anymore. It seems that the time frame between when kids can first understand and get excited about Santa, and when they start to perceive the whole thing as a crock, has become so small in the modern world that maybe it’s not worth the confusion it creates when they start to doubt the story. Of course, if we were to tell him Santa’s not real and it’s just a nice story, he’ll tell his friends at pre-school, and we would probably suffer the wrath of all the other parents at the school (we adults don’t like to admit it, but we’re subject to peer pressure just as much as kids).

Anyway, I can’t wait to see how Kai and Eidan’s relationship changes over time. I think the first change will come when Eidan starts to crawl. On the one hand, they’ll be able to actually play together, which they’ll both enjoy. On the other hand, Eidan will start getting into Kai’s stuff, which will probably spark their first real conflicts. But Kai is pretty good about sharing, so maybe it won’t be so bad…we’ll see.

Eidan is three months old now, and he’s on the verge of outgrowing his 3-6 month outfits. We’re also seeing his personality starting to emerge. Most of the time when he’s being held, he wants to be upright and facing away from you – he wants to see what’s going on around him. And he loves to be outside – sometimes we can park him in his stroller under a tree in the yard and he’ll be happy to just look at the trees, listen to the birds, etc. for as long as half an hour. He’s very different from Kai in this respect – when Kai was a baby he’d observe for a few minutes, but then he’d want to move on to an activity.

Over the past week Eidan has become quite a talker. All babies make cooing noises, as Kai did, but this is different – he will often engage in a discourse for several minutes, waving his right arm forcefully to emphasize key points. His favorite time of day is dinner – as we’re all sitting around the table talking, he will jump right into the conversation. Of course we have no idea what he’s saying, but judging by his demeanor, he’s obviously sharing some very poignant and humorous insights.

Aside from his animated conversation, overall he has a more mellow personality than Kai, which makes Maria and I very lucky. Most days we barely have time to get through our daily routines (work, dinner, clean the kids, wash the dishes, etc.), so the fact that we can stick Eidan in his neglect-o-matic swing for 20 minutes or so when we’re in pinch makes a big difference.

As the semester goes on, my Java class is getting harder, and it’s eating up what little time I had left for the blog. But Maria’s mom is coming to visit for a couple weeks – she’ll help out with the kids, so hopefully that will give me some time to catch up on blogging.

I have more photos to share – the first couple are from Maria’s trip to Denver with the boys, for Tony’s Bon Voyage Barbecue. The picture of the bottle of the liquor next to his photo has a box in the middle containing his ashes. Guests could share a drink with him and sign the book. The rest are Kai and Eidan pictures (my friends Jay and Pauline were here last weekend from California – they’re the ones in the pumpkin carving photos).

Maria brought back some great photos of Tony and Michiko from their traveling road show days. I’ll try to get some of them scanned soon.

And I’m turning comments back on – let’s see if the spammers have gone away.

It’s time for some new pictures of the kids. When I first saw the picture of Eidan in the “Sushi” outfit (the 3rd picture below), I laughed so hard I cried. Maria laughed just as hard when she first saw the picture of Kai’s head in the cow. The way the cow is painted, it’s head is too small, and at first she thought Kai’s face was sticking out the other end of the cow. And in Kai’s dancing video, he has a couple “wardrobe malfunctions.”

The picture speaks for itself:

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(My driveway isn’t usually filled with trash – it’s stuff I was hauling out for a “bulk” trash pickup.) And here are a couple shots of Kai demonstrating his athletic skills (from his trip to Denver over Labor Day weekend)

When Eidan was born, we didn’t think he looked much like Kai. But his appearance has been changing, and now we think he looks a lot like Kai. Here’s an infant picture of Kai next to a picture of Eidan, so you can judge for yourself (one thing that’s clear is how much bigger Eidan is, at an even younger age).

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Kai at ten weeks

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Eidan at six weeks

Eidan is a piglet. Here is my evidence:

Eating, quantity: at 4 weeks he was over 10 lbs, so he had increased his body weight by about 60% in one month. He’s six weeks old now, and we haven’t weighed him again, but my guess is he’s 12 lbs. He’s a very robust looking baby. Kai was never particularly large, so we’re wondering if Eidan is going to turn out to be less skinny than the rest of us, or if this is just a phase.

Eating, style: when he sees that bottle coming, he sometimes gets so excited that he grunts and snorts uncontrollably. Unlike Kai when he was an infant, Eidan is a very sloppy eater, with milk dribbling down his face as he tries to force as much milk out of the nipple as quickly as possible (an aside: I came across a great quote the other day: “the only intuitive user interface is the nipple, everything else is learned.”).

Odor: We bathe him almost every day, but there’s no denying Eidan is a stinky baby. It’s not just the diaper or dry milk – it’s BO. Actually, it’s mainly his head – he has stinky hair. Maria’s mother tells us there’s some ancient Chinese proverb about a stinky baby head being a sign of good fortune, but I am dubious.

In the not-pig related aspects of his development, Eidan continues to be a good nighttime sleeper. He’s up every 3 hours to eat, but he always goes right back to sleep. He’s much better than Kai was in this respect (we hardly slept for Kai’s first 2 years). Until a few days ago he was a good napper too, but now it’s much more difficult to get him to sleep in the day – hopefully it’s just a phase.

By this time with Kai, we had some sense of his personality, at least in terms of general temperament. But so far Eidan is still an enigma. He’s actually fairly sour most of the time – he typically has a look of general displeasure on his face. But I did get my first smile over the weekend. We had been trying without success for a while to get a smile out of him. On Sunday Maria’s friend Julia was visiting, and she facetiously suggested we pet him like a cat. I said, “oh, like this”, and I stroked him under his chin, and viola – a big smile! We’re looking forward to more.

You know that flap in the front of men’s underwear? There’s no special name for it – it’s just “that flap in the front of men’s underwear.” Well Kai found that to be unsatisfactory, so he gave it a name: The Peniser. My guess is that he derived it by combining “penis” with “launcher.”

I think he may have a future in marketing.

Last week, my family came to resemble a gang of Dick Tracey villains: we had Scrape Face (when he was finally almost over his respitory infection, Kai fell flat on his face in the driveway), Blister Butt (in just one night, Eidan developed a bad case of diaper rash), Zombie Mama (since I was sick all week, Maria bore the brunt of the night shift, and Eidan didn’t let her sleep much), and me, Mr. Zonked (I had a nasty flu that had me out of commission for most of the week). On top of all that, Maria’s car was rear-ended while she was driving Kai to school, so she had to deal with the insurance company, body shop, etc.

Neither Maria nor I was thinking very clearly for most of the week, which lead to some amusing snafus. To illustrate an example, I will present you with some facts, and then I’ll tell you how we acted on them:

1. Maria’s car is an automatic, mine is a stick-shift. Maria does not know how to drive my car.
2. On Friday afternoon, Maria’s car had to go to the body shop.
3. At the same time, Kai had to go to his karate class.
4. Afterwards we were having dinner at a friend’s house, and Maria was planning to pick up some beer to bring over.

Maria had a rough day, and watching Kai do his karate lesson was much easier than dealing with the guys at the body shop and fetching beer, so I offered to take care of those errands for her. So she happily drove off with Kai to his karate class, in her car, while I loaded Eidan in my car for a trip to the body shop. As I was putting the key in the ignition, the neurons in my brain stopped misfiring for a moment, and it dawned on me that there was a problem with this plan. I called the karate school and got Maria on the phone: “there’s a flaw in our plan,” I said. “Oh, what is it?,” she said sleepily. … We made quite a pair that day.

When Kai was born in California, four and half years ago, Maria’s folks were living with us. The 5 of us living for two years in a 790 sq. ft. house that was under construction was more challenging than you can imagine (we put an addition on the house that connected at the kitchen), but it had one saving grace: a parent-to-child ratio of 4:1 is really quite good. Now we’re in Philly and Maria’s folks are in Denver, so the parent-to-child ratio is now 2:2, which presents much more of a challenge. But like all parents, we’ll muddle through. As I keep saying, I don’t know how single parents do it.

Eidan is now just over 3 weeks old, and he doesn’t look like he did a week ago. Specifically, he’s fat now. He continues to guzzle milk at an astounding rate. Here’s a picture so you can see (the 2nd picture is Eidan with Maria at our friend’s house Friday night – we managed to get there in the end).

Kai’s hand-foot-mouth disease morphed into an upper respitory infection. He’s on antibiotics now and he’s doing a lot better, but he had a very hard time sleeping for a few nights (which means we didn’t sleep much either). Kai passed it on to me – I’m not doing as badly as he was, but it’s definitely slowing me down. And our sleeping-all-the-time honeymoon with Eidan is over. He won’t sleep for more than a an hour or two at a time now, and he’s becoming a lot fussier, so he’s been running Maria ragged (she’s on duty for most of the night shift, especially since I got sick).

I have a couple draft posts in the works, so you’ll hear from me again soon.