Joshua's Spot

An Experiment... and Happy Turkey Day!

I'm trying out a new way of posting videos to this site (courtesy of OneTrueMedia) - you can share in the experiment with me by clicking on the little video to the right. If y'all seem to like it, and if I can figure out how to get the videos into the body of the post (instead of having them gradually cluttering up the sidebar as I add more), maybe we'll have a winner.

As you will see if you check out the photo album, Josh has really taken to the new Boo-sized stroller we got him, so he can be Just Like Daddy and push his own little stroller around (and, incidentally, get some practice at big-brothering, but we won't mention our nefarious ulterior motives, right?). He spends most of the day now pushing Boo Elephant around in the stroller, all over the house. He also seems to enjoy dumping the Boo Elephant OUT o f the stroller, which is something that will probably have to be nipped in the bud fairly quickly, but for now it's relatively harmless. (Boo Elephant doesn't seem to mind.)

Of course, now that he has his own stroller to push, His Boo-ness doesn't seem to have any interest in being pushed like a baby in the big stroller, which makes walks longer than about, oh, twenty yards a bit complicated - he gets distracted very easily, when he's walking under his own power, and makes detours to check out rocks, and leaves, and sticks, and curbs, and puddles, and other irresistable objects that catch his little Boo eye. The solution to this problem, and the only way to avoid a major insurrection among the pigmy natives, seems to be to put both Josh and his little stroller into the big stroller. This, of course, gets a lot of smirks from the roving grandparents who seem to be everywhere whenever one goes out with a baby (they just come out of the woodwork), but hey, You Do What You Have To Do.

A shameless plug for the power of puzzles as teaching tools for toddlers - if you have a kid around 18 months or so, you really should try getting one of those little Melissa & Doug letter puzzles, the ones that come on a wooden board with cutout letters. Josh has been fascinated by these puzzles, starting with the ones that had animals on them, and more recently the alphabet and numbers versions, and in the process of trying to sort out which object goes into which spot on the puzzle, Felicia has managed to teach him all his numbers and letters by naming them as he puts them in place. I wouldn't say he knows his alphabet (he doesn't really know what order they come in yet), but he knows all the letters, and he can sort of count - at least up to two, which is the number of Boo Elephants he has.

He gets a little confused by the whole b-d-p-q combination, since if you turn a puzzle piece upside down or flip it over, you can get any one of these letters out of the same piece... but we're working on that. He also doesn't really know what the letters are for yet, but given that he's starting to find letters everywhere - on his high chair, on the books that we read him, on boxes and packages and things - he's well on his way to grasping the concept that letters make words, and words make stories, and so on. So I'm sure he'll get there, probably sooner than we want him to.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone, and may you and your family still be able to walk away from the table by the time you're done with your turkey dinner.

Plowing through the movie backlog

There are several long-ish new Boo Movies on the Neptune site - go take a look. Fair warning: I haven't done a great deal of editing, so these are your true-blue, died-in-the-wool, stereotypical home vacation videos, with all the warts and bobbles that implies. (But if you're a grandma, you won't care...)

One if by land, two if by sea...

At long last, in response to thundering public demand (read: a great many increasingly nasty e-mails and voice mails from the grandmothers, which seemed to be heading in the direction of imminent death threats), I've finally uploaded some new video on the Neptune site.

Well, okay, so they're still uploading. But unless you're checking this pretty much minute-by-minute like SOME people (who shall remain nameless), by the time you read this, they should be up on Neptune.

The reason for the long hiatus, in case anyone is interested, is that I was having no end of trouble with the extremely bug-ridden video editing software that I had been using (Pinnacle Studio 9), and so I switched to a different editor (Ulead VideoStudio 9). I'd like to say that I've been spending the past few weeks deep in the bowels of Ulead's tutorials, learning all the ins and outs of the menus and becoming a true maestro at video editing - and thus making sure that you'll get masterpieces of home video to enjoy. But no, I've mostly been doing the usual home improvement stuff, a lot of daydreaming about sailing and suchlik e, chasing the baby, and vaious and sundry other totally un-blog-ish distractions that none of you are really interested in, since they don't put blogs out there for you to read.

Whatever - SOME of us have a life, unlike SOME people I could mention (Mom, and Mom). Nyah.

In an excess of grandmother-induced guilt, I even put up some new photos in the albums. If that doesn't satisfy you, I'll sacrifice a chicken or two on the next full moon. Cross my heart and hope to... well, okay, so I won't really, but it's the idea that counts.

What's new, other than a few short movies?

Dat Boo is walking more every day - still not his main mode of transportation (crawling is still about fifteen times faster, and His Poopiness is a kid in a hurry, always), but he goes a little bit farther, and tries a little bit more often, and gets a little more confident all the time. Sure, he still looks like a drunken Frankenstein - legs locked, arms out front, wobbling back and forth sideways - but it's progress.

He's learning more words - the latest is "hot" (pronounced "ha"), which his Bubbie taught him the last time he was here and which he's been using at every opportunity. He knows what it means, too - if he picks up a piece of broccoli that's a little too fresh from the microwave, he says "ha." When he goes outside, he says "ha" - and it is, too, with temps up above 95 degrees pretty much constantly for the past several, oh, it feels like years. When he sees his Momma, he says "ha"... well, okay, so maybe I'm the one who says that, but still.

He's gone gaga for apples - will eat as much apple as you're willing to put in front of him. Anything else is pretty chancy, but apples are a sure thing. If it's true that an apple a day will keep the doctor away, he shouldn't have to see Dr. Steve again until he's about, oh, 68 years old.

As for your faithful correspondent, I've fallen prey to an old obsession that I hadn't even thought about for about, oh, 24 years:  namely, my old dream of going off sailing around the world someday. Maybe it has something to do with all the heat around Grants Pass lately, which makes the idea of some cool ocean breezes sound reeeaaaally appealing - who knows. In any case, I've been reading just about every sailing book and magazine I can get my grubby hands on, and have dragged the whole family off to go sailing on Klamath Lake (the nearest decent-sized body of water with boats for rent) twice now. The first time we even took Gimli, which was, um, interesting - I guess I hadn't thought about how difficult it would be to single-hand a boat (since Felicia has never been sailing before, and someone had to keep an eye on Joshua while I sailed the boat in any case) with a big, 80-pound, very clingy canine rug underfoot every time I tried to haul on a sheet or shift the tiller. So the second time, we left Gimli at home, which made things much more manageable.

Felicia, to her infinite credit, is going along with this whole thing with only the occasional mutter of "boondoggle" to be heard. I love this woman. (And she bakes a really mean lime tart, too.)

So that's what's up on the western front. Hope you're all well, keeping cool, and walking upright.

More overdue than the Star Wars sequels...

Sure, it's taken forever, but at long last, there are some new videos on the Neptune site. (Note that there are three separate short videos in one "album", so be sure you don't skip by any of them by mistake!)

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and a very blessed New Year to one and all, from all of us here in Boo Central. We love you all, and wish you were here!

New movie

There's a new movie, starring His Poopiness, on the Neptune site. Go check it out!

Video. At Last.

I've finally managed to get some downtime (while Felicia's at the hospital, doing a C-section, at the end of a long weekend on-call; and while the baby's busy falling asleep, FINALLY) in which to process a bit of the video we've been taking over the past few weeks. Take a look on the Neptune site - by the time you read this, there should be two or three new clips on there.

And to answer your questions:

- No, adding rice cereal to the diet did NOT make him sleep any differently, all promises from various and sundry expert parents notwithstanding. Maybe it takes more than a few grains getting into his actual gullet, as opposed to down his bib, all over his face, and/or on the burp cloth, before it'll actually make any real digestive difference. (Given that the stuff, when mixed with breastmilk, tastes just exactly like VOMIT - yes, we tried it - I can't blame him for getting it everywhere but in his stomach. We're working on some alternative preparation methods that might improve the taste somewhat. Rice cereal flavored french toast, for instance. And rice cereal creme brulee, which should be a real hit, if he really is his mother's child. Stay tuned.)

- Harvard is out, Christine - too far away, according to his mom. So Stanford seems to be the only remaining option. Although since we'll pretty much be going as a clan, by then, with his mom teaching academic medicine and me going back for my PhD at last, I don't see what difference it really makes. I just wonder how he'll react when his parents show up at his frat parties - not as chaperones, but as pledges. Hm...

Speaking of precocious...

... You really should go take a look at the Neptune site. Joshua's latest movie just goes to show that Dr. Steve wasn't kidding about this kid trying to take his milestones by leaps and bounds...

(Make sure you give the video a few minutes to load.)

New movie! Daddy's turn to make a fool of himself!

Just to show that Felicia isn't the only one who can be induced to do kooky-crazy things to keep the baby entertained, I've posted a new movie on the Neptune site. Be kind to me - it's my film debut. Kind of...

New movie!

I'm in the process of uploading a new flick to the Neptune site - give it another half hour or so, and then go take a look. Fair warning:  I discovered, when I went to import the current tape onto the hard drive, that there was a lot more backlogged video than I thought there was. I've spared you a lot of the more egregious baby talk of the variety that would only be the slightest bit interesting to his parents and maybe grandparents, but you may very well think I should have spared you even more of it. What can I say? Just SUFFER.

Momma Papparazzi

For my birthday this year, Felicia got me this absolutely stunningly wonderful new digital camera, the Nikon D70, which she'd caught me drooling over when Uncle Bruce brought one to our post-wedding gathering in Michigan last December. (Pretty much all the photos on this site have been taken with this amazing device, which has the incomparable advantage of working with all my old Nikon film-camera lenses, on which I spent half my take-home pay back in the days when I was still Gainfully Employed, if anyone can remember back that far. But I digress.)

The one feature of this camera that Felicia both knows how to use (all too well) and fully appreciates, given her limited patience for All Things Fussy and Mechanical, is the ability to take a very, very large number of photos very quickly. Her technique consists of pointing the camera in the general direction of the baby, growling at it until she gets it to focus on some part of his anatomy (preferably, but not always, his face) - and then blasting away until he stops doing interesting things or the memory card fills up, whichever comes first. Since the memory card has a 2 gigabyte capacity, and since even with this camera's impressive maximum resolution that gives us about, oh, 189 photos to take before we've filled it up, this approach can often leave me with several hours' worth of sorting to do at the end of the day, when it comes time to go through all these photos and figure out which ones to keep and which to consign back to their component electrodes.

But sometimes this Blast Method approaches sheer genius. Take a look at this little series of His Poopiness' patented Heart-Melting Smile in the process of forming (click on each image to see an enlarged version):

(Okay, so it may not look like much in thumbnail form, and maybe you have to be this little poopmeister's parent or grandparent to fully appreciate the effect, but trust me, to this impartial critic, it's Pulitzer caliber.)

Yesterday was a packed day - I got up and did some work in the garden early in the morning, while it was still merely steaming hot outside as opposed to London Broil, and planted some cosmos, marigolds, and nepeta to brighten things up a bit and provide some supposed organic-gardening-theory-driven companion plantings to keep the insect pests down, attract beneficial insect predators, and suppress weeds through some kind of plant pheremone that marigolds in particular are supposed to have. We'll see if it actually works - even if not, the flowers are durn purty. Then Felicia went for a run with the baby and the puppy while I went to the gym to do some exercises to try to strengthen my knee (which, remember, is still very much in recovery from major surgery in January, and has been so neglected lately that my physical therapist threatened to fire me as a patient last week if I don't find a way to come in more than once a month). Then we packed up the whole kit'n'caboodle in the Manly Man Truck and went on a day trip up to Eugene, to wander through the Owens Rose Gardens (for gardening inspiration) and go shopping at the mall (for mommy inspiration) and just plain Get Out of Town While We Can.

Overall, it was a great day - even the puppy had a good time, mostly because he got to glom on to both parents in turn in the back seat and cover them in puppy hair while mooching all the attention he could get while he had us where he wanted us. We came back late in the evening, tired but happy, and very impressed with ourselves for actually getting out of Grants Pass, for once, without major incident.

We also came back with some photos (Mom and ButzMom!), which I've gone ahead and posted both in the photo album here and on the Neptune site, before any of you Photo Nazis can even think about griping that I'm depriving you of photographic material. So enjoy, and keep yer gripin' to yerselves, thankyouverymuch! Sheesh.

On a side note, my mom was apparently printing out this little blog for my grandmother's benefit yesterday... and it took 105 pages or so before the thing was done churning out. Okay, so, maybe I really am as verbose as everybody says. Hm.