Monkee

Difficult Subject Matter

Difficult
Originally uploaded by Monkee16

I take a lot of pictures of the baby. Every time I set out to take pictures of the baby, I'll take a few pictures that'll make it on to the blog, maybe a dozen more that'll make it on to Flickr, and about two hundred others that never really leave my computer. Sometimes it's just because there was another similar picture that was better. Sometimes it's because there's something in the picture I don't really want to share with the world, like a pile of dirty socks in the background. Most of the time though, it's because photographing a baby is just about equivalent in difficulty to mastering a piano concerto. While wrestling an angry badger. Blindfolded.

Addicted

Every morning when he wakes up, it's the first thing he wants.

Every evening when we get home, it's the first thing he wants.

Every room he walks into, it's the first thing he looks for.

Every one that is off, he wants turned on.

He's addicted.

Why Special Agent Oso makes mommy pyschotic with rage...

I have to complain about this hideously awful cartoon before I explode from the force of my own hate.  If you are not familiar, Special Agent Oso is some sort of neon yellow bear with dark eye circles (I'm just going to guess he's an irradiated panda) and the story seems to be that every day he gets these special assignments to go help some kid or another accomplish some task or another.  Each task always takes three steps no matter how simple or complicated; fine, whatever, this show is meant to be watched by people who still drool like a St. Bernard. EXCEPT if you were going to make a show in which you knew that whatever skill you set up for this toxic teddy to teach had to be summed up into three steps, one might think that you would make sure that said skill was able to be taught in three steps.  One might also think that the people who write this show don't smoke the crack.  One would be wrong. 

AND mind-bogglingly enough, one would be wrong at both ends of this spectrum.  While occasionally this show is able to find a task that fits nicely into a three step explanation, for example, washing a dish: scrub, rinse, dry, far more often they either extend a minute little task into a three step explanation or cram an impossibly complex task into a three step explanation that expects you to have started with all the necessary materials, an advance degree and, you know, a third arm wouldn't hurt (Consider growing an arm.  Decide to grow and arm.  Grow an arm.  Three special steps!).  So one episode might have our intrepid little atomic hazard teaching someone how to, oh, I don't know, move a pencil from one side of the table to another (Pick up the pencil.  Move your arm to the left.  Put down the pencil.) while the next episode has them flying to the moon.  (Build a Rocket.  Fly it to the moon.  Get out and have picnic.).

Then, if that wasn't bad enough they throw in the episodes were the task at hand would involve either an extraordinary amount of natural talent or extensive diligent practice.  In one episode they learned how to shoot a basket with three special steps.  Put your leg forward; hold the ball up with one hand behind it, shoot the basket.  SWOOSH; nothin' but net!  Except, of course, when little Johnny or Suzy goes out to shoot said basket and realizes that Special Agent Nuclear Fallout Bear has been misleading them this whole time about the relative ease and difficulty of these tasks at which point Johnny and Suzy are set up for a lifetime of disillusionment and I have to deal with the guilt of being unreasonably satisfied with my rightness in the face of another's trauma.  Thanks a lot, Oso.

Haircut In Motion

Haircut Video
Originally uploaded by Monkee16

Songbird

Singing
Originally uploaded by Monkee16

As a general rule, when driving, I like to listen to one of two things. I either turn on a podcast and learn about something new and strange that I can torture my friends and family with by talking about endlessly (Ask me some time about alien hand syndrome; I could talk all day.) or I listen to late nineties/early 2000s alternative/punk (which I would like desperately to believe is age in appropriate for me, but which I fear is probably laughably old to anyone under 16 18 20. Shut up; I'm not old!

The thing is, it doesn't matter what I want to listen to because there is now competition in my car for the radio and he's starting to get some serious lungs on him.

This is the song the baby sings in the car when he's falling asleep. He does it pretty much every time he gets into the car and it usually winds up in him falling asleep on the last note, although this version of his song ended with a short performance piece where he sucked on his rattle for a while before he fell asleep. He's an artistic innovator, that one.

Can't Stop Progress

And then this happened...

Sitting alone in a restaurant highchair.

Damn that kid's growing up fast... You know, if he's going to keep hitting these milestones, he's going to have to start sleeping through the night or he's going to have to learn how to make his own bottles at midnight... and one thirty... and three...  and four thirty... and six...  sigh

Baby Be Gone

Speaking of how time flies when your life has been taken over by a demanding little creature who's every whim you're legally required to obey, Ezra got his first haircut today.  Technically this is less a result of time flying and more a result of my baby growing hair like a chia pet, but still, monumental moment for our household.

The problem was this:

My baby, my darling little bear, was starting to look like he lived in the woods with the raccoons and a mud-caked old fur trapper who was teaching him how to catch fish with his teeth.  Not exactly the look I was going for.  The solution was to give him a little trim by hand.  Naturally, being five and half months old and my son, he would not stop trying to see what we were doing long enough for even a single snip so it was time to call in the professionals or start getting used to call him Bubba.  Fortunately there's a local haircut place that is specifically designed to lure your little monster into technicolor, candy coated, videogamed nightmare coma trance long enough to shave them bald. 

More fortunately, he didn't really need any of it.

P>

That kid just likes people.  So he did beautifully.

Sat patiently.

Ate his smock contemplatively.

And when all was said and done...

They'd trimmed away my baby.

 

Mommy Time

Mommy time is a funny thing.  It's basically the compressing of real time into something infinitely smaller.  A day is gone before you've really even woken up; a week passes at the speed of light; a month is gone in the blink of an eye.  The other day I printed out some pictures to put on the wall.  I print some from Ezra's first weeks home.  As fast as it's gone by, it still manages to seem like an eternity ago.  I print some from our first weeks in this house, when he was still discovering both his hands and his personality.  I print some from his first trip to the pool, his first stay at Disney, things that just happened mere moments ago, I swear it.  Then I print one picture.  One solitary picture of him I had taken the day before.  The pictures weren't very good that day, but this one was so cute, so funny with his floppy hair and his Beatles shirt and I put it up on the wall in the middle of all the other pictures of my baby.  And there it was.  A little boy standing out like an elephant in a living room, surrounded by a wall of babies.

I can't believe how time flies.