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Niall, my boy who just turned one, was practicing spatial skills today. He likes to take objects and pack them in containers, and to unpack containers. There was an empty half-liter plastic water bottle on the coffee table and a large plastic iced tea glass, and he was holding on to the former and trying to fit it into the latter, but he was trying to put it in sideways. I worked with him on it for a while and showed him how to insert it so it fit. Then we tuurned it into a game. He would take the bottle out of the glass, turn it around 180 degrees, then reinsert it. Then we would clap together and I would praise him.

We did this probably twenty times, as I was calling to Jenn to come in and witness it. She did get to see it, and she started playing the game with him. He played successfully for a couple turns, then seemed to forget the trick and tried reinserting it sideways. One time he tried putting it in, then pressed really, really hard to get it to go in, then lost hold of it and it skittered across the table. He looked up at me expectantly and started clapping. It was the funniest thing, as it looked like he was trying to pull a fast one — “Now we clap, right?”

It was a lot of fun. For a while he was trying to hold both pieces to do the insertion, but his arms aren’t long enough to hold the glass away from his body sufficiently, so he looked at me and very clearly, through body language, asked me to hold the glass for him. It’s amazing how much can be communicated and learned without spoken language.

My wife and baby are back from twelve days’ vacation and they both remember me!

I’m thinking of writing a book called So Many Bunnies at the Scotch Whisky Distillery.  I’ve got the beginning worked out:

1 was named Ashton.  He slept in the mash tun.

2 was named Beryl.  She slept in a barrel.

3 was named Carol.  She slept in a barrel.

4 was named Darryl.  He slept in a barrel.

5 was named Errol.  He slept in a barrel.

There are a lot of barrels, you see.

OK, that’s a point-oh-one percenter.  The intersection of the set of scotch aficionados and the set of parents of infants.

We could go on. 16 could be Pete, who slept in the peat. 19 could be Sherry, whose butt slept in the sherry butt. And we could rewrite 4 to be “Daniel, who slept in the hogshead.”

OK, that’s a 1 x 10^-7 percenter.  I’ll stop now.

There are five new baby pictures, at the bottom of the list.

The new garden page isn’t ready yet, but I wanted to share with you the absurdity that is the kabocha squash plant. It now has seven squashes growing on it. Keep in mind that all the pictures are from a single plant, started outdoors from a single seed.

It’s interesting how people will get fixated on a specific and forget the general. In the evenings, I’ll go in to check to see if the baby’s still breathing, a reflex the parents out there will probably understand. I’ll usually leave the light off so that I won’t disturb him. Just now I went in to check, feeling for him in the relative dark, but he was tossing and turning. I thought, geez, I wish he’d stop moving so that I could tell if he was still breathing or not.

New pictures of him are available.

A new picture of Niall:

For my family members (who have graciously not been nagging), more baby pictures.

This is a joyous post.  On Friday, 03 October 2003, our son was born.

Named Niall Henry David McGee, he came into the world with a minimum of fuss in a quick and easy delivery after only ten hours of labor.  He was an alert, curious, quiet, 7 pound 6.4 ounce baby boy.  His favorite activities at present are sucking and farting, and to his credit he is quite good at both.

On Sunday they let us go home.  We were home for ten hours before we found he was running a fever, so back to the hospital it was.  It turns out he was dehydrated, and may have had a urinary tract infection (we are waiting on the results of the urine culture.)  Both are being quickly sorted out, through antibiotics and supplementation of his feeding with formula, once we found a nipple that he liked.

Jenn and I are happy but very tired.  I will keep you posted as things develop.  In the meantime, some pictures: