Increments of Time

Yesterday was December 10th, which marked the third calendar month that Little Michael has been in the world. I use the phrase "calendar month" because I had honestly been counting his age by number of weeks.

Now I know why parents do that.

It's not just that you're caught up in milestones of how long the little kid's been around, it's because you just spent 9 months of your life counting everything out in weeks. We don't measure the progress of trimesters and pregnancy by the calendar month, we measure it by the march of days and weeks from one set point to another.

For 9 months.

And then the baby's born and you have a 2-week check-up, and a 4-week check-up, and then we're at 4 and a half weeks and what do we call that? A month and a half, right?

It's really easy to, at least when thinking of the baby, stick with the system of measuring time that you've been using for almost a year (or, before too long, an entire year).

In any case, this led to some confusion recently, and I was spending some time thinking about it. Personally I wouldn't mind just counting along for 4 week periods until we rolled around to September 10, 2011 and count it from the calendar from then on, but now that it's been pointed out I suppose that I'll just go to the calendar.

So, happy 3 months Little Michael! Hope that the next 9 treat you well!

Different Editions: Books?

I'm going to start marking posts that have to do with realizations about the difference between Michael' generation and my own.

They'll be entitled "Different Editions" which is a book joke and a gamer joke at the same time.

The first just struck me the other day.

It's not like Michael will grow up in a world without books; even trimming the fat of my book collection I have managed to more than fill an extra giant book shelf since our last move. I love books, and I hope that Michael will as well.

But it is almost a certainty that, at one point, Michael's going to have some form of device with which he can access a collection of e-books. Whether it's a dedicated e-reader like the Amazon Kindle, or a multi-purpose tablet device like the iPad, it's a technology that seems to be growing and even if it's not ubiquitous by the time he's building his own book collection... well I am a geek dad.

Think about that. Someone growing up with a portable electronic library of their favorite books, perhaps even those of parents and friends to some extent, always on-hand. Heck, it's a book store, too! Comic books are starting to be delivered and purchased this way, as well.

Good Lord, and my parents thought that I was bad about never putting the books away.

Just a thought.

Adding Up Experience

I know that it's been quite a while since my last update here, and for that I've got to apologize; between Baby Michael and work it's been hard to muster up the intiative to post on the baby blog.

But it's far from done.

Yesterday was Michael's 3 Month Birthday! It was mostly just celebrated by his parents being even more ridiuculous in their playing with him, and the watching of a Baby Einstein Mozart video for kids 3+ months.

For the record, it was sort of odd how strongly he latched on to the video; between the sounds and the big colorful images of toys and moving lights something really caught his attention in a way that nothing we've had on before ever did. Veronica sat there the whole time talking about everything that came on screen, which was also really cute.

Michael himself is getting to be a big boy, making new sounds and gaining in size. He's started day care a few times a week, started grabbing at the toys on his little bouncer, and is proving to be strong as all heck... even if coordination isn't exactly a strong suit yet. He can keep his head up for extended periods, but he also tends to stick his arms out to the sides and lift his legs off the ground when he's on his stomach which makes it hard for him to try and roll.

We're working on it, and it's fun.

In other news you might have noticed that many of the Flickr images that were once in the blog have gone away. Part of that is because Flickr can be picky about URLs when you fiddle with privacy settings (even if you end up making something public again) and part of that is because I fiddled with privacy settings so as to limit the number of images just floating around out there.

Still, there will be photos.

My last note is just that I think the nature of this blog is going to need to change a little bit if I am going to be able to keep it up. With time being as tight as it's been, my blog posts in the future are likely to be somewhat shorter and more focused on one particular subject.

I'll try to talk a little about these past three months, too, though you can imagine that my attention might be turned pretty strongly to things as they happen.

Thanks for reading, and I'll see you soon!

In the meantime, here's a Michael picture some of you might have already seen.