Saturday, February 26, 2005

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Speed

We took a little trip to see Aunt Bess (Carolyn's sister) in Des Moines last night, and fate allowed us to understand the interpretive key of our present lives. To explain, a selected chronology of the trip:

1. We leave the house with crying baby (who often cries when being packed into the carseat--which, beautifully, is a portabebes in Spanish). Pete cries through Grinnell and for the first couple of miles on route 80, and then settles into his customary vehicle slumber.

2. We arrive at Babies 'R' Us, and I add a second apostrophe to the store's name to indicate the second missing letter in "Are." Then we go inside, strolling Pete. As long as we keep rolling, he stays awake and calm, sometimes verging on drowsiness. If I slow down or stop too long to look at something, he careens into fussiness, and I get moving again.

3. After we leave Bess's house, Pete cries again until we hit the onramp to I-80 and settles down on the proverbial dime, exactly as he did the previous time we drove that route.

4. A point placed out of sequence for maximum dramatic effect: while at Bess's, we happen onto the first part of the movie Speed, whereing LAPD bomb squad dude Jack (Keanu Reeves) must keep a bus running at more than 50 MPH lest it explode. See! See! We are living in Speed, and baby crying is the bomb on the bus! Now we can rest easy.

Monday, February 21, 2005

Mighty feets of fatherhood

Unexpected fact of baby life: now that I'm spending a lot of time carrying a baby around, I'm discovering a lot of things that I can and can't do with me feet. For example: I'm getting pretty handy (get it?) at operating the CD player and receiver of our floor-level stereo system with socked feet.

Friday, February 11, 2005

Petezilla

In Pete's first two weeks, he grew an inch, to 20.5 inches. In the eleven days after he dropped the usual bit of weight after birth, he gained 21 ounces, ending up at eight pounds, six ounces. Extrapolating those rates (.5 inches/week, 1.9 ounces/day), we see that when Pete turns 21, he will be just over 47 feet tall and will weigh about 915 pounds. I'm sure he'll carry it well.

Sunday, February 06, 2005

Photos

Photos of Pete: Page 1 * Page 2.

You can click on any photo (on the linked pages, not here) to see a larger version.


Hello, World

Erik here. We're using this blog to collect serious and (mostly) silly things we've written and collected about Pete going back to his days as in utero protoPete. The pre-natal commentary generally comes from Plans (grinnellplans.com), an online community of Grinnell students, alumni, staff, and faculty. When our comments reference specific people from Plans, we will anonymize them. If you want to start from the beginning, go to the archives and read up from the bottom of each monthly page.

Thursday, February 03, 2005

Birthdays

Who was born on your birthday?

My birthday list is uncommonly uninteresting. I share November 26th with Charles M. Schultz and a few other notables, but it's a short and relatively undistinguished list. Pete fares better, however; January 20th is a great day for film (Colin Clive, George Burns, Fellini, David Lynch), and other 1/20s include Theobald Wolfe Tone (leader of the 1798 Irish Rebellion), Leadbelly, Buzz Aldrin, and Bill Maher--along with former Virginia running back Terry Kirby, after whom Kirby the cat was named.