It’s my impression that by the time Lennie was Finn’s age, she was already speaking a ton of words, mostly the names of animals from an animal book we’ve also shared with Finn (though probably less often — having two kids is harder than having one, and you wind up short-changing both in lots of ways that make you feel really bad). Finn is turning out to be a little more sluggish with words (it’s pretty common for boys, I believe), but he’s finally started to show an interest in words and other linguistic feats. For example, he’s pretty good for saying “dog” now. He routinely says “mama,” but he tends to use it in a pretty general sense, usually barking it whenever he wants something. After some work with the animal book, he’ll volunteer “neeee” if you ask him what a horse says, and with a little prompting, he’ll do a chicken sound. The most impressive thing at the moment is that he’s picked up “bite, please,” which is what we croon at him when he’s insisting “maMA” and reaching for food. He’s not terribly consistent about it yet, but it’s not uncommon for him to say “bite, please” when he wants food or drink, though it comes out more like “Bobby” with a big pause in the middle.

Not to be outdone by her little brother, Lennie has started reading and writing on a limited basis. She’s been increasingly curious about letters, and we’ve been helping her learn their sounds and doing the old “duh, ahh, guh” drill to show her how to string them together to make words. The other morning, she had written “cat,” and neither of us had explicitly drilled her on that one. When we asked her how she had come up with it, she said that she had just worked it out based on the sounds. I’m not entirely sure I believe her, but it’s certainly not beyond the realm of what’s possible.

She continues to be a good little artist as well, picking up things like perspective without any prompting. The other day, she drew one fish at sort of an angle and some other fish from the side; the sideways ones had only one eye (they were not flounder). This sounds lame and obvious if you don’t have small children, but it’s a pretty neat thing to watch happen.

It’s shocking how little I’ve blogged about Finn. He’s about midway between 10 and 11 months old now, and I don’t know that I’ve written about him more than two or three times, including his quick birth announcement. Cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon…

Anyway, this week he has begun to stand up on his own at some length. He’s occasionally accidentally stood up for a few seconds, but now he lets go of whatever he’s holding on to and stands confidently, twisting around to grab other things or even to pick big heavy things (like a hippo walk-behind toy) up. He’s very close to taking his first steps. Sometimes if you reach for him as he’s standing there, you’ll start to see one of his feet twitch a little and you can tell he’s thinking about moving it, but then he lowers himself and crawls to you instead.

He’s not talking yet, but he pretty consistently says “duh” when the dog is around (though that’s his main word for most things, so I’m not sure it counts). He had been signing “more” for food, but he’s left that behind. He waves goodbye and does “stick-em-up,” which is where we put him in his little booster seat and squeal “stick-em-up” at him and fling our hands into the air, whereupon he flings his own hands up, allowing us to snap the dinner tray into place. We did this with Lennie too.

He has eight teeth and has had them for months (I think). He got teeth early just like Lennie (but earlier).

He continues to be an absurdly happy baby, though he’ll now occasionally protest loudly if something gets taken away from him (which happens often when Lennie’s around and feeling territorial about her stuff). (See the picture, which I wish we had in full color but which a stray finger caused to be taken accidentally with some weird color-extraction setting turned on.)

This weekend, I got a football out in anticipation of tossing it around some before the Super Bowl (it rained, so we didn’t), and Finn loved chasing it around on the floor. He also really likes driving cars around on the ground. This isn’t something Lennie ever did, and it’s not something we taught him. He’s just naturally more interested in things with wheels than Lennie ever was.

I haven’t noticed him doing it a lot in the last couple of weeks, but for a while, he would bob his whole body to dance to music. More recently, he’s taken to bouncing his arm up and down conductor-style when he hears a catchy tune.

He’s beginning to get something of a mullet. By the next time I manage to blog about him, he’ll probably be a teen-ager, and we’ll have to see if mullets are back in style then and if he’s one of the cool kids who has one.

Cooking 19 pounds of wings turns out to be overkill, even for a Super Bowl party boasting 20 warm bodies. 11 bags of chips also proved to be excessive (I think we opened four). Last year, my excess was ranch dressing, of which I got probably nearly a gallon. As a gag door prize this year, we gave out a bottle of ranch. I’m thinking of saving some of the wings and chips left over from this year’s party and giving them as a door prize next year.

Well, Finn is an eater now. About a month ago, I wrote that he’d nibble on a carrot if one was offered, but at the time, he still wasn’t very much into eating spooned food. The last couple of weeks have seen a lot of progress on that front. At first, I could jam a spoon of rice cereal into his mouth and he’d sort of gag but keep most of it down. This past weekend, he really turned a corner and started opening up his little bird mouth and even moving his head (like a cobra?) to get to the disgusting purees I offered. So far, his favorites are brown rice with peas (shudder) and sweet potatoes. He’ll eat a medium jar of the former in two meals, which still doesn’t represent too hearty an appetite, but it’s a big step forward. We also have these barley teething biscuits that are, post-teething, the nastiest thing I’ve ever voluntarily touched. They dissolve pretty quickly into a light brown sludge that coats his chest and hands. I’m not terribly squeamish, but even I wince a little to pick one of these slimy things up for him when he drops it. Once we’re through this box, I think we’re switching to Zwieback toast.

Finn is also a full-on crawler now. Mleeka and others wanted to allow that he was crawling long before I would accept his movements as crawling (I mean, c’mon, wallowing and spinning around on your butt to get to things within a 3-foot radius is impressive for a little tyke, but crawling it ain’t). Finally, a couple of weeks ago, he started doing real crawling, and now he gets around without any trouble, often making a bee-line for the cat’s water dish, which he delights in turning over. He also pulls himself up on things and can stand up assisted. This weekend, he woke up and crawled out of our bed and fell to the floor (which is a 3-foot-plus drop). We installed a gate at the top of our stairs and are trying to decide now what to do about his out-of-bed crawling, whether we can think up some sort of preventive measures or whether to see how long it takes him to learn a valuable lesson on his own about depth perception and exploring a bit more carefully.

No, it’s not a misspelling. For a couple of weeks now, we’ve sent Lennie to bed without a pull-up. She had been waking up with a dry pull-up pretty regularly, and then we just ran out of them, so I started dressing her in her most absorbent undies for bed and hoping for the best. She’s had accidents only twice so far, and one of those was a small enough accident that the undies soaked up all the pee anyway. It’s been only in the last few months that we’ve had any consistent success at potty-training, so this is a pretty big deal. She’s been a fully self-guided daytime pottier for a month or two, and now she’s mostly a non-bed-wetter.

Insert inspiring and graceful transition here.

When he was about 5 months old, we tried to introduce some non-boobie-milk food to Finn, mashing up some banana. He was very interested, having been in the habit for a while of watching us intently while we ate and lunging with impressive force and accuracy (and often success) to grab our dinner plates and pull them toward him. He’s like a little savage at the dinner table. But he wasn’t quite ready for solid food yet, and he choked a little and we had the necessary heart attacks and put solidish food of for another month. Last week, I got out a carrot for him and held it for him to let him gnaw on it while I ate my dinner. He would grab it and jam it into his mouth with gusto. Then he’d shave at it for a minute with his two bottom teeth, pull it out suddenly, and give it a puzzled look and repeat the process. Yesterday, we tried giving him some rice cereal, and he choked again (I don’t remember Lennie having so much trouble, and we got her started earlier than we did him), but I later gave him some more carrot, and he did ok with it, probably because he seems to have managed mostly to shave little bits off and get them all over his face and chest.

Insert inspiring and graceful conclusion here.

When Lennie was very young, I’d take time every few months to write a bunch of things about what new things she was doing, almost always prefaced by something like “I’m a crappy dad for not doing a better job of documenting things.” It turns out that having a second kid makes you an even crappier dad, as I don’t believe I’ve written one word about Finn since I first announced his birth nearly six months ago. It’s been long enough that I don’t really even know how to begin.

He’s a healthy boy, by which I mean he seems to be of generally strong constitution (if you forget the bout with croup he had a couple of weeks ago) and that he’s something of a hoss. I don’t remember his exact weight right now, but he’s coming up on 22 pounds, which let’s just say breaks the curve. And yet he’s not grossly fat, like some heavy babies. He’s got big thick legs and hefty arms, but he’s skinnier through the middle than Lennie was at this age, I think.

He’s also a cheerful boy. From the beginning, he was always peaceful. We could actually put him down in his bouncy and he’d sit there happily for a while. Nowadays, he more often wants to be held, but we do get him down for naps on his own sometimes, and he’s pretty good for sitting up and playing on the floor with some toys for a few minutes at a time (which is new in the last week or two, this sitting up steadily on his own). If he catches you smiling at him, he’ll light up with a big grin of his own, and his laugh is a lot like Lennie’s was when she was first coming into her infant laugh. A couple of months ago, Dad emailed us a picture of me as a baby at about Finn’s then-age, and the resemblance was striking. So it’s safe to say that he’ll be a handsome devil.

He got his first two teeth at roughly the same time when he was around 4 months old. Lennie got her first tooth at about the same age, but hers was a weird side tooth, and his are the bottom two in front. And boy are they sharp. One of his favorite toys these days is a little wooden spoon that he applies to the teeth. I’m thinking of giving him a file and seeing just how sharp he can get them.

Finn’s best trick these days is doing push-ups. Like honest to goodness push-ups. We’ll put him on his tummy, and he splays his arms and legs out and gets full abdominal clearance, pushing his butt up in the air higher even than his head sometimes. He’ll hold this pose for a while and then go down and right back up. So steadfastly was he performing this exercise a week or two ago that he actually sheared off part of one of his big toenails.

Lennie adores him and is a great big sister. For example, we nearly drove off a couple of weeks ago without having remembered to fasten part of his seatbelt, and she cried out for us to stop. Sometimes she loves him almost too much, applying herself to him rather like the Steinbeck character who cuddles his puppy (or is it a bunny?) to death.

There’s more, and more, but this is what I can manage for now.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a pretty deflating review of DeLillo’s Falling Man. Last Saturday evening, I myself fell down the last four or five of our stairs and banged my left big toe up. Whether or not it was actually broken or just cracked or had a bone bruise or whether I’m maybe just a big old wuss is a matter best left to the doctor (whom I didn’t see fit to visit, as he’d at best have just given me a splint and happily charged me $300 for it). But I did that evening find myself visiting this very blog. As Mleeka glanced over and saw what was on my screen, she asked if I was updating my Falling Man entry to include an account of my own inadvertent portrayal of that character. That wasn’t my intention, of course, but her comment so amused me that I thought I’d make a note of it.

Mom died today at 3:30 p.m. I was sitting by her bed doing some work on the laptop while Dad napped. Her breathing was pretty weird (has been for days), and it paused for a really long time. When there was the beginning of a long pause after her next breath, I woke Dad. I then went upstairs to wake my sister, because after a number of false alarms over the last few days, this seemed like the real thing. I then had to step outside to handle a drop-in visitor. When I returned to Mom and Dad’s room, Mom was dead. After her last breath, she gave Dad’s hand one last squeeze and then let go. She was 61 years old.

At 5:06 p.m. on March 19, Finnegan Samuel Learn Houston was born by C-section after 37 hours of painful labor. Weighing in at 11 pounds and with his head craned back at a weird angle, there was no way he was coming out in the conventional way. We’re home today after a few days of recovery in the hospital.

When we visited my parents for the holidays in early December, they told us that some shadows had appeared on a chest X-ray Mom had gotten during a routine physical. It was too early to confirm just yet, but the probable diagnosis was lung cancer. I flew to California from their house after that visit for a week of work there, and during that week, Mom and Dad confirmed inoperable non-small-cell (the “good” kind) cancer in the lungs, around the bronchi. They engaged a world-class oncologist to build a team to fight the disease, but things were still a little up in the air, and more thorough testing needed to be done. The following Thursday (I was back home), Mom and Dad called to let me know that the cancer had spread to her adrenal glands and one of her hips (she had been hobbled by a case of sciatica that it turns out is actually the cancer).

Friday morning at about 11:30, I was on the way home from Home Depot after buying a bunch of stuff to help spiff up our new house over the holiday break when they called again and suggested that I pull over. The cancer had also spread to Mom’s brain, and they were preparing to admit Mom for brain surgery the following morning to remove the tumor. From zero to brain surgery in two weeks is pretty fast accelleration. Mom and Dad have been dealing with this for just a few more weeks than I’ve been in the loop.

Naturally, I dropped everything and went to Charlotte for the weekend. Mom’s surgery was mostly successful, though the surgeon had to leave some cancer intact around a blood vessel he didn’t want to cut near. They’ll attack that with radiation, which was on the agenda anyway. I stayed through Christmas Eve to try to give Dad some support, and I drove back late in time to get home and spend Christmas with my nuclear family (funny how the nucleus of your family shifts when you partner up and have kids). Mom was able to go home Christmas afternoon, and they’ll kick off radiation and chemotherapy starting in the new year.

No need for commiseration or comment of any kind; I deal with this sort of thing in my own quiet, private way. I’m just posting this to capture the timeline for my future reference.

powered by performancing firefox