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.

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.

A brief conversation I had with Lennie while going to the drive-through ATM today:

Lennie: Daddy, the bank is sort of like our house.

Me: How’s that?

Lennie: Well, it has bricks like our house.

Me: Do you think it has beds like our house?

Lennie: Yes, probably so.

Me: Do you think the money sleeps in the beds?

Lennie: No, money does not have mouths or eyes, so it does not sleep in beds.

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.

Moby Dick has long been one of my favorite books. It’s part adventure story, part whaling encyclopedia, and it’s just good prose, dramatic, poetic stuff. It’s something of a precursor to things we see today like the fascinating and entertaining show The Deadliest Catch, which details the mechanics and the drama of fishing for crab on the Bering sea. If you like the latter, it may be a misstep to dismiss the former.

When Lennie was still in utero and we were trying to think of ways to let her hear my voice, I thought of reading Moby Dick to her. It doesn’t matter what words you’re saying, but matters only that the child can hear you. Also, though it’s one of my favorite books, it’s one that Mleeka never read and has never had any interest in reading. Our effort fizzled thanks to a lack of enthusiasm on her part (as I recall it; it’s possible the book just put her to sleep).

This past Christmas, I got a radically condensed, cartoon version of the book (not to be confused with the comic book version I got for my birthday), the idea being that it was something I might share with Lennie. To be honest, the book isn’t that great. The drawings are pretty crude, and though the book hits the high points of the plot, it’s just not the best sort of thing to read with a kid because of the way it’s laid out. But a few weeks ago, Lennie developed on her own a very keen interest in having it read to her. Probably a dozen times or so now, we’ve glossed it at bedtime. I don’t bother reading the words so much as pointing to pictures and telling Lennie the names of the people and explaining that the whale and Ahab are grumpy. Now she tells me these things. She can identify on her own the characters Ishmael, Captain Ahab, and Queequeg (volunteering the names of the former two). And of course, she knows the white whale’s name and that the sailors wield harpoons on their hunt for him. She can also tell the difference between the pictured right (or baleen) whale, and she’s close to being able to volunteer that the right whale has no teeth but has baleen instead. She’s very interested in the ouchies that appear on Moby Dick’s flank (bright red ribbons of blood trailing behind), and she understands that Ahab (who she knows has a peg-leg) is grumpy because Moby Dick bit his leg off.

And finally, as of this weekend, when we get to the page on which Moby Dick is first sighted from the crow’s nest, she’ll say in a theatrical voice that I may be responsible for having helped her develop for the purpose, “Thar she blows! A hump like a snow-hill!”

Mleeka refuses still to read even the abridged book with Lennie, and I consider it my duty to raise a little fanatic to exact revenge, which is, after all, one of the book’s core themes.