IsaacAndNaomiBlog

I can’t sing (Daddy can and Grandma Mary certainly can!), but I do anyway because Isaac seems to like anything I do that involves paying attention to him. (At fussy times, a guaranteed way to calm him down is waltzing, with either bears or Matilda.) A recent article in Slate about the maddening tendency of children’s music to take up residence in one’s brain gave me the idea of looking for the real lyrics of Isaac’s favorite songs, most of which are dimly remembered from summer camp and elementary school music classes.

How about U2 (and several featured guests) enumerating various body parts?

or an authoritative summary of “a popular nursery rhyme which describes the adventures of a spider as it ascends, descends and reascends the downspout of a gutter system”?

or the dreary, dirge-like tale of an insect procession. This site bears the prescient warning “It is probably not a good idea to start singing this at your child’s party or on a long car trip.”

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Happy Birthday!

You’re five months old today, and have started eating solid … well, ok, semi-solid foods! Oh, and by the way, take everything you figured out last month and double it. In addition to the food thing, which is going quite well, you’ve also found some of the best playthings a boy can have: your feet! Yup, grabbing feet and rolling around is, as they say up here, wicked awesome. Where Daddy comes from, they say “Rad.”

So, food. Rice “cereal” (really a flaked powder) mixed with breastmilk and maybe a touch of warm water. The first few weeks, well, most of it ended up on bibs, you, us, the floor. This week, however, we’ve turned the corner, and you’re eating robust amounts (2+ tablespoons of mixed food and liquid!) at a sitting, with most of the food going down your throat rather than onto Dad! Yay! Earlier today, in fact, you tried strained peas for the first time. OK, so maybe that wasn’t such a great idea on our part:

Still, the rice is something you consider yummy! And more interestingly, you respond to the request “open your mouth” with a wide-open smily mouth. That’s pretty cool. You also respond to your name, which is even cooler.

These days, you’re also playing more intently, working to figure out all the complex plastic toys we toss in front of you. Or the tabbed sheep, or the plush frog, or the jingly ball, or the plush tiger … all of these things get two, three, four times as much attention as they used to. You stare, work over with your fingers, move things around, it’s just fantastic. As we mentioned already, you’ve rolled over a few times, although since Mom posted that, you’ve stopped. Huh? What you haven’t stopped doing is growing. You’re going to blast past the height requirement of your infant car seat well before you hit the weight limit at this pace (you are just over 26″ long these days). And did I mention your fat little huge feet? Yes, that’s an accurate description, trust me.

It’s hard to believe, but you become more of a joy each and every day. Happy Birthday!

Love,

Dad

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