No Shirt, No Shoes, Service

Quick post. We haven't put up a slide show for a while, so here you go. The girls are coming up on the one-year mark, and as I look at theses photos, I wonder if we really needed to buy any clothes at all? The last 11 months have been all about sleep, survival, and sustenance. Maybe the next year will involve putting on a shirt once in a while. Part of what happens is that the girls are most agreeable after eating, which should definitely not be mixed with clothing. Eh, something to work on. This link might work better for some.

Motorboat Macy

Macy is quite adept at the raspberry, or Bronx cheer, or what ever you call "PBTHPTBPTHBPHTH". She loves it so much that other considerations like a soaked front side from drool, don't even register. She just goes and goes and goes. I would think her nose would itch after a while, but she doesn't mind. Here is a video of her raspberry and simultaneous desire to get the camera:

Vegetables: carrots. Vitamins: check.

Pots and Drums

When Edna and I got married, we received some gifts from Williams-Sonoma, and with each gift came a small, wooden mustard spoon. The girls have found a use for those spoons. Four is about the right number because each hand has a spoon and no one feels compelled to take someone else's (Macy, I am talking to you).

Vegetables: green beans, squash, red peppers, broccoli. Vitamins: check.

Back to the park

Here are some photos from earlier this summer that I never posted, starting with the two girls swinging.

When muppets smile, their lips don't curl; their mouths just open more. Here is Camy putting on one of her muppet smiles while swinging.

I wish this one were more in focus, but it was the best swinging smile I got out of Macy that day.

The girls are always working on their immune systems, as Camy shows here:

Vegetables: carrots. Vitamins: check.

Camy "!"

There was a time when I wanted to give my child the middle name of "!" - a loud tongue-clicking noise. Cooler heads prevailed when we named Camy and Macy, but since then the girls have learned to click there tongues.

However, I have yet to catch this skill on camera. I have tried a few times, and even though the girls are imitating more and more, something about the camera throws them out of sorts. Not all bad, because sometimes you end up with a short clip like this:

Vegetables: broccoli, cauliflower, carrots. Vitamins: check.

Babies + Berets = Blurry

Babies don't wear hats. You've never seen it happen. If a photo of a baby exists with a hat on, then it has been photoshopped.

I bought hats for the girls as my only impulse buy where I thought, "Oh that is so cute." That same thought that keeps entire chains of baby clothing alive. Since then, they have grown out of the dresses, but only recently grown into the berets.

The problem with hats is by the time you place the hat on the baby head, remove your hand, get the camera lined up, and push the button, the hat is gonzo:

But, BUT, if you put a pot lid on their head, they will sit with contemplative stillness for as long as you want:

Thanks Camy.

Vegetables: carrots and avocado (yes, fruit, but if its green, it counts). Vitamins: check.

Vocalizations

A quick disclaimer: we don't use software to track our readers. I don't know how many people visit or how frequently. I know my mom visits frequently the old-fashioned way - because she tells me so. So there is no need to log in to your international ip-address scrubbing proxy server before coming to the site for amateur videos of Camy and Macy.

Speaking of which, here is an amateur video I enjoy. The girls are becoming vocal. In addition to the usual babblings, some of their sounds are starting to sound like they are intended to convey meaning. My favorite part in this video (even though it is portrait oriented, sorry; you can turn your head, turn your monitor, or pretend it is an M. C. Escher Relativity painting), is at 0:07, where Camy realizes she dropped her pen by saying, "Oh!" Then Macy comes in with some pretty typical Macy chatter.

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This next vocalization has less contextual meaning, but seemed pretty intentional. At 0:08, Macy says, "bop!" Don't know why I get such a kick out of it, but she felt like she needed to stop and say something. Meanwhile, Camy is inspecting a LittlePeople goat with her pen. We have "Macy pens" around the house - pens with the ink cartridge removed. Camy apparently found one. The girls have also been seeing how things react to being prodded by different things: pens, spoons, bottles, etc.

Vegetables: cauliflower, broccoli, carrots. Vitamins: check

Happy Birthday Mom

Here at the "Family of John, Edna, Camy, and Macy" blog, we watch our readership statistics very closely and implement the most sophisticated statistical software to understand our readers better.

And of the 3 of you that read our blog, no one visits more often than my mother. Eight hundred and twenty days have passed since the first blog post, and we have made 59 posts since then, which means that someone who checks in daily to see what updates we have made leaves disappointed 92.68% of the time. The other two of you only leave disappointed 48.78% of the time.

Well, not this week. In celebration of mom's birthday, I will do three things every day this week: post something new on the blog, eat my vegetables, and take my vitamins.

Here is a video that is similar to the one posted on May 10, 2009, except Macy is the one with the giggles (Camy chimes in late and off screen) - sadly dad has not learned any new tricks since that video, but the twins are very accommodating:

Vegetables: green bell pepper, cos lettuce, arugula, fujishima pepper, cherry tomato (yes, technically some of those are fruit, but you know they taste like vegetables, are you trying to ruin my mom's birthday?) Vitamins: check

Man vs. Machine

Parents are generally faster, stronger, smarter than their children for a period of time. These advantages aid many aspects of parenting: feeding, changing, protecting, etc. But one aspect where I have found myself at an immediate disadvantage to my children is in will. For example, Camy is determined to learn about electricity. She sticks fingers in sockets, pulls endlessly at the safety covers put in sockets, puts three-pronged plugs in her mouth, and pulls on every electrical chord found. Usually, I will simply pull on a leg to displace her a foot or two. She crawls back to the point of interest. I pull back. She crawls back. I pull. She crawls. Pull. Crawl. Back. Forth. Pull. Crawl. I'll change tactics by throwing in some fuzzy, plush, or foam distraction with muted effect. We eventually relocate. I lose. Every time.

Macy loves her legs. She kicked when she was "young." She jumps now. When she was about five months old, I counted the number of times she kicked me while changing a diaper: forty-eight times, about once every two seconds. Bath time is like Shamoo at SeaWorld, except the whale jumps every two seconds.

So this evening, I picked her up to see if she wanted to try taking a few supported steps. She took that as another invitation to start jumping. She's done this before - so much so that friends of ours offered us their jumper that hangs in a door frame after taking care of her for a Saturday afternoon. As usual, after 5 or 6 minutes, I have had my fill of jumping, and my mouse-and-keyboard arms are getting tired. But I wonder, "Does she ever really tire of jumping? Surely she must wear out after a while, right?" So I ask Edna to set up the camera.

After another 5 or so minutes that feel a lot longer than the previous 5 minutes, I seriously begin to believe she can do this forever. She is going to kill me.

Mentally, I dig my heels in and my mind bends to how it felt during cross country races when trying to pace, overtake, or break an opposing racer. She starts to lift her feet and hang! But then starts jumping again. Then her knees buckle and she starts arching her back - a definite sign of wanting a change. But then starts jumping again. Would my fate be the same as that of John Henry or Garry Kasparaov?

The time-lapse function shoots a photo every second and then replays 15 of those shots every second. So this video documents the final 9 minutes of our race, which puts the total bout at around 15 minutes. Those are some kickers she has! Can you jump rope for 15 minutes? I can't even comprehend the question.



She eventually crawled off to the kitchen to find stranded goldfish on the floor, as if nothing had happened. But I won. I WON! I just hope I can get out of bed tomorrow to go to work...