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Behold: LOLBoyWonder!



(Those cheeks definitely look photoshopped (GIMPed?).  Especially in real life.)

The Elder Daughter of DOOOM is now eleven! To celebrate, we went out to the local purveyor of chilled sucrotic lactose with three quarters of the grandparents and half the aunts and uncles. Grand Moogi brought a new hat for the Boy Wonder, but he didn't want to wear it (he never does unless his head is cold) so we swapped, and managed to snap this photo.

More photos shortly, but I wanted to get this one out so that Grand Da could see...

First words are a significant thing in this family.  The Elder Daughter of DOOOM's first word was "Mama", which is fair enough because she's definitely her mother's daughter.  The BatPup's first word was "Dada", which also fits because she's indisputably a Daddy's girl.  So we've been waiting with bated breath to hear the Boy Wonder's first word, knowing that it would tell us a lot about his future personality.

Last night, he spoke.  There is doubt in some minds that this constituted a first word within the definitions of the First Words and Childish Gibberish Act 1943 as amended, but I think the facts speak for themselves.  His first word: bugger.

It's going to be a fun several decades...

Sitting in front of the heater downstairs, typing one-handed, with a Boy Wonder asleep on my lap.  He puked all over our last set of clean sheets at about three, and his mother has been less than thrilled with his insomnia.  Will try putting him down in his hammock, perhaps...

... OK, that worked.  He's happily asleep.  I shall use this quiet time to do important stuff like... oh, probably browsing the web or somesuch.  Hey ho.

If Stephen Fry can do blessays (blog essays) then I figure I can do flessays: Flickr essays. As promised to antipodean_girl, here's a collection of shots of the Boy Wonder, from shortly-after-birth to shortly-before-today. There are other photos to fill it out, but they're on the Beloved's computer and she's asleep, so this will do for now.

Went to see the EDoD riding her recalcitrant pony in circles at the pony club get-together, then had a moderately edible lunch at the new cafe. Afternoon was spent fixing things that needed fixing, lamenting the impossibility of finding time and resources to fix other things that needed fixing, and getting each of the three munchkins to go to sleep.

Sleep methods employed:

The Boy Wonder: cuddles, a phone playing soothing, spooky music, and darkness. The Boy likes going to sleep with music, usually classical. I set a transistor radio to ABC-FM and duct-taped the dial so it can't be fiddled with, and it frequently does the trick when nothing else will to get him off to dreamland.

The BatPup: Mummy Milk didn't quite work, but a couple of Three Batpups stories got her most of the way there and Empty Garden, The Minstrel Boy and My Old Friend The Blues finished her off.

The Elder Daughter of DOOOM: feeling very disconnected and emotional (oy, vey) but concentrated Daddy and Mummy time and the spare mattress up in our bedroom did the trick, so she finally drifted off to sleep not long ago.

We need to try drugs, I think. Strong ones.

Now I'm going to try to get teffania's minions up and running with Gratian, then I'm off to sleep.

(A brump, in case you wonder, is a brain dump, a virtual vomiting of many disconnected thoughts and impressions all in one go. You probably won't have heard the word, since I just made it up. Although that's not 100% reliable, since I've made up a number of words over the years — I'm an incurable neologist — that other people have sworn blind they already knew. Parallel evolution? Perhaps.)

My nursing home simulator has been coming along slowly — more slowly than I or my boss would like, although I did have a week off doing other bug fixes, and there have been an assortment of complications. Right now it's happily prescribing and administering drugs to my simulated geriatrics, and I'm playing around with the dark nooks and crannies of the medication management software, finding things that my more experienced cow-orkers never knew, or had long forgotten, about how things work. My boss cheered me up mightily by saying out of the blue that he thought this was a valuable tool, because it was allowing us, the programmers, to see what looked like real live data, instead of the weeks- or months-old anonymised data dumps we usually had to rely on. Just looking at the Administrations page and seeing a live history of administered drugs, rather than the garish "overdue" alarm clock icons we get normally, was an odd but encouraging sign.

Meanwhile, I'm working on other stuff. Canon Lore is in a pretty good state now with teffania Canon at the helm, but I have a bunch of bug fixes I need to send to her. The LaTeX work for Mr Death looks like it won't be hard at all, if I knuckle down. And there are one or two other little projects, backburner tasks, that mainly exist to keep me from getting stuck on one problem for too long.

This Saturday is the Boy Wonder's ½th birthday. Six months — really? It seems like a week ago the loungeroom was crowded with a plastic wading pool and my son arrived, asleep and happy, as the city slept. And now he's too big for his bouncy hammock and eerily close to crawling by himself, which suggests that walking, talking and dropping out of college to become a bass guitarist can't be far away. He'll always be my baby boy, though, even when he's towering over me and asking for the keys to the hovercar.

Sunday, of course, is Mother's Day. Why does the SCA keep scheduling weekend events on Mother's Day? They're working on fixing some bugs in the laws at the mo'; I'll have to remember to suggest that they change the rules on May Crown Tourney so that people with real live families can have a slightly better chance of getting a weekend to themselves. The Queen will approve; her Mum is good value, and — ten years ago at least — was a bit of a spunk too, now I think of it. (And her dad was a colour blind psych lecturer who repainted their house by himself, and it showed; strange family, but nice.)

Oh, Saturday is naturalredhead's birthday party. Must mention this to the Beloved. Hey, Beloved! Saturday is naturalredhead's birthday party! There we go. Not sure if we can go along; depends on munchkins.

Ummm... that's all I can think of. Sorry, nothing to make schizophrenic Republicans froth at the mouth today; they'll just have to amuse themselves. Hey ho.

We seem to have settled into a new pattern. I come home from work and play with my assorted munchkins until dinner time. After dinner, the Beloved brings the Boy Wonder upstairs to boob him to sleep, and I take the BatPup off to her room and we watch an episode of Kipper and have "stories and songs". The stories almost always involve The Three BatPups, her absolute favourite storytelling engine. I'm running out of songs to sing, but fortunately she has a few new favourites, of which number one is undoubtedly Elton John's Empty Garden; if we're watching songs on YouTube instead, she's also inordinately fond of Gotye's Heart's A Mess, mainly for the animation. After she falls asleep, around 9ish, I come out to discover that the Beloved has fallen asleep with the boy, so I spend some quality time with the Elder Daughter of DOOOM (Doctor Who and Futurama are usually involved) and then I have the evening to myself. Being largely braindead by this stage - around ten PM - I usually just do the washing up instead. Then I go to bed.

As ruts go, it's not too bad. I hope the Boy Wonder will reprise his earlier trick of going to sleep unattended sooner or later though, because conversation with one's Beloved is an underrated thing...

In other news: I found my old database of the original flurf.net website, pre-2007, and I'm writing some code, in Lisp of course, to read it and translate it. When that's working, I'll stick the backdated blog entries here and on my blog site, but that's a low-priority task. Much higher priority is translating my PHP/PDF code for Mr Death into LaTeX; that's coming along nicely.

Right, enough. Bed time.

Yesterday was a big day for the Boy Wonder. Behold: the booster chair, with Snog the Snake-Dog bending over backwards to provide lateral support. Behold: the place at the dinner table, not just on Mummy's lap but actually sitting up. And behold: spread evenly all over the chair tray, traces of real actual mashed potato, just like what Mummy and Daddy and Big Big Sister and Little Big Sister were eating.

The Boy Wonder has been introduced to food!!!

And isn't he pleased with himself!

He didn't swallow any of it, of course, since he hasn't quite got those reflexes worked out for anything that doesn't come from a Mummy's boobies, but he's been v. v. cross at being left out of this whole putting-food-into-face lark for the last month or so, and so we've given him a taste, so to speak.

Did not get up and go to the Dawn Service today. This was in keeping with the pattern for the week, in that we did not get up and go to the Torch Relay Breakfast yesterday. Instead, we slept. Well, that is to say, I slept. My Beloved took the Boy Wonder and the BatPup downstairs and kept them entertained at about oh-fuck-hundred hours and let me sleep until the sound of murder and mayhem woke me at about 9.30. Have I mentioned how much I love my Beloved lately? Lots. Lots and lots. As they say in Lisp, '#1=(LOTS AND . #1#).

I attempted to repay this inestimable debt by taking the three munchkins off to the park. By some fluke of nature, I have here a photo of the Elder Daughter of DOOOM and the BatPup in the same frame! The Boy Wonder, being in the wrap at the time and strapped to the front of the photographer, could not be included. This appears to be some kind of conspiracy, because it is frankly impossible to photograph the three of them at once without one of them grimacing evilly, one covering herself in paint and/or mud, and one falling over and drooling on the scenery. And they run away to throw gravel at each other before you can take more than a couple of shots.

The rest of the day was spent dealing with assorted insane munchkins and trying to get other stuff done. It appears to be impossible for both of us to achieve anything simultaneously: in this case, the Beloved was working out her plans for the usefulification of our useless front yard, so I did the munchkin wrangling. The Boy Wonder slept for a little while here and there, but the BatPup didn't. The EDoD isn't a mad fan of babysitting, so she's pretty much irrelevant in these calculations (although I believe she helped out with the gardening today). As a result, there I was, bouncing babies and playing with toddlers and getting nothing actually done.

Ah well, could be worse. There could be zero achievement and no cuddles. I'm not too unhappy with taking it in turns to be drooled on, I guess.

Just occurred to me to mention that Brunch this week is at The Eyrie, the home of uniqueid, from 10.30 tomorrow. All welcome, even if you haven't made the acquaintance of His Most Serene Penguinity. Email or call me for details.

The Boy Wonder practises sitting up

Got woken up by a Boy Wonder entirely too early today. Usually he's lovely; we have a queen-sized and a king-single mattress on the floor and he sleeps between us, so when he needs input he rolls one way (Mummywards) and when he has output to deal with he rolls the other way (Daddywards - I keep the spare nappies on my side), and most of the time we hardly need to wake up to deal with him. But he got disturbed by the BatPup I think, or had a burp of at least 3-4 on the Burptor Scale (where 1 is barely a hiccup and 7 can take out windows all up and down the street) percolating in his complicated innards. Whatever; he woke up early. Bleagh.

We did, however, manage to get off to the Farmer's Markets in plenty of time, which is good. The Beloved is becoming quite intent on turning us all into locavores and since it means bloody good food, I'm magnanimous in my tolerance. She's decided to cut out processed food as much as possible, meaning no choccies from the Hansel & Gretel near my work, so I bought her some v. v. nice raspberries -- sadly not all that local, being from just outside Orange, but sold by a friend of her family so that'll do nicely -- and she agrees that this will suffice as a chocolate substitute for Valentine's Day.

Apart from that: the house has remained tidyish, so when The Beloved suggested inviting our nice-but-normal neighbours over for dinner, it wasn't too painful to get the place into shape, even with the necessity of wrangling a BatPup and a Boy Wonder, and with an EDoD who seems to consider invitations to help clean up her own messes to be somehow beneath her. (She seems to have lost all grasp of Enlightened Self-Interest lately; she is apparently unswayed by explanations regarding the number of hours in the day, the necessity of getting certain work done, and the difficulty of scheduling Daddy/Daughter Fun Time when there's no Daughter willing to assist the Daddy in getting the house in order. I can only assume this is some pre-teenage rebellion thing that's about as interesting as rat shit, and I want her to get Over It as soon as possible.) So we invited the neighbours in and they were perfectly nice, although I think a little uncomfortable with the degree to which the aforementioned EDoD was pushing her parents' patience. (Sigh. We love her, we do; we just want her to have some other settings than "off" and "eleven".) I'll have to invite them to my rapidly-approaching fourth birthday party so they can be company for any other non-loonies I may invite.

Ah: other thing. I've just about fixed the big feature in the Politarchopolis website that has had me stumped for months. Shortly it will be possible to upload even descriptions -- feasts, tourneys, meetings, fighter practices -- and have it display much more information about them. The existing method was a real kludge, and enhancing it doesn't bear thinking about. The new method is much more adaptable, and will be a sharp improvement. I shall have to find out if my deputy wants some work to do over the next week...

Anyhow, that'll do. I'm knackered. I want to go to bed and maybe get some unbroken sleep. Good night!

I got the news from the Office of Births, Deaths, Sausages and Mash today: the Boy Wonder has been officially approved, noted, recognised and certified. He's going to be issued with a Birth Certificate!

It was a tough assignment.

The alleged Boy Wonder at the centre of the controversy expresses his disdain for all governmental farnarklage.

I got the forms in pretty much immediately - they were received by the Office on the 16th of November, and he was born on the 10th - but we always knew there'd be a stumbling block. See, the forms include a space for the name of the medical practitioner present at the birth, and while I'm sure Ms Flurfelina Dorothy Nettlebold (known to her friends as Flurf) would have been happy to sign, her Doctorate of Higher Navel Fluff Collection is sadly not recognised by the hide-bound bureaucrats of this backwater nation. So we left it blank.

It was interesting explaining to the poor dears that there was no doctor and no midwife, and that we did it that way on purpose, and not because the only dirt track into town had flooded or any such occurrence. They were actually pretty cool about it: they saw the point that birth is not a medical emergency, and did not, for example, accuse us of child abuse or any such silliness. However, The Paperwork Is King, and the lack of a checkbox in their software marked "No machine-that-goes-ping" meant they had to discuss things with the management.

In the fullness of time (and I'm glossing over Australia Post randomly returning the correctly-addressed letter the Office people sent out to us) we got told we needed all of the following:

• Statutory declarations from all persons present setting out relevant details about the birth; and
• A letter from The Beloved's GP confirming that a birth occurred; and
• "Any additional information that might be relevant in support of the application".

Christramanukkahzaastice intervened, making it tricky to get Stat Decs signed and witnessed, but we got it done. I brought them in early in the new year. Unfortunately, the JP who witnessed nessbrain's statement forgot to check for some necessary identifying details, so she had to go and get another one done. She very cunningly gave us a certified copy, so that if the mail played silly buggers again we'd have backup.

I called the Office this morning, and they got back to me. The Powers That Be have decided to accept our assertion of munchkinocity, and the registration will go ahead.

Luckily, I was not required to cart a bucket full of used nappies out to Fyshwick to provide the "additional information". I was willing though.

For the benefit of any potential freebirthers out there, may I suggest lining up a friendly medical professional beforehand? They don't have to be present, but if they're around shortly afterward to sign paperwork, it will make things easier for all concerned.

Now we wait for the Baby Bonus, which will be spent entirely on getting our bedroom insulated (behind which sentence lies a tale of housebuilding incompetence that must wait for another rant).

I got the Windows guest VM talking to my Linux laptop, but I'm not sure how. I just kept installing packages until something started working. Samba, I think. Weird, but I'm not complaining.

What I am complaining about is that, at the age of eight and a half weeks, my son is still not registered with the Office of Bureaucracy, Dithering and MismanagementBirths, Deaths and Marriages. The lack of a proper grown-up at the birth (there was only me, thelancrewitch and nessbrain, but no proper medical "professional") means we get to jump through hoops. We got some statutory declarations and a letter from the Beloved's GP, but the JP who witnessed nessbrain's stat dec didn't notice that she'd missed the bit that asks for her address and occupation. So they won't accept it, and won't get to and process the paperwork until Ness jumps through one more hoop.

It took them a month and a half to get these requirements to us in the first place, of course, and then they were closed over Chrismukkahstice, so if they insist that we've missed the 60 day window for registration, I may need to hurt them. But if they demand more evidence in support of this alleged birth, I know what to do: I'll bring in a used nappy and the frozen placenta (which is still in the outside freezer, because what do you do with a placenta?). Let 'em argue with that!

I just had to blog this. This is the Boy Wonder in his Bouncy Thing. Note the gorgeous dimply smile.

Behold the cuteness!

The Beloved has coined a word, “Squargle”, for the noise the Boy Wonder makes on occasion. For some reason, it inspired this filk of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Tit Willow.

On a bed with a pillow a little round boy
Said “Squargle, oh squargle, oh squargle”
And I said to him, “Son, does it give you much joy,
Singing ‘Squargle, oh squargle, oh squargle’”
“Is it weakness of intellect, Hughie?” I cried
“Or a Mummy-juice glut in your little inside”
With a shake of his bald little head, he replied
“Oh squargle, oh squargle, oh squargle!”

He viewed me intently with never a smile,
Singing “Squargle, oh squargle, oh squargle”
And kicked with his dear little feet all the while,
Saying squargle, oh squargle, oh squargle
He snorked and he sighed, and a gurgle he gave
Then a look of relief made his features less grave
And an odour arose from the pants of that knave,
“Oh squargle, oh squargle, oh squargle”

Now I’m fairly convinced that no diction’ry yet
Contains squargle, oh squargle, oh squargle.
However, I’m sure I shall never forget
His “Squargle, oh squargle, oh squargle”
And if you need translation to figure it out,
Examine his nappy, and you’ll have no doubt
Of the matter he’s seeking to tell us about:
“Oh squargle, oh squargle, oh squargle”

Crossposted from fLog.

With a BatPup and a Boy Wonder, the latter asleep in our venerable EllaRoo wrap. It's fun to have a portababy again!

Thu 29/11/2007 16:57 29112007249

After a little recalibration of our signals intelligence (ie figuring out when he’s hungry and when he’s burpticious) we managed a much better night’s sleep last night. He has now met his Grand Moogi, his Nanny and Pa, two aunts and an uncle. Shortly he’ll be off to the doctor to get looked over properly, but given our habit of having thoroughly healthy babies, we’re not expecting him to have leprosy.

Our Boy Wonder is lovely.

Crossposted from fLog.

The Boy Wonder, having been born in an unassisted (planned) home birth with only Mummy, Daddy and nessbrain in attendance (and Ness's three-month-old Aidan acting as a qualified observer), didn't get all the usual measuring and testing done upon arrival. We popped over to the local butcher's shophospital last night for some of that, and the rest will be done by our GP. The numbers won't have changed much, though, so here they are:

Length: 53cm long from buzzcut to toesy-woesies.
Head circumference: 37cm (at the large-brained end of the normal spectrum)
Weight: 4.76kg (10 pounds 8 ounces in the old money)
Labour: 4 hours (from 9.30ish Friday night until he officially arrived at 1:18 Saturday morning)
Fingers: 10
Toes: 10
Noses: 1 (unsquashed)
Horns, forked tail: none (sorry, seagoon)

His first full night as an air-breather was somewhat unpleasant, and the Beloved had to have all morning to herself to catch up on sleep while I took the BatPup and the Boy Wonder around to see Grand Moogi. It appears he overfed and had heartburn, but we're learning his signals. The sound I call «electric baby baa-lamb stripping its gears» means he's hungry. The sound «texta writing on balloon» means he's got gas and needs less food and more burping. He has a vaguely alarming «chin shivering» that means he's unhappy (we thought it meant he was cold, but it's not just that), and a pretty standard «riding an inverted mid-air bicycle» means gas as well.

(They say human beings can't communicate until they start to talk. I say: piffle.)

Still looking for our whizz-bang new camera so I can take photos and post them. Ness has some, and my brother took some too, but I want to, dammit! Stay tuned for more munchkinblogging.

Scene: the loungeroom. The Beloved is feeding The Boy Wonder, and I look across.

"That's a very cute baby," I note, quite truthfully. "Did you really make it all by yourself?"

The Beloved nods proudly.

"That's amazing!" I say. "How did you make the little toesy-woesies?"

The way she responds without missing a beat demonstrates that she's been married to me for far too long. "I have a special tool," she says.

Sigh. That's my Beloved.