Week 18 Day 1: Need for speed

In case you were wondering, my throat still hurts, though it's much better, thank you. I appreciate your concern.

Gavin's crawling is increasing in speed. His rapidly growing mobility, while exciting and amazing and normal, is making him increasingly more difficult to take places. While he hasn't outright rejected the stroller or the shopping cart yet, I can feel it coming. Once he's able to walk it'll be all he'll want to do and it'll take us two hours to go down one grocery store aisle. Not that it isn't adorable to see Gavin master new skills and look at you like, "Did you see that? Did you freakin' see that?"

Although I have never done drugs, I can't help but imagine that in order to experience the world like Gavin does I'd have to be high. I mean, this is a kid who reaches out to touch the cheap polyester upholstery on the seats in our mini van (yeah, you heard me. I said mini van. Want to make something of it?), opens and closes his fingers to scratch and feel the fabric then turns to you with a look that says, "This is, like, totally blowing my mind. Far out."

When Stacy came home this afternoon she caught Gavin and I in the middle of feeding time. I suppose "caught" isn't the right word since it implies we were doing something wrong. We were not. It's just that most of the time Stacy's arrival completely derails the process when I've got him in his highchair and am feeding him his afternoon solid foods. For one thing, he's happy to see her so he gets very distracted, and for another thing as soon as she walks in the only thing he can think about are boobs (or "hooters" to substitute a more refined and polite term. "Hoots" for short). Today, however, he kept on trucking with the solids after recovering from the initial excitement of Stacy's homecoming. Granted, I was feeding him plain tofu at the time so it's kind of miraculous he kept opening his mouth. When Stacy saw me carve a little baby spoonful out of a tofu hunk in his blue plastic bowl she said, "You didn't mix it with anything?" I had not. Nor had I put it through the baby food grinder. I was not left with these instructions. This would explain why Gavin then coughed out a wad of tofu, which I proceeded to scoop off of his high chair tray and plop into the dog bowl on the floor beside us. Henri was very happy.

After mixing in some applesauce and crumbling the tofu with a fork Gavin seemed to find it more palatable. Stacy took over feeding so I could go get a package that had come for her in the mail. I really love to get things in the mail and cannot stand not knowing what's arrived at the house. Conversely I also do not open my wife's mail, thus my eagerness for her to open it when she got home. (It was a book she'd ordered for school, in case you're curious. The Hungry Caterpillar in Spanish.)

While she was feeding him Stacy started to marvel at his teeth. He still only has four on the surface, though his eyeteeth are coming in. But it does seem like the four he has are getting bigger and bigger while the rest of his mouth stays vacant. "Your mouth is like Detroit. There are just vast spaces where there's nothing," Stacy said to him. He didn't seem to get the reference, even though we took him to Mexican town yesterday so that Stacy could buy some piñatas at Honey Bee Market (she's a Spanish teacher and Cinco de Mayo is just around the corner) and we drove right past the abandoned train station and everything. (Sigh). Babies. So self-centered.

Also this weekend Gavin and I went to Detroit Comics for Free Comic Book Day. Gavin was quite the hit there. When we walked in the door Aunt Laura and Uncle Jamie (who was helping out and who works there respectively) and Brian, the owner, all yelled, "Hooray!" or something to that effect and there were balloons everywhere. I'm pretty sure Gavin thought it was his birthday. That is, if he had any concept of what a birthday party would be like. Gavin was super chill while we were there, fooling everyone into believing he was always that way. Brian's wife Lori held Gavin and after she'd walked around the store with him for awhile she said that I could have two additional free comic books if she got to keep him. I knew such a trade would probably make Stacy pretty mad so I made sure to choose two she would really like. So if you want to meet my son, stop by Detroit Comics to say Hi! I'm kidding. I did not trade Gavin for comic books. I would never do that. But you still should stop by Detroit Comics because it's a pretty cool place where you can buy stuffed bacon for your child, just like I did. Whether or not you tell him it is soy bacon is up to you.