Archive for February, 2007

Four Movies of the BahBooh

Saturday, February 24th, 2007

I should say, there’s nothing all that great about these, but we’ve been asked to post what we’ve got. Barnaby shuts down in utter fascination when he sees the camera, so we can’t seem to get him smiling or goofing off or anything.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5lB-VQCmQI]

Staring at the camera in the tub
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxLpa-Zmt1E]

One more in the tub
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyAh909GKq4]

Again, he was just doing something cool, I grabbed the camera and he got his 1000 yard stare on.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvLgVrQKQLA]

Two Months

Thursday, February 15th, 2007

It’s hard to say what has changed because the months feel like moments and the minutes feel like molasses. Barnaby is our entire life now, he fills both of us with dread and elation every single minute of every day.

He’s big and he’s strong and he likes being that, I think. There is a game we play called “stand up routine” or “stand ups” where he gets his feet flat in our laps and we hold his hands and he stands up as tall as he can and he tries to balance there. When he gets all the way up, we just squeal, “look at you! Look at how well you’re standing!” and a lot of times, he’ll be delighted and laugh.

I have pointed out to him that, with this skill, he could go to the DMV. Also, when he’s got both the standing up and the laughing, all he needs is some jokes and an audience.

There’s one thing that’s very clear. We love him and he loves us just as much. He does this thing where he just stares at us… for the last few days he has spent a lot of time just staring. He will be looking around the room, gazing off and then BAM, he sees his mom’s face and he’s entranced.

Mom’s right off camera

Some of the loveliest moments of my life now are when he’s half standing in my lap, leaning on my hands, and he just stares at my face with wonder. He looks and looks, his little mouth hanging open, his hands gripping my fingers. He looks at my eyes, switching from one to the other, he looks at my cheeks and mouth, and he loves looking at my hair, because it’s often stickin straight up.

The pics with the flash are bad, but Jordana caught this moment…

He loves to talk to us. Some of the time when he’s crying, I can tell he’s not really crying, he’s just pissed that we don’t understand what he’s trying to say. I mean, it is crying, I’m not an anthropomorphic jerk, but there’s a continuum from his very quiet cooing and mewling all the way up to his can’t-breath screaming, and some of that is when he’s just hollerin’.

I gotta say, he cries some, but he seems pretty even-tempered. He needs a lot of sleep to feel okay, and he’s almost always willing to nap a little if tricked. In fact, I learned last night that if I comfort him and swaddle him and rock him, he’ll go to sleep even when he probably shouldn’t, because his stomach is still hurting and we should have burped him.

He spits up a fair amount and it would concern us if he wasn’t so heavy, long and bright-eyed. He’s about 25 inches long now, just shy of that and probably just under 15 pounds. He can basically hold his head up for as long as he wants.

In direct opposition to what I just wrote, I should point out that Barnaby has his mother’s tendency to have trouble relaxing. He wants to do stuff, and the stand up game seems very satisfying to him because he’s been kicking his legs for two months (or longer) and now when he tries to kick his legs, it lifts him up in the air. He looks genuinely thrilled by this accomplishment. He doesn’t want to let go of the day, he doesn’t want to let go of what he’s doing, and sometimes for the first ten minutes of a nap, his eyes are closed, but his mouth is as well and he’s rigid as a board.

My mom says that we don’t have pictures of him screaming and while that’s true, it’s mostly because of the bottomless pit of panic that hits us when he goes off. He doesn’t scream that much, but when he does it is just awful.

Maybe the only picture of him melting down…

He loves the bath. I set him down in the tub and every time his eyes go a hundred miles wide with the shock of the cool net, and then his mom pours water over him and he becomes sedate and thrilled. I think he will be a water baby- again, like his mom.

Yeah, I know, but he won’t be humiliated for years.

But a lot of the time, Barno’s just bored. And when he’s bored, he whines. He doesn’t really full on scream and yell, he just pouts and bitches. When he does that, the thing that helps the most is “walking the right of way”, which I stole from the movie “Station Agent”. This is his favorite thing to do. He particularly loves the kitchen because he likes the glass doors and all the glasses inside. He just wants to walk around the house, check out his domain…
Yes, every single picture is out of focus. I just hate the flash…

I hope that he’ll eventually love to walk around Astoria with us, but right now it’s about ten degrees outside.

There is no way to do justice to the first few months of a baby’s life, but Barno, if you’re reading this, my writing is dry and uninspired because I’d rather be playing with you than documenting all of this. Your mom and I love you, but I should say, more than that, that you’ve made my whole life both better and worse. Worse only in that I now want so much more for you, and better because I feel like you can have it.

Yeah, here you go

Tuesday, February 13th, 2007

This is taken with my digital camera. One step better than the phone, one step worse than the video camera. We’ve been trying to get Barno smiling on film, this is pretty close.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PGHrujk-6U]

Two Barno Vids

Sunday, February 4th, 2007

So, there are certainly a couple of things I should write about, but the truth is, the baby is taking up my whole mind, so I’m putting up a couple more videos.

These made my mom really happy, so I thought I’d post a couple more.

Man, I’m wasting bandwidth. I’m using it like it’s *free*.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SERxVmX1C0]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hgZGhlRmZo]

Barno Talks To Michelle

Sunday, February 4th, 2007

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wpv11ZhjwE]

Quickly

Saturday, February 3rd, 2007

Barnaby’s down, so I wanted to post something really fast.
We’re watching “Empire Strikes Back” and this was such an important film for me. This is such an incredibly formative movie, basically my entire moral universe was taught to me from this movie. I’m not sure, but it might be because of my age, at 36, I am exactly the right age to have seen this movie when it could enter my hindbrain. I saw it in the theater when I was ten, which meant I saw it with some of my friends and only one parent, and we were able to discuss the larger ideas both before we went in, and long afterwards.

1) Darth Vader is Luke’s Dad.

We had heard about this for a while before we saw the movie, and we all talked about how it was simply impossible. There was just no way that Luke could possible be Vader’s son. It was made very clear in the first movie that Vader KILLED Luke’s dad. When this was revealed… too much can not be made of this plot twist. It was a Cain and Abel level reversal, the kind of thing that can change not only the way you look at storytelling, but how I looked at the world. Always in the back of my head was the possibility that I could be more than my parents were, and this is a liberating idea that I want so much to pass on to Barnabutt.

2)Luke Leaves His Training

Luke realizes his friends are in trouble and he leaves his training before he’s done. Even in the path less traveled, he takes the path less traveled. His training prepares him to the point where he feels like he can take on the world, but the holes in his training have left him unprepared. Talented, brilliant and unprepared. I can’t tell you how this made me feel, looking back.

3)Lando’s Betrayal

Has anything else so completely shown the very worst of what a government can do. A deal with the devil will never be honored, and the small betrayal you have to commit in order to get ahead will NEVER pay off in any way. You can sell out, but selling out will guarantee you nothing. The man who asks for betrayal certainly believes that betrayal is a reasonable option.

4)Obi Wan’s Death

Although this is in the first movie, it does take the entire movie to get to it, and the revelation of its importance is revealed in the last two movies. When Obi Wan lifts his lightsaber and allows Vader to kill him, this beautiful and simple act of charity changed my view of the entire world. In a larger sense, I was profoundly effected by the concept of sacrifice purely for the sake of proving what love is to Luke, but some years later it occurred to me that he was also teaching a lesson in transcendence and spiritual glory. One of three or four of the most powerful moments in movie history for me.

4)Han and Leia

Naturally, I wanted Leia to be with Luke in the first movie, and I was always pissed off at Han Solo for pursuing her. But how brilliant is it that the romance doesn’t really work out, and for all the right reasons. This is how I got Jordana. We were shooting a little film in LA and everyone on the set was flirting with her, and for some reason I dug deep and thought, “Y’know what? If she likes me, she’ll be with me, if not, she won’t. I’ll just wait it out.” I was right. Just like Han.

5)Han Solo

In “40 Year Old Virgin”, the main character is told to act like David Caruso in “Jade”, but every girl who’s ever like me has like me because I was acting like Han Solo. When she says “I love you” and he says, “I know.”… That’s just awesome. And yes, I know that Harrison Ford added that.

6)Luke Losing His Hand

We now know that George Lucas has a hand-cutting fetish, but man, that was some serious shit when I was ten. It was the single most violent thing I had experienced, in terms of seeing something brand new and awful. Of course, as of 8 weeks ago, I finally saw something even more graphic and disturbing, but in both cases I got something nice out of it.

Han Being Frozen

That’s only the one example of realizing the very dreams we’ve had on film. The lightsabers, the laser guns, the hyperdrive, R2D2 plugging into the outlets, levitating spaceships, a city in the clouds… The truth is that the first three movies are so much more visually compelling than the prequels. Much of it is that by now we’ve seen all this crap a million times, but the truth is that the original movies are still more compelling than the new ones.

Nothing I’ve seen in the cinema since has effected me like the original Star Wars trilogy, and by far the very best one is the second. I can’t wait until I can watch them with Barno and let him tell me that they’re all gay.