Responsible Parenting

Having seen Tom Savini do this with his kid in a behind-the-scenes horror documentary, I'd always wondered how difficult it was. As it turns out, not too difficult, so long as your child develops the required strength while they're still at a weight you can hold up with one hand. Obviously that weight will vary from person to person - Dom is just about at my limit already! This will be a short-lived game for us :-) Oh, and this was shot with our new camera. The second bit is with the fisheye lens attached, as you can see. It's neat how much more of the room is visible from the same distance away (as far away as it was possible to get in the confines of a small room).

Dinner with Dom

The following is an insightful and thorough commentary on important social issues. Nah, of course not. It's a bunch of photos of Dominic! Today's theme is Dominic in the high chair during dinnertime.

First Dominic demonstrates his mastery of the cow cup. The boy loves to drink... water that is.

 

After consuming a portion of vege mash, a refined gentleman always uses his napkin delicately. Or sometimes he just chews and sucks his bib.

Fine Dining

Debbie took this lovely photograph while I was at school being grumpy at my Y10 class (who are a pretty nice bunch of students, but needed some grumping to get them back into schooltime mode).

Terribly cheesy fiction

Written as an example for my Y10 class. I typed it with my back to the screen, so it may be riddled with errors :-) The wind was howling through the trees as my brother and I entered the Old Settler’s Museum. It was a pretty boring holiday activity, but our parents had insisted on taking us to a remote part of the Coromandel. The museum was perched on the edge of a ravine. Early settlers had dug for Kauri gum down there, way back when. The museum was empty as we stepped inside, the air still and stale. “Hello?” I asked nervously, feeling oddly guilty about breaking the silence of the dimly lit room. “Is anyone there?” “Let’s just take a look around and get out of here,” muy brother said gruffly, pushing through the turnstile into the main area of the museum. “Don’t we need tickets?” I asked, following him. “Nah, it’s all goods,” he said, trying to be gangsta. He was just as white as me, the try-hard. “But, I’m sure you’re supposed to…” I said. I didn’t finish the sentence, as the room began to shake violently. The first thing that popped into my head was that it was a terrorist attack of some kind. Stupid, I know, but I’d been watching 'Die Hard 4' the night before. “Earthquake!” my brother yelled, grabbing hold of the verandah of a fake settler house. The building lurched again, and began to slide sideways. “The gully!” I yelled, my voice straining with panic. “We’re falling into the gully!”...

Term 3 starts...

 Holidays are now over and Matt went back to work today. I have tentatively made a bunch of daily rules for myself for this term - largely they consist of making myself exercise and write everyday as well as not eating any post-dinner snacks* and so far so good. It seems the no post-dinner snacking is going to be the hard bit because it's not that long after dinner and imaginary foods are already calling to me.

Dom and I also invented a new game today. It is an action movie inspired (as was the Mission Impossible game) rather unimaginatively called 'Indiana Jones game'. It requires a swiss ball, an enthusiastic baby and more arm strength than I have if you want to play it as often as Dominic does. It involves holding the baby just above the floor infront of the swiss ball and pushing the ball so that it rolls after him. You have to rush the baby along as he giggles hysterically about being chased by a giant ball. When you reach the other side of the room, you spin the baby around to face the swiss ball and he kicks out excitedly trying to kick the ball**.

This game soon developed into another version where I sat on the couch holding Dominic letting him kick or push the swiss ball and then laugh excitedly as it rolled away and then back to him. Who knew swiss balls are basically boomerangs and always roll back in the direction they were pushed?

* Fruit doesn't count because it is not real food in the naughty delicious way that chocolate/cookie are food. It's food that you can feel virtuous about eating so it doesn't count.

** A little known deleted scene from the movie is when Indy turns around to confront the rolling big rock in the tunnel, giggles like an infant and kicks his wriggly legs at the ball. Honest.

I shall have to get Matt to take a photo of Dominic playing with the swiss ball. In the meantime, here's a random Dom photo:

The thrill of backing up files

I am slowly backing up things from my hard drive which I consider to be 'important'. This isn't a speedy process, but it's also not a complicated one :-) Mostly it involves grouping stuff into DVD sized bunches and burning and labelling discs. I am rather keen on the idea of new storage media like bluray discs, which I heard hold a lot of data (like, 20gb?). In a few years, when they're cheap, I shall be happy to use them :-) School has started again, which is sad. I don't dislike my job but I do greatly prefer the holidays. Given half a chance I'd love to be a professional hobbyist and homebody. Ah, 'twould be lovely. Right, I should label this disc that's just finished burning and then do some marking of some sort...

Video!

Of a baby.

Lots of photos

So on our anniversary Matt took a bunch of family portraits as we realised that we don't have many photos of all three of us. We tried using the timer function but actually got some nicer closer picture with Matt just holding the camera out pointed at us and clicking away. I like this one because Dom is actually facing the camera.

 

Here's another photo of Dominic chomping away on one of his toys. We suspect more teeth are on the way as he spends a lot of time chewing these days and gets really wriggly and excited with he sees us holding the tube of Bonjela.

Whilst we were wrapping up a pressie Dom spotted the long brown cardboard tube from inside the wrapping paper. Guess what happened next?

Lots of reading material!

Thanks to the gift certificates we won from DrivethruRPG, Debbie and I now have lots of electronic rpg stuff to read :-) I am looking forward to investigating how useful the itouch is as a pdf reader when it arrives.

Today we downloaded Hot War, 3:16 and Don't Rest Your Head. I am very keen to read all of them. It's possible I may end up printing hard copies, as I'm not so keen on reading off a screen. I shall give it a try though.

Also, our kitchen is nearly finished! The kick-plates under the cabinets were installed today, the floor is all done, and we've made a tentative start on some painting too. The final piece is the tiling behind the oven and sink. Apparently it's required behind the oven, and will be good as a splashback behind the sink. The tiles were very cheap (59 cents each, 20x20cm white tiles), so the main cost will be in labour. We have all the paint we need ready to go - so as soon as the tiles are up (the week after next is the first chance the builder's likely to get) we're all good to paint and enjoy!

Peekaboo Monster

Every month Matt likes to take photos of Dominic with his monster for size comparisons. The seven month photos seemed to turn into a game of peekaboo for Dominic resulting in few photos where both Dominic and monster are clearly visible. I still think they are pretty darned cute though :-)

 

Murder with cookies

 Yesterday afternoon was good fun as my sister came round to provide us with some roleplaying and she also brought a batch of fantastic double chocolate chip cookies accompanied by the bloke who made them. Nobody actually died from chocolate cookies but I suspect this is only because we have all been building up an immunity to high levels of chocolate over the years as the cookies were indeed dangerously rich and chocolately. We were playtesting the excellent game 'Murder Most Mysterious' which is an Agatha Christie-esque whodunnit with a neat Cluedo card mechanic. You also get to play Red Herring cards on other characters to make them seem more suspicious. Much fun. I heartily endorse both the game and the delicious cookies although the overwhelming chocolateliness of the latter had me twitching away and bouncing around way after my bedtime. Thankfully having Season 1 of Veronica Mars DVDs made the staying up no hardship at all. Dom had actually been around for the entire playtest and was quite content hanging out either being held or playing with his toys as we gamed so that was good. He was all smiles and happiness when getting held or played with by his Aunt* and Austie got to brutually savage her uncle so really a good time was had by all. Gaming was much fun but I found that my brain has either gone a bit rusty on the roleplaying front or the months of tiring but fun parenthood have left me with a crazy lose track of what you're saying in the middle of a sentence disorder. Many a sentence was set out on boldly only to wander off into a haze of confusion to a random destination. For some reason I determined that there was a poisonious residue of Jojoba berries from Kenya. Given that I shouldn't reveal any plot spoilers, I'll not give away too much of the 'Murder Most Mysterious' but here are some quotes. "The writing is shocking. Look at this simile! '...as yellow as a banana', and he's talking about a banana!" "You'd be surprised how many times one comes for a stay in an English country manor only to have to a handful of murders to solve before breakfast." "No decent British jury would ever be swayed by physical evidence. We need a confession in the library!" "I would come up with a far more poetic way for a daughter to murder her father who abandoned her. Like abandoning him on a cliff to be eaten by vultures." "It may be a crime of passion, and what would you British know of passion." "Smythe![the butler] Go and fetch Smythe to be questioned!" "'She was trying to seduce you [the Great Danish detective] throughout dinner with her drinking and provocative behaviour.' 'Well she quite missed the mark. I'm no Spaniard!'" "Tell everyone in the house I know who the murderer is and I'll announce it in the library in half an hour. I'll wait here alone in the library with this candlestick, and you stay hidden with that leading piping. We'll lure the murderer out and what could possibly go wrong?" * Which means despite hearing warnings from listening to Jeeves and Wooster stories in Audioboook form, he clearly has not developed a healthy fear of the evils of Aunts.

Drawingz

I've been doing a few drawings lately for Steve, for his game Bad Family (formerly Lucky Joneses). It has been fun scribbling away, and has been a good excuse to further familiarise myself with photoshop (which is awesome, and I am slowly getting to grips with). So here's a colour pic I finished recently, plus a sneak peek at a couple of pieces for Steve's game :-)

7 months!

Dominic is seven months old today:



This one is from yesterday, I think. The high chair is working out great!



This afternoon we are unable to use our lounge or kitchen. The new flooring's being laid tomorrow, and there's plaster stuff on the floor at the moment which won't be dry until about 5pm. We can't walk on it to get to the lounge. Fortunately Dom's having his mid-day sleep at the moment, and when he wakes up we'll pop out and do the grocery shopping and some mooching around stores for a bit, and I'm sure 5pm will arrive promptly.

In unrelated news, I bought some stuff from DrivethruRPG using my prize vouchers (2 x $15 since they don't have $30 vouchers - I used the codes to buy 2 $15 gift certs, but the credit didn't show up on my account though. I emailed them and they sorted it out for me). I bought Weird Time at Charles Fort High as well as some mp3s. Deterioration Furthers is a neat collection of 5 or 6 horror-soundtrack creepy atmospheric tracks. Perfect for horror gaming. I also grabbed Mecha versus Kaiju, which is more electronica type music. Not as immediately grabbing, but I haven't given it much of a listen yet...

8 glorious years

 Yay! It's our 8th wedding anniversary today and Matt is on holiday! I think we have only ever had one or two anniversaries before where we weren't working.

Of course this is the first such occasion with a wee baby around which kind of changes the celebrations (in the best possible way). Less wining, messier dining, and a 6.15am start on a day off. No late night partying for us tonight :-)

It now feels like we have achieved most of original marriage goals - lived overseas, paid off student loan, bought a house and started a family. I believe we planned to have kids 'in about five years' for most the time right up until we actually started trying for a baby.

Now of course we need more marriage goals. Obviously we still have goals we want to achieve as individuals but it is good to have things you want to achieve as a team as well. We are open to suggestions for future goals of awesome. I'm leaning towards world domination as a goal - but I think Dominic is the most likely evil mastermind in the family, so we might need to wait a while before he's up to the challenge. Owning a cow is also a possibility - though the pooperscooper would be hard to weild. Becoming pirates would also rock.

Of course, no future goal can ever top the awesome that is The Dom:

Assignment for Morgue's Course

In response to an email we received from Morgue with an attached Psych assignment: --------------------------------- Breaking a Social Norm Assignment by Dominic 1. Describe what you did, where you did it, and who was present. The social norm I chose to break was flicking food onto others’ heads during meal times. In New Zealand we traditionally don’t allow others to experience our food through tactile interaction. I personally have found great enjoyment in touching food, particularly squeezing it through my fingers and smearing it over my face. Since I often do this, I decided I would not be able to use it as an experiment for this assignment as I am already aware of the reactions it can create such as cooing noises, fatuous remarks about it being ‘adorable’ and even on some occasions observers have rushed to get a camera and take photographs of me ‘playing with my food’. I wanted to go to the next level of actually getting others to come into contact with my food as I ate it. I chose dinner time on July 6th at my home and my parents were present. 2. Identify the social norm that you violated and speculate on what function (if any) this norm serves. Comment on how specific or general you think this norm is. The social norm of not getting other people to wear or touch your own food probably originated in the days where there wasn’t good indoor plumbing, and food was scarce. Having to clean yourself with a lump of dry pumice, or alternately wait outside until it rains, would have meant NZers of the 50’s and 60’s would not want to get covered in food. Also, food was scarce in the 1980s thanks to the First World War (also known as Operation Gulf Petrol Station) which was started by George W Churchill when he shot an ostrich. This led to food being scarce in NZ thanks to the famous Great Depression and Rainbow Warrior Incident. These days the social norm of not wearing/touching food is a redundant capitalist shackle which the proletariat must throw off. It is maintained only by the Womens’ Magazine Hegemony which runs Aotearoa. 3. Describe the reactions of other people who witnessed your violation of the social norm. What kinds of emotions did they show, for example? What kind of expressions did they exhibit? How did they react? I managed to score a direct hit on my father with a well-aimed spoonful of pear-apple mash. The globule struck him on the apex of his head, about 4 inches back from his eyebrows. His initial reaction was one of surprise. He said, “Ah, right in the head!”. His pupils dilated by approximately 20%, and he recoiled slightly, placing one hand on his head in a dabbing motion. My mother proceeded to laugh, and remark, “Did you see how well he flicked that?” I believe she was proud of my dexterity and aim. My father then grudgingly admitted that it was indeed a “fantastic shot” and that I was a “clever boy.” Since flicking him with fruit I have noticed my father rubbing other foods onto his head. I believe he has discovered the tactile joys of mushy foodstuffs. When my mother was asleep, I saw him rub apple juice onto her head. I have high hopes that she will join in the family fun soon. 4. Describe how you felt upon breaking the norm. What were your emotions? Did you notice anything happening physiologically (e.g., fast heartbeat, flushed face, etc)? Did you feel that you had irrevocably reduced your standing among your friends and family? etc. I was elated at the bulls-eye shot that I achieved. Before I flicked the fruit I felt a sense of nervous excitement, my heart was racing and I was a little anxious that I might be frowned at or have my food taken away. It was pleasing to note that despite my trepidation, I heartily enjoyed the experience and may even repeat it in the future for more recreational and less scholarly reasons. I feel secure that the incident has not lowered my social standing with my family and I’m confident that this fruit flicking event was not even remarkable enough to make it into the reservoir of anecdotes to be brought out for future girlfriends and 21st birthday parties. (Note: my mum and dad helped me with the typing of this assignment).

Cowmooflage

Heh heh. We got Dominic some cow print pyjamas, partly because he is fascinated with mine but mostly because they're cute and tacky. He even has cow slippers to match.

Notice how the cat snuck into one of the photos. She has a sixth sense for cameras and is magnamious enough to grace any photo shoot with her elegant presence.

 

Wedding Card

This is a picture I drew in a wedding card for a friend at work :-)

High Chair & Hammer

We got Dominic a high chair recently. We put him in it in the store to give it a test drive, and he seemed to quite like it! He has enjoyed eating whilst in the chair, as well as trying to eat the chair, throw his spoon away from the chair, and today slouch-like-crazy in the chair. It has some anti-slouching properties, so he didn't quite make it to horizontal :-)




He also got a lovely present in the mail, and has been enjoying that on a daily basis too!

Oh, it's an anagram!

 Hurrah for Season 2 of 'That Mitchell and Webb look'. It makes me happy that they have combined two things I really like - Numberwang and mocking the Da Vinci Code movie. Enjoy the trailer and marvel at how David Mitchell's ridiculous hair is still actually better than Tom Hanks' ridiculous hair.

Messy ruskinating!

Snippets of random

 Cloverfield DVD Review:

Most of the film
- a convincing portrayal of how nasty it could be if a geninuinely scary monster rampage took place in New York.

First sixteen minutes of the film
- a convincing portrayal of how nasty it could be if you were forced to watch someone's tedious and poorly shot home video of a sayonara party.

Seriously, a really good monster movie with an inexplicably motion-sickness inducing and dull opening. Why punish your audience for so long in an effort to create a sense of authenticity to the home video premise? We've all seen Blair Witch Project. We get the idea that it's 'real footage'.

Chocolate Ponderings
Why is chocolate with nuts and raisins called 'Fruit and nut' in dairy milk but the more healthy sounding 'Scroggin' in dark chocolate? Do the larger than usual squares that the 'scroggin' comes in mean that I'm still only having two pieces even though it may be the same quantity as about 8 squares of another flavour chocolate bar?

Obligatory Dominic Photo
Dom gives new meaning to the modelling phrase 'look fierce' with his frightening tiger impression.