Still

Charles Krauthammer, still the asshole he ever was

Tummy bug

Timmy started daycare on Monday. He loves it there. On Wednesday night though he didn't have a good appetite, he had liquid diarrhea and vomited out both his dinner and his bedtime milk. Since these were different occasions, he had four baths and changes of pajamas that night (the first one was the regular bath and change for bedtime).

I've taken Thursday and Friday off to stay home with Timmy. I take care of Timmy and Sol takes care of John. We don't swap because we want to have Timmy get rid of whatever the bug was and we want to avoid having John get the bug. So there'll be no cross-kissing or hugging until at least tomorrow (Saturday). Timmy will go back to daycare on Monday.

Timmy is slowly recovering. He hasn't had any further diarrhea or vomiting, but he's not as active as usual. Some of that is because he's eating less and avoiding his milk. We convince him to have some milk anyway, but he's down to about a third of his normal milk intake. Some of that is just him avoiding the milk because he associates it with the vomiting. A few more days of lower milk intake with no vomiting should see him let go of the association.

As it happens, Sol's mother and sister were due to leave for Manila on Thursday morning. So the vomiting and diarrhea came at just the wrogn time for them, when they were already working through the idea of missing Timmy and John. There was no slack in their visas though, since both visas were to expire today.

We hope to see Sol's sister back in a month or two, and perhaps her mother in 9 months or so.

Hmmm, my stomach is a bit unstable too. Not to the point of diarrhea or vomiting though, so I might have a touch of what Timmy has, but my body is fighting it off.

John Christian Quimpo

I have videos of John Christian, and a particularly great clip of Timmy with John, but I don't have the time to edit the videos into shape just yet. It doesn't help that kino on Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) is ridiculously unstable (and PulseAudio makes it worse).

I just got around to selecting a bunch of John Christian's pictures, from when he was born to just a few days ago. I've pushed those up to Photobucket and now here they are:


In the operating room





In the maternity ward, waiting to go home. Sol and John had to stay an extra two days because John had jaundice and had to have ultraviolet light treatment




And finally home. He still had a little jaundice, so we had him in the sun for ten minutes or so every day. Fortunately, unlike at Sta Mesa, we have sun right in the bedroom and in the living room.





We bought John a bassinet. Sol has since removed a lot of the cushions and other material since they might contribute to SIDS, so now it's just the cane bassinet and the main oval cushion and a flannel sheet. That second picture is a huge favorite of mine.



Timmy loves playing with John. He's just lent John his small bear



John, of course, is oblivious. All he wants to do his eat, sleep and poop. All of which he does A LOT.








John has gained a lot of weight by Christmas. He's a bit less than 1.5 months here and he laughs when mamang babbles at him.




A week or two later he's almost twice his birth weight and he pretty much completely fills his bassinet. We have a swing/rocker for him, and he definitely fills that up completely too. We thought he'd use that swing for six months.





I expect toria will appreciate the way those toes have personalities of their own.


He laughs when tickled, and (in the bottom pictures), he loves his bath, so he feels really good and laughs from pure pleasure after a bath. At the bottom there, Timmy loves his baths too, but for some reason he chose to look cute and pensive in his monkey bathrobe.

Timmy games

Timmy is 26 months old and he loves copying what sol and I (and my mother-in-law, and my sister-in-law) do. The ladies all love watching cooking shows on Food TV, so Timmy also loves to "cook". He plays pretend cooking in the walk-in cupboard, where the pots and pans are kept (as are flour, salt, cookies, canned goods, honey and spices, all kept on shelves he can't reach).

Since I'm always on the computer when at home (either just reading, or working remote, he also likes sitting at a computer and typing. He's not content just to play with his Fisher-Price Laughtop now (although he really loved to play with it a few months ago and learned his alphabet with it).

When I (or sol, or my sister-in-law) am at the computer, he'll walk over and force his head under my arm. Once he's got his head in the door, so to speak, he'll then climb up on the chair and eventually onto my lap.

Usually I can dissuade him when I'm working, but when it's time for a pause, or when it's time for a cuddle we play some flash games. Before I thought of flash games, I'd just click on a folder of family pictures and videos and either set the pictures to display in slideshow mode, or have the videos play one after another. That still works, but now he wants to interact with the computer more, so we play flash games.

He really likes the Fisher-Price ABC Zoo game. He sings along to the alphabet song intro and then likes pressing keys and having the corresponding animals come up and make their signature sounds. I think he'll tire of it soon though since there's only one set of animals, so pressing a letter always results in the same animal coming up.

Fisher-Price also have the Animal Sounds game. The URL is bogus though, it's only accessible via javascript from: here. Oh, I could probably read the source of that page and figure out how to get to the game directly, but I don't care enough to do that. I'll just say it's a stupidity to have games or other resources that are accessibly only through javascript. Timmy doesn't like this game as much as the alphabet zoo. But maybe he'll grow into it.

Orisinal has some incredibly pretty flash games for kids. But Timmy can't play any of them yet since they're all mouse oriented and I bought a full size mouse. I should have bought a mini-size mouse (they were discounted at Dick Smith's Electronics when I bought the full size mouse at a second hand store, so I didn't save much on the mouse), so that it would be easier for Timmy to hold. Well, my old laptop is sitting idle right now since I've switched to an oler but faster widescreen desktop-replacement laptop. If I can find a reasonable place to put it, maybe I'll let timmy use the old one with an external keyboard and mouse so he doesn't touch the laptop directly.

Timmy will enjoy playing the Orisinal games when he learns how to use a mouse and gains some more manual dexterity, focus and attention-span. That's probably another two years away.

The Jackson Pollock flash app is probably just right for him now though, and he'll enjoy playing it since it doesn't take any skill at all, just moving the mouse and random clicking. That'll get him to learn how to control the mouse a bit, which may make playing Orisinal come around earlier than I think :-).

Having him sitting on my lap pressing letter keys to have the letters and corresponding animals come up is very restful and enjoyable. He's not hard to distract away from the games for now. I hope that continues. I doubt it though. I'm sure it'll get more and more difficult to pry him away from a computer as he grows older :-).