I’ll keep this post really short, since these sit rips are becoming more common and less cool/flattering. In the past two months I’ve seen four identical versions of my site (but with my name/stats/work swapped out with theirs) and one that I have a hunch started as a copy/paste of my site, but luckily with original imagery (which almost stings more, but eh)…as of 5 minutes ago, the only site that still stands is this: http://www.nazmulalam.com/delta/

Look familiar?

I’ll post screenshots soon since three of the four (five?) offenders have removed “my” site. One even responded to my email (which has awesomely been replaced with this: http://gurdeepubhi.com ). I guess I’m writing this up now because I’m working on two sites which will launch soon that, in my opinion, are cooler than sursly.com. So I’m expecting them to get ripped.

They’re both 1-pagers and though they don’t use the same lead-through method that my current site does, they do everything else better/cooler.

Back to finishing the first of the two…

Oh, but you’re still here, because you know the books are that good.   Literary CRACK, I tell you.  Not because you can just crank through each one and can’t wait to get your next fix, but because I’ve sacrificed sleep to re-read books that I flipped through less than 9 months ago.  Exactly.

And of course this is because the fifth movie (which was one of my least favorite books) and the final book (which will pretty much make live less worth living once I finish) will be here in less than a month.  Soon.  So I’ve started at the beginning, again, and won’t see the movie or read the last book until I take in every addictively wonderful word.

Sure, I could be reading The Bible or something else I haven’t read but know I should…like Moby Dick or some other classic stuff, but then Megan wouldn’t be able to make fun of me for talking about how I want a magic wand instead of an iPhone (unless you can cast some spells or something with the iPhone, which I’m sure Apple is working on).  So that’s that, and there goes half of my already small audience.

Annnd Jonah has a cold, which he has managed to avoid for a while now.  We’re hoping that he didn’t contract it today when he ditched his delicious ice cream cone with sprinkles for a little bird poo on the picnic table.  To his credit, they looked a lot alike:  some white creamy stuff with flecks in it.  He did stick his tongue out after realizing that it was not ice cream, but not before Megan and I screamed and made sure that no one from Child Services was watching.

Live and learn, little one.

Annnnnd, we have company again, hence the lack of actual posts.  Besides, I’d probably end up bitching about the heat, which I clearly hate to do.

However, Meg and her visiting family decided to make some old-fashioned home-made ice cream in one of these nifty balls, and it was pretty yummy.  There was one injury in the making of the ice cream, which could have had something to do with the ball being made of hard plastic, or it could simply be further proof that someone around here has to get hurt while trying to have fun.

But gosh, it was worth it.

This morning we thought brunch would be a nice idea. We booked reservations for our second attempt (we never made it out the door on the previous attempt) at a pretty nice place up at Cornell. By “pretty nice” I mean swanky, and by swanky I mean a potential baby meltdown situation. We knew we were in over our heads when we were forced to use the valet parking.

This is one of the many many reasons (among the 82 different kinds of assholes and incredibly promising career paths) that I refuse to return to LA. Unless you’re buying the plane ticket. And renting me a helicopter.

But breakfast was good. Jonah didn’t make a scene, and neither did I, so everybody wins. Megan did notice that we were strategically seated in a corner. Away from people, and the food. Smart.

And thinking back on it, the valet experience wasn’t terrible. We gave some dude our ticket when we left, and went outside and watched him back the car up 30 feet from where it had been parked. And this was a good thing, because I didn’t feel bad giving him a “thanks” and half-assed smile instead of a fiver. As in five dollars. American.

Jonah, on the other hand, looks grumpier than he lets on.

And we played in the water instead of crashing the wedding that was in place a few hundred feet down the coast.

There is nothing more appropriate for this epic shift in your sense of time than counting down the months/weeks/days to your child’s birth, which is both a) an impossible thing to predict (“due date”, seriously?) and b) the first day in which time will no longer continue to make sense to you. Assuming that your child was born on his/her due date (which they weren’t) you’ll never be able to prepare for this switch. Well I wasn’t.

Example
Today’s date: June 12, 2007 (happy birthday Kelly!)
Jonah’s age: 22 months
Feel like I’ve been a parent for: a little while.
That period before I was a parent: feels like half a life-time ago.

22 months is not a long time. But, it feels like it has lasted an eternity. And, it has flown by. India (only three years ago) seems more like a dream than a memory. So does college. But so does that time when Jonah just drooled and slept all day and stared into oblivion (the glory days). The contradictions are endless and I’ve made no progress in understanding how to possibly prepare for the next onslaught of timewarp. But there were a few obvious contributing factors in this whole mess.

Jonah’s birth was sort of the beginning of the end for sleep. While he was napping between 14-17 hours a day during his first few weeks on Earth the few of those remaining hours he was awake were between 1-8am. But oh, its fun because you have a new baby, and he’s cute, and you’re losing your mind because you’ve been rocking a kid to sleep for 30 minutes and the sun is coming up, but it’s okay because he “cooed.” You get through it, but this inevitably defines the first stages of “Parent Time.”

Which is different from, you know, time. Going somewhere? 25 minutes late. Anywhere. We could plan a week in advance, or leave early to get wherever it is we were going with a newborn. Late. It isn’t as though Megan and I were that casual before Jonah. The “fashionably late” doctor appointment becomes uncool after 10 minutes, we learned. And missing not only the previews (sorry Meg) but the first 10 minutes of a movie you kind of wanted to see but really just wanted to get out of the house? Also uncool.

So we got used to sleeping no more than five hours a night and being late all the time. This would have been somewhat tolerable if it lasted a few days, or maybe (maybe!) a few weeks. But eight months go by and you’ve actually gone insane. Strange how that happens. Your sweet, beautiful child is crying at 3am and that’s it. Can’t go another night. “We’re letting him cry it out tomorrow,” we say. But we don’t. But then, we DO. And then (!) a few days later, he’s sleeping all night. And those previous eight months of torture kind of melt away, and our faces slowly begin to resemble 20 somethings again. And we’re happy. And so is the baby.

Then, things really start to move. He’s eating solid food, and you can barely remember the time when he was just eating mush. And he’s walking, which is great, but he’ll surely kill himself in the process, and you crave a time when he sat in the bouncer all day (which, again, seems like it lasted ages but was only a few months ago).

But this doesn’t stop happening. There is always a milestone, always something your child is doing or learning that changes everything in your life, and you think “remember when ____” and realize that you may never experience that again. But you can’t dwell on this because look, he’s 22 months old, can speak full sentences, and will possibly remember getting a splinter today. Or making home-made Play Dough with his Mom. Or strumming the guitar with his Dad. And you can’t explain it, but it’s comforting, in an uncomfortable way.

Maybe it’s just because I’ve been using everyone else’s DSLRs lately or seen a million of them hanging off the necks of people who I’m sure have absolutely no idea how to use them – or appreciate them – but it’s about time to cash in one of the five-hundred credit card offers I’ve been getting JUST to buy a new camera. It’s time like this that I appreciate the sweet irony in going to school for film/photography and using their Hasselblads and Other Expensive Stff to get a degree that prevents me from getting a job* where I can afford that previously overabundant and underappreciated Stuff.

I write this because I was taking a lot of photos today, more than I usually do, and was pretty much ready to chuck my camera (which has taken some decent shots) into the gorge. I mean look at the noise in the shadows. I think I’ve pushed this thing as far as it can go.

But I did manage to snap a few nice shots of Jonah despite his unwillingness to stay in one place for more than half a second. I’ve been neglecting the camera because of its flaws and headache-inducing-mannerisms, but I do feel like I’ve been lacking in the baby documenting department. Which is my department.

* * to be continued (oh snap) * *

*My job is rad and my degree did not help in my getting hired. At all. Thought you should know (there’s still hope for all you folks with useless film degrees!).

And for some reason we’re consuming cereal in this place faster than oxygen.

But it is a little warm around here.  And that makes Jonah’s hair unnaturally curly.  Which is nice.  If you like a baby boy who look like girl.  His hair has only been cut once since August 2nd, 2005, and that was only to fight off a mullet a few months back.  He’s currently sporting this hipster swoopy hair that looks ridiculous on anyone over the age of 3.   Did you hear that hipsters?!

But we had ice cream tonight. And we had to peel Jonah off the walls to get him into the tub afterwards.  And I discovered that giving a baby a bath after eating ice cream looks a lot like when a cat falls into a toilet. No one wins in these situations.  No one.

Then, a few weeks ago, Megan brought back the “shake your booty” request – which he had either grown out of, or we just stopped asking for -  and he happily obliged.  He can do this standing in place or running across the house.  Or field.  Or grocery store.  It involves a little singing on our part, and a lot of gyrating on his.  Also nice.

Last week was the beginning of the previously mentioned attacks of affection.   Pretty self-explanatory, not life-threatening.

Last week was also the beginning of the Train fascination.  He’s always had a soft spot for the choo-choos but lately he’s been taking all his transportation toys (planes, cars, trucks, trains, etc.) and placing them in a line, single file, and pushing them across the living room, with mixed results.  It usually ends pretty badly for the kids on his school bus, but somehow they are able to fly the weird convertible plane afterwards no problem.  So it’s all good.

In the tub he’s taken to “swimming,” which is basically propping himself up on his hands with only his head above water and scooting around until he bumps into a wall.

There’s also the recent development where Megan or I can now say “pump it” to our son and hear “LOUDER” in return, and visa-versa.  I’m not sure what to make of this.

The list could keep going.  And I’m leaving out all the great things like how he can poke things with a fork and get the food to his mouth.  Or occasionally drink from a non-sippy cup.  Or count from one through eight.  But those things aren’t nearly as cool as singing Black Eyed Peas and dancing around the room giving high fives.

Not that we’re about to get all sappy and nostalgic over 22 months, but now we can feel better about telling everyone he’s “almost two” rather than saying “21 months” and watching people scratch their heads to quickly do the simple math only to figure out he is, actually, almost two.

Granted he looks like a bit of a giant compared to most kids his age, I still can’t seem to accurately guess the age of any infant, toddler, child, whatever, under the age of 14, and even that is a stretch. I like to think that I have improved at this “profiling” a little bit, but it has always been a struggle.

It doesn’t help that you can’t ask a kid how old they are, either. Well you can, but you can’t trust them, just like no one should trust Jonah when he is asked his age and replies: “Yellow.”

And to make matters worse, for some reason – since Jonah learned how to say this word – anyone that doesn’t have facial hair or boobs or is under 5′ 3″ is a “baby.” As the present stay-at-home-person Megan has run into this a lot, and told me many stories of how our little toddler has pissed off 3 or 4 or 8-year-olds by calling them “baby.” But don’t they deserve to be called that if they can’t take smack-talk from my 22-month-old son?

Not that Jonah is trying to be mean, or sees anything wrong by it. He loves other kids, all kids. Babies, teens, whoever (unless they try to swipe one of his Elmo toys). And maybe this is just something leftover from our overuse of the word for the first year of his life. But it makes for some grumpy kids and weirded-out parents.

We’re not exactly sure why, but the fine dining establishment that we blessed with our presence had the strangest outside seating. Ever. We were happy to feast in the 80 degree weather but were confused as to why we had about 17 inches of sidewalk to do so. The two waiters that tag teamed our party of six (c’mon, we’re not that demanding) tried explaining how next year they were going to ask the city for more sidewalk space. Looking at the restaurants to either side of us, which each had at least eight extra inches on our chosen destination, we quickly realize that this place is run by penny-pinching Hobbits. Check please.

So we rush to the kickoff of the Ithaca Festival, which is celebrated with the Craziest Parade In The Tri-State Area. I don’t think we’re in a “tri-state area,” but my point is: this is the wackiest shit for miles around.

But “good” wacky. You know, Volvos wearing tutus wacky. Jonah is thoroughly amused by everything other than what we came for, occasionally pausing to look at some shiny parade object or spinning lights. Great. I do eventually manage to sit him on my shoulders, all cliché Dad style, which is cute until he tries to jump off.

And then we notice how dark it is getting. Not because of the time of day, but because there are End-Of-The-World Clouds approaching from, well, every direction. We briefly weight the pros and cons of staying and possibly getting soaked, but again, get distracted by shiny parade objects and spinning lights.

And then we’re soaked. It wasn’t really like a drizzle or shower – more like sitting under a waterfall. Or two. And the insane thing is that we didn’t just up and leave. We have a good laugh: “Ohh, should have brought the umbrella, ha ha ha.” This is Ithaca after all, and these episodes DO happen, and frequently pass as quickly as they begin. But not this time. So once the baby starts shivering and every inch of our bodies is drenched, we decide to head back to the car.

To Jonah’s credit, he was laughing the entire time we racewalked to the car. Through rivers and over lakes. It was glorious.
(thanks Molly for snapping some great shots of Jonah!)

Until Raffi shows up.

Now like all new “kids” albums we end up with, I always say “oh hey, this isn’t that bad.”  And since I have a slightly vague recollection of this childhood “favorite” I was optimistic.  But when I have “Oats And Beans And Barley” in my head at work during a client meeting I know that CD has got to go.

But he loves it.

So I try to find alternatives.  Backup favorites in the past include select Gnarls Barkley tracks  and anything by Feist.  Jonah will occasionally make my day and request a Jetsetter (my pseudo-band) song and we’ll listen – me, pretending I’m “gonna make it one day” and him, pretending to like it.

So we try real instruments.  I get out his slightly unused xylophone from his first birthday.  Nothing.  Our sweet Casio keyboard?  A little response.  The guitar makes an appearance and it is something to climb/chew on.  And his teeny tiny mallet for his “toy” drum is a LETHAL WEAPON.

So it’s back to Raffi for the time being.  And surprisingly he’s picking up on words (and notes, or at least some sort of change in pitch).  Which is both amazing and slightly painful.  But I’ll take it.

Now it used to be that a short board book was both a delicious snack and the perfect length for my child with the attention span of, say, the length of this paragraph.

But now not only will he sit still the entire time, he’s picky.  One Morning In Maine? No problem.   Roget’s Thesaurus? Sure.  The Giving Tree? Yes. No. Maybe. What?

So reading Elmo one night is the Greatest Thing In The World but the next he’ll scream until I set it on fire and throw it out the window.  We have found however, over the past week, that there is one book he will never refuse, and it is simply called: Classic Fairy Tales.

At first it was cute.  We’d get out of the tub and he’d point through the wall to his book and say “fairy tales???” and wait for our response.   And so it began.  We’d try Goldilocks or The Frog Prince and he wouldn’t blink until I closed the book. Every night we’d open up the book and read a very very very long version of all the old school fairy tales I’d grown up hearing/reading/seeing.  But maybe it is my memory, or this “classic” edition, but these stories seem different.  Creepy different.

Yesterday’s Hansel and Gretel was pretty much the last straw.  I had endured the Three Little Pigs making an ass out of the Big Bad Wolf, and then boiling him into a stew.  I had hurried through Snow White being poisoned THREE TIMES (stupid stupid stupid Snow White) only to move on to the Big Bad Wolf (again?!) eating a grandma and her Little Red granddaughter (and then watch the wolf get served AGAIN).  But I wasn’t prepared to read how a step-mother convinced her husband to leave their children in the forest, who stumble upon a crack-house of candy and are abducted by a the psychotic owner who tries to eat them, only to get tossed into the oven herself.  Nope, didn’t see that one coming.

So my 21-month-old learned the big fact of life: kids have it rough, but if you stay alive long enough, your enemies will die a horrible, painful, unnecessarily graphic death.  Karma? Maybe. But needless to say we’re off the ‘tales for a while.