entirely safe and fun

His hand is slightly wider than my thumb, so his home rows on a QWERTY keyboard would be DF and JK, with S and L being long reaches.

More pictures are up, tagged with “day twenty”. There are a few gems in there, such as Dante’s first MySpace-type glamor photo (exhibiting a touch of Internet Disease, in fact, to hide his baby acne!).

Given the amount of time that I’ve been able to spend with Dante since his birth, it could not have escaped my attention that he is an insanely detailed scale model of a full-sized person. I read sometimes about the model-makers who, when building a 1/128-scale replica of a battleship, turn 1/128-scale pistons for their perfect 1/128-scale steam engines, complete with 1/128-scale scoring along the axis of compression to simulate years of 1/128-scale service at 1/128-scale sea… a baby is like that. Somehow, in seven pounds of flesh, there needs to be room for all the fiddly little parts that go into a full-grown person. Not just the big, obvious stuff like a pancreas, but a whole collection of tiny pancreatic nodules, populated with the requisite Isles of Langerhans. Not just a 5%-scaled intestine, but hundreds of sphincters along its length to facilitate peristalsis, and billions or so of villi to increase intestinal surface area. Not just two soft, pink feet, but ten toenails, copying adult toenails with an otaku’s obsessive perfection.