entirely safe and fun

The skeptical look runs in the family.

New pictures are up, tagged with tagged with “day twentyfour”. Many of these are pictures of Dante’s namakarana, or naming ceremony, which we held on Saturday afternoon. Some of our guests took pictures; if that describes you, and you’ve got your photos up on the web, I’d really appreciate it if you could send me a link (email or comment). Thanks to Parashuram for sending his along!

There is also quite a bit of general-purpose cuteness, much of it taken by or featuring my sister Abby — thanks to her for letting me put these photos up.

Last night, I awoke to a strange, high-amplitude sound coming from the vicinity of Dante’s crib, like someone rubbing a giant eraser on a stretchy plastic bag. Needless to say, I was concerned, and jumped up to check out the situation. It turns out that the boy has worked out a way to make a noise louder than anything he can produce with his larynx by sucking very hard on two non-adjacent or non-parallel fingers, e.g. on his thumb and index finger, or index and ring fingers. It’s an awful whistling, screeching sound like something out of Lovecraft, and it’s (unsurprisingly) effective at getting him fed. It could also help him find work in Hollywood, voice acting for man-eating aliens that jump out of the ductwork.

Modern guides to baby-rearing suggest that it’s OK to get babies to soothe themselves by sucking on a hand or finger, and in particular that it’s preferable to having them cry or to getting them hooked on exogenous soothing fetishes like pacifiers. But if this is going to be Dante’s hand-sucking technique for the foreseeable future, geez. Is there somewhere I can sign up for crying instead?