Shyness Creeping In

So there seems to be a new trend with our son that started developing over the weekend.  This new trend is shyness around others.  Personally, I thought this wasn't supposed to happen till nine months of age or older, but here our son is, 6 months old and starting to exhibit signs of shyness.  This shyness of his is not your typical infant shyness of turning the head away, burying it in mom or dad's shoulder and refusing to look at others.  Rather, it consists of our son seeing others, a pouty face developing, and then small tears sometimes until I convince him that the people he sees are OK.  It happened this weekend to start with when we went over our friend's house for a play date and then again yesterday when I took our son to see our chiropractor.  In any case, his pouty face is so cute that you can't help but giggle a little while trying to convince him that the world is not coming to an end and that he has seen certain people before.  Maybe it is just a passing phase that will quickly disappear and then again, maybe it won't be.  Whatever the case may be, he is adorable all around.  Enough of the shyness, however, and on to my day off yesterday with our son.  As most people who read this regularly know by now, my day off watching our son is one of my favorite days of the week and I do my best not to miss it. 

Overall, yesterday was an ordinary day with nothing overly special to speak of.  One of my personal highlights however is the fact that I don't have to hold our son's bottle for him anymore.  Babies sure learn quickly when it comes to food.  About three weeks ago, I started teaching him how to hold the bottle on his own.  He would already grab the bottle with both hands while I was holding it, so I simply started taking my hand away and letting him be in charge of getting the milk from the bottle to his mouth.  At first it was touch and go; he would hold it for a little, then drop it, hold it then drop until he reached the halfway point of the bottle after which he got too fidgety to hold it himself.  He got progressively more adept at working the bottle, and for me, yesterday was the first day when I didn't have to hold the bottle at all for him.  Don't get me wrong, his grip would occasionally slip and the bottle would drop, but all I did was hand him the bottle and he would grab it and tip it upside down to get the milk inside.  It is quite funny at times to see him feeding himself.  When the bottle does occasionally slip, he will sit up with his mouth wide open and his hands reaching for the bottle.  After I place the bottle in his hands, he tips it up and throws his whole body back into the supine position to get the easiest flow from the bottle.  What is even more hilarious sometimes happens when he is nearing the end of the bottle his bottle and he starts to slow down.  At times he will spontaneously sit up, the bottle dropping and he will inspect any pillow or object around him for a few seconds, pound it with his open palm, and then realize he was eating and reach for the bottle again.  It is wonderful to see him learning things. 

He has an overall fascination with everything, but that fascination as I have mentioned before tends to be towards his environment rather than the toys he is given.  This isn't to say that he doesn't like his toys, what few of them he has, but it seems he would much rather explore the world around him than dwell on toys for too long.  I love to see the studious look on his face whenever he sees my wife or I doing something that he is not familiar with.  This could range from pouring a glass of water from a pitcher, washing our hands, putting plates and silverware away, or making trail mix.  As of yesterday, his two most fascinating events were trying to figure out how I clap my hands and how he can do it, and also perpetually dropping objects to the floor from his high chair.  With my hands, he will stare at them as I bring them together to clap.  He will watch over and over and over again.  While he has yet to try clapping himself, I have a feeling it won't be too long before he figures it out.  And on to the dropping.  I thought he was testing gravity a while ago by dropping things to the floor, but this week gravity has taken on a whole new meaning.  He will grab whatever is on his high chair, hold it over the edge, and drop it to the ground.  After dropping a given object, he will then stare at that object until you pick it up for him at which point he will grab it and repeat his dropping process.  I know that at some point he will start saying "uh-oh" when he drops something because I say that whenever he does.  It won't take long for him to make the connection himself.  In any case, I enjoyed every minute of my day off yesterday except for when I had to get boogers out of his nose and he screamed his head off.  Other than that, it was a wonderful day. 

The Flying Car

I don't know about anybody else, but I for one would love to have a car that is capable of flying.  Just imagine how much easier life would be if you could check the traffic in the morning, find the roads are super slow, and decide to fly to work instead, needing nothing more than to push a button in your car and turn it into an airplane.  Not only would it help for traffic, but it could cut down on travel time as you could fly faster than you could drive and cut out all the windy roads in between.  This is not to say windy roads are not fun, but if you want to cut down travel time and need to get somewhere in a hurry, what better way to get there than to hop in your aerocar to get there.  There are two aerocar's currently in development with serious effort being made to put them into production.  One was designed and is being built in Woburn, MA.  The other, with a little different design, is being designed overseas in the Netherlands.  The issue now with the cars is determining how they will meet both aviation and automotive standards.  The rigorous process of crash testing, test flying, etcetera etcetera, will probably take a few years in a of itself and even once it gets through all the that, the price tag may be what turns some people off.  Currently, the price for the American version is set at around $279K with the Dutch version being set at around $300K.  Either way, it is nice to dream of having both an airplane and a car, in one, parked in your driveway.   (Full Article Here)

This does bring to mind a few possible problems.  The number one I can think of is air accidents.  If for some reason, the price of the aerocar becomes reasonably affordable where most families could afford to buy one, imagine what are skies would look like?  They would probably be chock full of flying cars, zipping here, there and everywhere, vaguely reminiscent of a Jetson's show minus the futuristic housing.  In my mind, there would need to be some sort of air traffic law set up and enforced, possibly with flying police, to ensure the safety of all flying cars and also the people on the ground who would also potentially suffer if an air crash were to happen above them.  It seems there would need to be designated routes of travel to minimize congestion and to keep complications to a minimum.  And while we are on the topic of air accidents, we can't forget to factor in the FUI, or Flying Under the Influence.  I guarantee that if people drive cars under the influence, it wouldn't be too long before someone flew their aerocar under the influence.  It would make sense to me to have a mandatory breathalyzer attached to the ignition of all aerocars so FUI's couldn't happen.  To me, its all about safety.  The ramifications of the aerocar need to be considered in full before they are ever made street and air legal.  But alas, these prototypes still need to go through all the mandatory tests before they can ever reach the consumer, so I think we are safe for now. 

Despite my slight pessimism in the latter paragraph, I do think these are a wonderful combination of two totally different vehicles, the car and the plane.  It takes a person with incredible engineering know how and tenacity to go through with a process like this.  The end result could be amazing and I for one, would love to buy an aerocar if they are ever made affordable.  For now, however, we will simply have to watch and wait, seeing where all this leads to.  You never know, this could be the answer to our congested roadways and increasing traffic.  This could usher us into a new age of transportation.  It is the innovators like the ones who created these two different aerocars that we need more of, people who are willing to push the envelope and take an idea from paper and turn it into a functional, working vehicle.  The only way we will get more innovators is to instill a sense of creativity in our youth, a yearning for knowledge, and a lack of fear when it comes to pushing the boundaries.  A new generation of innovators and inventors is what we need to kick ourselves out of this economic slump we are currently in.  But once again, I digress as I have a tendency to do sometimes.  Let us simply keep our eyes looking up and searching for the first flying car in our neighborhood (in a few years that is). 

First Play Date

Before I get into our son's first play date, I must ask, why is it called a "play date"?  Why can't it simply be called a date?  Or does that imply something other than a meeting between two or more people at a previously agreed upon place and time?  But I digress, it is merely me questioning the status quo and the terminology we use to label certain events or whatever.  Back to the "play date" as we will so call it from here on out for lack of a better term and to keep any confusion out of the picture.  The play date took place on Saturday, a little past high noon, at our friend's house in Trumbull.  Outside of the children our son spends some of his days with at daycare, who are 2 and 4 years old, this was the first time that he has been up close and personal with another infant.  The other young boy he met for the first time is a little bit older at 9 months, but in the overall scheme of things, its a drop in the bucket.  At this age, its funny how 3 months separation can make such a big difference in their development.  Our son's new friend is crawling up a storm, (the army crawl of elbows and knees) is a good deal bigger, and is starting to pull himself up.  Besides that, however, they are merely two infants, fascinated with the world around them and eager to get themselves into trouble.  I think our son was a little more curious in his new friend than the other way around.  The other boy, while also interested in our little man, was also hell bent on crawling as far as he could. 

What our son did accomplish, for the first time that we were able to witness, was sit up on his own for an extended period of time.  It seems he is starting to gain his balance a little more.  If he leans to far to either side or backwards, he does still tend to fall over, but it doesn't happen that often anymore and he has come to like sitting.  Mind you, this was all at our friends house, so we were quite excited to see it happen.  Beyond his sitting, he did his normal routine while there, searching for toys, often times the same ones that his new friend had in his hand or ones that his friend had discarded in search of another.  The big difference that I noticed was that once our son had a toy, he liked to play with that one as much as possible whereas his friend would go from toy to toy to toy.  There is a big difference in the amount of toys that our son's friend has versus what he has.  His friend has a whole slew of toys strewn all around their living room while our son has a small box out of which we may take one or two at a time for him to play with.  Even while there, our son tended to find the objects that weren't designed as toys, but were fascinating enough for him to play with.  The one he found most fascinating was the clear plastic top to his friend's bottle.  It rolled around and forced him to chase it everywhere with his almost but not quite crawl.  All in all, we all had a good time over there. 

I guess most of all, I am glad that I have at least one friend with a son who is very close in age to our's.  It will allow our son to get more time with a child his age versus children who are his elders at this point.  To me, it will be interesting to see how the two grow up, see if they actually become good friends, and how this will all work out.  There are a few differences already that I am fascinated to see how they play out in the future.  Our son began daycare at 3 months of age out of necessity whereas his friend is just beginning day care this week at 9 months of age.  It will be interesting to see how his friend does in daycare and how his mother does coping with it.  Essentially, his mother has been home with him for 9 months, working from home, and has had a lot more time bonding with her son than my wife had with ours.  Over the course of our conversations on Saturday, she did express a little concern at how she would handle it with her son in daycare.  For my wife, it wasn't that bad as she was only home for 3 months with our son, but we shall see.  I am more interested in how our son's friend will handle the daycare and the new experience of being surrounded by a lot of other children where before he didn't have exposure to that many.  Also, it will be interesting to hear of how he reacted to being separated from his mother for the first time in such a setting.  I can imagine it might be a little more difficult for him, but who knows, he could handle it fantastically.  In either case, is has been an exciting weekend and will continue to be exciting as time progresses and we see how their friendship develops.