Sunday, November 30, 2008
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Max was not named after anyone, but since picking the name I have noticed how many Maxes there are out there. It's like when you buy a certain make of car and suddenly you see them everywhere. To get this out of my system I'll be attempting to post a Max of the week.
- Name: Max Fischer
- From: Rushmore (1998)
- About: Played by Jason Schwartzman, Max Fischer is the lead character in one of Wes Anderson's best movies. He stages plays based on famous movies like Serpico, compulsively starts clubs, and is such a bad student he ends up getting expelled and going to public school. He also falls in love with a teacher and convinces Bill Murray to build an $8 million aquarium for her, before meeting his true soul mate, the clever and earnest Margaret Yang.
- Quote: "Maybe I'm spending too much of my time starting up clubs and putting on plays. I should probably be trying harder to score chicks."
- Connection: At our wedding, we asked a string trio from the Capriccio Ensemble to play "Margaret Yang's Theme" as our recessional music. We still have the sheet music if anyone wants it.
- Meta: For the 1999 MTV Movie Awards, the Max Fischer players did a series of very funny short plays based on the nominated movies. Here they are, thanks to YouTube:
Friday, November 28, 2008
In response to your requests for more photos, we've loaded a bunch onto Flickr. Some are shown below -- click on any one to see it larger. You can also click here to see the whole collection. We'll eventually do some organized blog posts with captions & stuff, but hopefully this will sate your interim appetite for more Max.
Grandpas and Grandmas:
Uncles and Aunt:
A millisecond before Jen tells me to stop taking photos already and get back to taking care of the the baby:
Max was born Friday, November 21, 2008 at 9:34pm. He weighed 7 pounds 13 ounces, and measured 20 inches long. He and Jen are both doing great and are in good health. Here are some first photos from that night.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Jen got these great animal prints from Marisa Haedeke's Creative Thursday store on Etsy. You should all go to her site and buy lots of stuff from her. [BTW, advice for those of you playing the home game -- hanging three frames at exactly the same height is harder than it sounds.]
My parents got me this amazing original Bugs Bunny drawing a while back, and it seems totally appropriate (and maybe even classy) in the kid's room.
Chris Giarrusso did this awesome drawing of the Mini Marvels for me at San Diego Comic-Con this year. You should all go to his site and buy lots of stuff from him, too. Start 'em young! Fun fact -- when choosing who I wanted in the drawing, I ruled out the Human Torch because of a vague sense that the kid shouldn't get the idea that fire is good. But who do I choose instead? Hawkeye, who shoots pointy arrows, and Wolverine, who has knives coming out of his hands. I'll get the hang of this parenting thing eventually, I promise.
Tchotchkes on the top of the bookcase. From left to right:
- Photo cube with photos of me as a little kid. If you zoom in you can see the spiffy bow tie.
- Rock painted like a duckbill dinosaur I must've done when I was like 4 or something.
- Mr. Toast and Joe Egg by Dan Goodsell -- awesome comic, he has an Etsy store too.
- Supercool robot piggy bank my Mom got the kid at the baby shower. I had to be physically restrained from keeping it for myself. Thanks Mom!
- Three squishy ghost lamps from IKEA in green, blue, and red. I need to take a photo in the dark with them lit up. They are eerie goodness.
So where are we going to put the rugrat?
This photo is a good comparison with the 'before' -- hard to belive it's the same room. The Best Chairs glider from Buy Buy Baby is about as super-comfy as it looks. Jen found the curtains at Urban Outfitters after an extensive search. They have neat stencil images on them, including pairs of bird sewing scissors.
Check out all those books! Being married to a children's book editor has its advantages, massive discounts on printed matter being one of them.
Step 1a: check out the splotches of brown paint under the wallpaper. Really gives you that crackhouse vibe. Seriously, where are the receipts?
Step 3: patching. Jen's mom and Aimee patched innumerable holes and dents in the century-old plaster walls.
Here are some original photos of the kid's room from our house inspection and walkthrough.
Looks pretty normal, doesn't it?
- Three kinds of wallpaper
- A border saying "Flowers Harmony and Love" over and over
- Green picture molding
We pretty much ignored this when it was just a guest room, but if you know Jen and I you can imagine our kid is unlikely to be the Flowers Harmony and Love type.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
You may be aware that our house is a bit of a fixer-upper which we've been working on steadily since we moved in. (We tried to get a houseblog going but it fizzled out, mostly my fault I am sorry to admit.) The reason I mention this is that having a baby meant we had to find a place to put the baby. Solving this issue involved a complex rearranging game like one of those number sliding puzzles.
The old guest room had to be turned into the baby room, which meant we had to relocate a guest sleeping area, our treadmill, and two full Billy bookcases. To have enough room for all that in my home office and Jen's craft room, we we needed to close up a large wall opening that had connected my home office with Jen's craft room, which meant calling back Tico's Carpentry, the reliable folks who moved a doorway and built an extra wall when we were renovating our kitchen. We had to buy a bunch of bookshelves -- more Billys for Jen, and a bunch of Elfa shelves from the Container Store for me.
The upshot was a couple months with the second floor in chaos -- I only got the new storage shelves into my closet last week. But the results were good. I'll put up a separate post with before & after shots of the baby room itself.
Hey, why wait to embarrass your kid until he's, you know, born? Thanks to the magic of ultrasound you can watch the kid's ontogeny recaptitulate his phylogeny in stunning time lapse photography. Soon he'll be leaving the womb and making his own way in the world. I hope he can find work in these challenging economic times.
March 28 -- 5 weeks 5 days -- the little blob on the right. The round bubble is the yolk sac I think.
April 4 -- the round thing is still yolk sac, not a head.
April 11 -- 7 weeks 4 days -- head and limbs.
April 25 -- big ol' head. For me this one gives off a kind of starchild-at-end-of-2001 vibe. Enlighten us, space baby!
May 7 -- 11 weeks 6 days, heart rate 141 beats per minute. The kid is a techno song.
May 14 -- ontogeny recapitulates technology as TV goes color.
June 25 -- 3D ultrasounds are the coolest things ever. Jen pointed out that this looks like a baby wrapped in spray foam insulation. (That thing in the front is not an insanely beefy arm.) Also this starts a few weeks of debate about whether the baby has my nose.
