The Lord Squirmoculous

Watch­ing Abra­ham is a never-​ending source of fun. At first he had no voli­tion, at all, but here we are three weeks later and he’s already fig­ured out that he has the abil­ity to con­trol his own body. He’s not very good at it, but I can already see some def­i­nite human behav­ior emerg­ing. He’s a good boy.

In the evening he’s usu­ally over­stim­u­lated from all the new things he’s learned dur­ing the day, so while he feeds he fusses might­ily. Some­times he gets full and doesn’t really know what is going on and becomes incon­solable by Debbie.

I’m an expert, how­ever, at both wak­ing and get­ting the boy to sleep. Here’s a demon­stra­tion of the former:

The lat­ter basi­cally con­sists of me lay­ing him across my body and let­ting him hear my heart­beat and look at my face until he’s out like the fat kid in dodge­ball. Takes no more than 10 min­utes, every time.

I’ve been read­ing him Robert Bly’s The Night Abra­ham Called to the Stars and The Sil­mar­il­lion.

The other day I referred to him as Lord Squirmocu­lous, and treated him as if he were a com­mand­ing alien from an alien inva­sion force; dis­guised as a baby, of course. This has been quite fun, and we’ve been run­ning with it. Say­ing: “Lord Squirmocu­lous com­mands x!” and “Your forces are leav­ing Squirmoc­ula now, sir!” and “If you don’t lis­ten to Lord Squirmocu­lous, he’ll unleash the Squirmo­culizer!” Poor lit­tle guy, he has no idea. Heh.

Comments on this post

  1. Sil­mar­il­lion, excel­lent choice. Might I also sug­gest Go, Dogs Go! and Are You My Mother? both are writ­ten by PD East­man (pub­lished by Dr Suess) and are Michael and Kathryn’s favorites.

  2. PD East­man? I think he also wrote Sam & the Fire­fly, which is Debbie’s favorite kid’s book.

  3. Quick look at wikipedia val­i­dates what we’ve both said: http://​en​.wikipedia​.org/​w​i​k​i​/​P​h​i​l​i​p​_​D​.​_​E​a​s​t​man
    The books I’ve men­tioned are great books, good length and pac­ing for kids and they both can “read” them now. By “read” I mean they know what the words are for the pages and can mimic my voice for the dif­fer­ent characters.