Redeye

Benjamin's right eye seems to be mildly infected. A colony of yellow barnacles has set up permanent residence around the perimeter, the upper and lower lashes are connected by a web of white stringy mucus, and the area around the iris has turned a dull red. Fearing early stage river blindness, we have chosen to follow doctor's orders and apply antibacterial drops, "directly in the eye, four times daily." If we're interpreting the corresponding display of howls, shaken fists, and bodily convulsions correctly, Benjamin is not a huge fan of the drops.

So the boy looks like something of a cyclops right now, a one-eyed hairless micro-sumo with Parkinson's and an attitude. He is surreal in other ways, too. He now weighs 15 pounds, exactly as much as our friends' five-month-old. Random people who see him in public are confused: they see the face of a newborn, but the body of a toddler. They respond as if they had just witnessed some really cute version of the mythological Chimera, with the lion's mane replaced by wispy baby hair and the goat body by a beer belly. "Cute, but still a freak," I can see them saying to themselves.

Catalina has decided that the boy will be an art critic when he grows up. His vision has improved to the point where his gaze focuses on things beyond the breast (already miles ahead of most men), and though vast spaces of blank wall continue to exercise a strange fascination for him, he seems especially drawn to a large water color collage Catalina made for me as a gift back in our courting days, a playful fusion of symbol, scale, and color. He also seems to ogle the crappy watercolors that line the walls of the Make Your Mark Cafe, a child-and-laptop friendly coffee space to which Catalina and I make ritual pilgrimage every Friday morning. It should be admitted that his choice of subject matter is rather idiosyncratic; for example, he will choose to look at objects exactly 37 degrees to the right and 15 degrees above straight ahead and level, and he will enthusiastically absorb everything within that line of sight, turn him as we will. At times, this approach seems to place undo emphasis on traditionally undervalued objets (e.g. the space three feet above the frame) but Catalina thinks it is a decidedly modernist approach whose time will come.

Other interesting behaviors: the Mystery of the Green Poo continues, with roughly every eighth diaper a spectacular mass of fluorescent green goo. We have turned these random color shifts into a kind of household game show: whoever rolls green on a diaper change gets one free pass on washing dishes. (Needless to say, we are both competing to change as many diapers as possible.) Yesterday he used his own hand to take the glombus from his mouth, bringing it to the level of his navel before he realized what he was doing, panicked, and let it fall. We were impressed. (Now if he would just move it in the other direction.) He often suffers acute squirminess, especially when he's trying to sleep, his fists clenched, his arms swinging, his legs bicycling frantically. Perhaps his is training too hard to become Baby Heavyweight Champion of the World? We need to talk to him about separating his professional and his personal lives.

There is new baby media: a batch of photos (all captions courtesy of Catalina) and a short video showing this heavyweight contender in the agonies of one his training regimes (the famed Stomach Time.)