21lbs 9oz

By all accounts, our child is a monster. At his six month pediatric appointment this afternoon, Doctor Schneider confirmed that he was off the charts for height and weight, and suggested that he was showing signs of "unusual mental agility" for a child of his age. I have this second hand, unfortunately, our current deadline crunch allowing only one parent at a time the liberty of gallivanting with the pediatricians. "But what does that mean?" I ask my wife, delighted to hear the news but genuinely puzzled by it. After all, talented though he be, his tricks are limited to smiling, clenching, vomiting, howling, and staring with the same bug-eyed open-mouthed vacuous stupor that he probably inherited or acquired from me. Which among these is the mark of genius? The wife couldn't tell me, alas, having apparently agreed so completely with the doctor that refining questions appeared superfluous. We'll see if he still has the signs at nine months, when it's my turn.

The child has definitively made the transition from larval blob to b0nzai humanoid, i.e. from the sort of creature you expect to find under a wet log to one you might reasonably expect to see on a living room floor. As the above photo shows, sitting up is now routine. In peak form, he can hold that position almost indefinitely (the 'almost' part has caused a couple of tears) while systematically passing every toy within reach through the laboratory of the mouth. (I think it's a question of limited tools, the old 'if all you got is a hammer, you see a lot of nails' business. Perhaps when he has other methods of probing material objects, the Tooth Test will seem less compelling, but the moment, everything goes in, from juggling balls to fingers to the tails of the cats.) Still has trouble sleeping through the night ("He absolutely does not need to be eating at four in the morning at this age" admonished Dr. Schneider. Well well. Maybe so, but who wants to listen to him grumble?) and can't crawl yet, but his nap schedule is regularizing and he seems to have made a reluctant peace with the nanny. (Could it be that we have made a reluctant peace with leaving the premises when the nanny is here? Strange how those two phenomena coincided.) He has taken well to solid foods (avocado, mango, pea, banana) and his poo has transformed from delicate light brown milk stains to round oversized rabbit turds. Hurray for clothe diapers.

Under the dual dietary regimes of breast milk and raw fruits, fat is gradually filling in the convex hull of his body. Soon he will physically instantiate the following theorem: let B denote the set of spacial points coinciding with Benjamin's material body. Let x and y be two points in B, and S the straight line segment that passes from x to y. The all points in S are contained in B. (Preliminary proof: see photo above right.)

A few recent quotes:

"That kid don't miss no meals, do he?" (woman working the checkout counter at Home Depot)

"That child looks...healthy!" (random dog-walker in the park who witnessed B.'s cheek jutting from the sling and tried to suppress a smile as she passed.)

"Be nice to Benjamin, he might decide to sit on you." (The mother of the child with whom we share a nanny, speaking to her child.)