injecting foreign fluids into my pinhead baby

sorry sorry sorry for the down time -- mr nice guy has been unplugged, bereft of internets, for lo these three-plus days and it has hurt me more than it has hurt you. damn you time warner! damn you straight to hell!

but! like mike tyson i am back despite my better judgment and the advice of my peers. much has happened in the intervening days, dear sweet readers: the child had her second round of shots; she had her first solid food; i was forced to go nearly four days without porn. you see, there is much catching up to do.

let's start with the shots! last week mrs nice guy and i took the kid to her vet and the vet said "time for more shots" and we said "you're the boss." and you know what? i have no idea what she injected into my child. i just blindly agreed and said "shoot 'er up" and the vet took out a quiver of needles and proceeded to administer shot after shot after shot after shot. i lost track after 38. for all i know shot #2 was battery acid, shot #8 was drano and shot #19 was special k. inoculated? no clue. i am the best parent ever.

the interesting thing here, though, is that we switched tactics. last time the kid went to the vet she got four shots (if i am not mistaken: hardwood floor cleaner, white out, toilet water and acid rain) and she SCREAMED. this time mrs nice guy had the brilliant idea of nursing during the shots. the difference was uncanny! my wife's omnipotent healing breasts kept the baby totally distracted for the duration of the shots. i think the kid flinched a little when the vet injected the liquid nitrogen, but i couldn't tell for i too was mesmerized by the boobs. sweet, life-preserving boobs.

anyway. i was impressed. the mammarial panacea did its trick. (next time i stub my toe i know exactly what i'm going to do.) as we were leaving, the vet gave us a little fact sheet about our baby. the interesting stats: for her age she is in the 75th percentile for weight and 69th percentile for height. an above normal kid! tall and chubby and very healthy! sweet. the harder news to swallow: her head circumference is in ... the fourth percentile. oy! this means that only three percent of all four-month-old babies have a smaller head than hers. my baby is a pinhead. a tiny-skulled freak. if ever there was any dispute she was mine, it has now been dispelled.

on to other news! the vet told us to starting thinking about introducing solid food. yikes! since the baby had, for reasons she failed to communicate to us, resumed waking up screaming at four every morning, we thought solids might help weigh her down for an additional two hours of sleep. sweet, life-preserving sleep. so. solids. where to start? what would be a good introduction to solid food? like your last meal, i suspect you want your first meal to be special: steak? jambalaya? baba ganoush? guess again! true, yesterday she ate solids for the first time. but by "solids" i of course mean a tablespoon of single grain rice cereal thoroughly dissolved in breast milk. still, it was served in a bowl with a plastic spoon we bought at target earlier that day.

the baby, who was mostly unclear on the concept and demanding to know exactly how the tits figured into all this, ended up wearing more cereal than she ate, which suits me just fine. it was cute. got some good pictures. also, like the vaccinations, i am not entirely sure what we were putting into her body. reading the ingredients on the box didn't help either: niacinamide? sounds like a delicious, dessert-flavored suicide tablet. pyrodoxine hydrochloride? don't rich folks use that to clean their swimming pools? i suspect the gruel was largely harmless, made of bone ash from the local animal shelter, for calcium, and silt to thicken it up. so she ate it sloppily like a big girl who loves her sleep-inducing pyrodoxine hydrochloride. and then she conked out for her first full-night of sleep in days. ah. sweet, life-preserving pyrodoxine hydrochloride.