Because so many of you have asked, here is an update on Alexander. I haven't posted anything about him in a while. This isn't because nothing's been going on. No, no, no. This is because I feel the need to include photos when I post entries about him, and cropping down the photos so that they'll still look good at Web resolution (that's 72dpi to you) takes more effort than I have time for, these days.

And shrinking them down to fit... how far do I shrink 'em? I want them to be large enough for you to see, but small enough so that you don't have to resize your browser window just to take in the whole view.

And then, there's selecting which photos to post. For today's post, I narrowed two electronic rolls of 64 photos each down to thirteen representative (and relatively in-focus) shots. I put all thirteen into Photoshop, cropped 'em, shrunk 'em, and saved 'em. But, which ones should I choose to put up today?

Okay, okay. That's all a long-winded excuse for why I haven't shown you the little guy. Let's get on with the show.

A great deal has been going on since last I posted about him. Alexander's two lower teeth and several upper teeth have come in. A couple more upper teeth are on their way.

He has started walking. He doesn't walk around a lot, yet -- he'll tool around for six or eight steps and then sit back down. But he's doing that more and more often. He's been very articulate. We notice more inflection and variety in his speaking all the time, even if we can't understand a thing he's saying. More often then not, he'll explain to us that, "Bwah, bwah, bwah." Don't know what it means, but it's endearing.

As ever, he keeps going through growth spurts. At one point, his growth spurt seemed to be dealing exclusively with his head. His cranium started bulging out so much, we thought he looked a bit like a mad scientist. I've included a photo here showing the mad scientist at work on the most important tool for controlling the world: the remote control.

His appearance changes from day to day, especially eye and hair color. Most days, his eyes are a brilliant blue, but every once in a while they take on a greenish tinge. His mother's eyes alternated between blue and green for the first five years of her life before they settled on green, so it's anybody's guess what will happen with his eye color. (For the record, my eyes are green and my father's eyes are blue, which is also true for Paulette, so we know that we both carry both blue and green eye-color genes.)

On any given day, his hair will appear blond, reddish, or brownish.

Dear friends of mine across the country has a son who was born one week before Alexander, and we also have good friends here who have children just a few months younger. You can't help but compare your child to other children when certain things come up in conversation. Alexander was a late crawler compared to most of the babies we know here, but he started crawling early compared to Jack out on the other coast. But Jack, on the other hand, has been eating solid food without complaining for months. Months!

Not so, Alexander.

Alexander simply doesn't get into eating "solid" foods, like the Gerber pureed veggies and the like. For a while he'd tolerate them, but he's not even doing that any longer. There are very few things he'll put into his mouth, and food is not among them.

He will, however, chew on paper products. Napkins, envelopes, yellow legal paper. His favorite paper product, though, is playing cards. Just like his father, he has taken an early liking to playing with cards (someday I'll have to explain why I named my web site "House of Cards"...). Unlike his father, though, once he gets tired of playing with the cards, he'll put them into his mouth and gum them to oblivion.

Is the red dye in playing cards poisonous? I sure hope not.

For a kid who doesn't eat much food, though, Alexander is doing just fine. And in less than a month, he'll be celebrating his first birthday. Yee-ha! Or, in the words of Alexander, himself: Bwah, bwah, bwah!