Moving on Up!

We’re Moving!

Just a quick note today to let you know about the new home of HeirApparent, http://heirapparent.frantzylvania.com .  After a year and a half of using WordPress.com,  I’ve decided to move up to my own hosted blog which gives me much more control over how things look and function.  I’m already more than thrilled with what I’ve been able to do so far from an aesthetic standpoint, and am just hoping that Google will rank the new site just as high as the old in the ‘cat poop disease’ department.

What does this mean for you?

Not a whole lot actually.  If you are a subscriber to either the Feedburner RSS or the Email updates, I’ve already switched the source of the feed to the new site.  If you stumbled upon my site, just remember to go to this address, as it will now be the updated blog:

http://heirapparent.frantzylvania.com

Thanks, and Happy Easter!

Food for Thought. Thoughts on Food?

Time marches on, as it usually does, and our once immobile bundle of sleepy flesh has quickly evolved into a crawling, squealing ball of energy that bounds around the floor chasing the cats, the rabbit and anything else that moves or lights up.  In addition to her newfound mobility, Justine has now embarked upon yet another new frontier.  She has begun refusing her “baby slop” in favor of more “regular people food.”

I’m being unfair to the baby food, though.  I mean, yes, it is a variety of slurries served up in a rainbow of colors and flavors.  And no, I probably wouldn’t invite you over for Easter dinner and serve you ham and green beans through a straw.  But we’ve recently discovered at the local BRU more “sophisticated” ground up food.  Chicken Mango  Risotto.  Creamy Chicken Apple Compost.  Er. Creamy Chicken Apple Compote.  (Don’t believe me?  Check it out.) Finally, I thought, we can spoon feed our baby food that is as exceptional as the food that I personally prepare nightly.  I’m a big fan of the compote, ya know?

While this all sounds well and good, for the most part Justine isn’t a big fan anymore.  While we used to delight in serving her new and different bottles of goo, she doesn’t seem to have much interest now, with the exception of pears, turkey and cranberry, and green bean casserole (sans the fried onions of course).  She’ll also take her squash and oatmeal in the morning, perhaps implicitly understanding that oats are either for breakfast or horses.  But beyond these exceptions, spoon feeding her baby food results in her objection.

Objection is a mild word.  It’s more of long grunt, followed by wild swinging of extremities.  She then finishes with the “scrunch,” whereby she instantly contracts every muscle in her body and utters perhaps the most annoying whine imaginable.  I think Kim would agree, it’s a cringe-inducing horror that eats immediately at your soul and makes you want to go outside and kick down a tree.  Imagine that happening multiple times during a feeding and you can start to understand why we figure she’s moving out of the baby food stage.

This leaves us at an odd crossroads – what do we cram down the craw of our hungry baby if it isn’t the baby food which we so accustomed to using.  First is the old standby, either Cheerios or “Puffs” (which I’ve heard termed “crack for babies” and that description is apt).  She quickly learned to grab these little nuggets and crush them with her 3 teeth.  Beyond those basics, now we just try and give her whatever we can cut into small enough pieces for her, including string cheese, watermelon, mashed potatoes, meatloaf, rock candy, goose pate, and her absolute favorite, Faberge egg omelettes.  (We do have to remove the gemstones first).

This new preponderance of finger foods has had other unintended side effects, most notably our thorough re-enactment of “Leiningen vs. the Ants,” which you may remember from 7th grade English class. Justine’s recent dexterity isn’t 100%, and so probably a third of everything she picks up ends on the floor, where the tiny little monsters emerge from nothingness to shepherd the sugary goodness back to their lair to feast upon.  Which means that we need ant traps.  Which we can’t put down where the ants are.  Why?

Did I mention she’s crawling all over the place now?  Sigh.

A Letter from the Future?

I’m still in shock.  Today I received the following email:

“Dear Dad,

I am writing this to you in the year 2050, to ensure that you enter the 2009 Spring Contest at Dad Blogs – grand prize of which is a Three Ring Adventure Wooden Swing Set crafted by Kid’s Creations.  By the way, in the future, it will be possible to “back date” emails and have them delivered in the past.   Very handy.  In any case, you don’t know it yet, but that swingset laid the foundation for my entire life.  Without giving away too much of what is to come for me, here are a few highlights:

My daily regimen of running up the safety stairs and then doing a flying leap onto the trapeze bar landed me a spot with the Flying Wallendas when Luigi Wallenda spotting me doing the routine at age 14 as he was driving to a Home Depot to get supplies for repairing their safety net. They were suddenly in need of a replacement trapeze artist, and I was perfect for the job.  With your blessing I spent 4 years touring the country with the circus, where I met many interesting folks, including the San Diego Chicken and Robin from Batman.  I was awarded the coveted “Chang and Eng Scholarship” (well, one half of it at least) and was able to attend both Harvard and Oxford simultaneously (in the future, everyone will attend a physical university and an online one at the same time).

The rock climbing wall vaulted me into the world of competitive rock climbing, and helped me to become the youngest person to ever scale Mt. Everest (at 7 years old).  Later, my expertise in climbing in addition to an amazing tolerance for G-Forces developed on the swings and the slide was put to the test as NASA sent me to Mars to climb Olympus Mons, which sounds more exciting than it actually was.

Thanks to the toy telescope perched on top of my swingset, astronomy became a favored hobby of mine, and I spent many an hour of my adult free time documenting the sky.  That’s how I discovered JVJ24601, a small asteroid that was destined to slam into the hills south of Paris and bring an end to both humanity and any appreciation of Jerry Lewis.  But thanks to my interest in physics borne from studying the motions of the attached disc rope swing, I was able to devise a method of deflecting the asteroid using all of the trash in the world’s landfills and several hundred thousand feet of Gorilla tape, thus saving the world and earning both the French Legion of Honor and a lifetime supply of Gorilla glue.

After years of playing on the tire swing, I realized there was a fatal design flaw in the design of radial tires and as a result I patented a process that improved their lifespan to over 700 years.  I also discovered that, after having played with the steering wheel attached to the inner housing, that car accidents due to oversteering could be prevented by a small but pivotal change of the wheel shape from circle to a trapezoid.  The fame and fortune these  provided me landed me on “Celebrity American Gladiator” where the cargo net training proved vital, and I began a 5 year stint as “TireIron,” a formidable foe for contestants on the program.

The sheer unboundless joy that the swingset brought to my life inspired my to try and better the health and welfare of everyone I could.  Capitalizing on the fame that each aspect of the swingset prepared me for, I ran for President of the Americas (and Portugal) – you’ll find out about that soon – and won handily.  Just 3 months into my first term I was able to narrowly avoid a nuclear holocaust by providing the Republic of Eurasialia with millions of ductile iron swing hangers to solve their “swingsecticide crisis.”  Now that very Kid’s Creation swingset I played upon as a child sits in the White House grounds, right next to the hoverport and the 50 foot statue of former President Jenna Bush.

So Dad, you should see the importance of entering that contest.  The fate of half the free world depends on it.

Sincerely,

Duchess Madam Dr. Justine E. Frantz, Esq. MD, CPA, DDS, Ph. D. MLS
President, World (West Half)”

A New Nickname

9 Months Old Photo Gallery

Now that Justine has mastered crawling, she’s fallen back on trying to perfect another, more harrowing skill.  She now, at every chance possible, attempts to pull herself up to a standing position. This is actually much more frightening than I had initially imagined it being.

Now I’m ok with crawling.  While it’s true that we can no longer leave her for hours at a time and expect her to still be in the same place, and we’ve had to move my collection of knives, poisons, and recalled lead painted choking hazards off the floor where I had been storing them, she’s still, thanks to a variety of expensive barriers, confined to a central area.  So we can still steal away for a few moments to feed the cats, go to the bathroom, or briefly continue our experiments in cloning meatloaf.

But this “pulling herself up” business adds a whole new dimension to the issue.  Literally.  What’s the big deal?  Well, adding verticality to the mix significantly increases the chance of “rapid de-verticality” – in other words once she’s up she’ll probably go back down and in some cases in dramatic fashion.  Thus we end up gingerly standing nearby, our hands crouched at the ready should we need to swoop in and rescue our daughter as she tumbles to the ground, only to pull herself back up again, laughing at our overprotective designs.

There are three notable areas where she has learned to pull herself up with varying consequences.  The first is the table upon which our rabbit (Gizmo) lives her largely solitary existence.  Justine pulls herself up gingerly, sets her feet, and then with one hand attempts to either pet or jab at the bunny through her cage bars.  Gizmo is generally a sport about this, but occasionally is startled and gives a friendly honk and a not so friendly thump before retreating to the corner.  Justine, of course, finds this hilarious.  I just stand nearby, nervously eyeing the hardwood floor behind her.

I discovered the second locale on a Sunday morning as I was awakened while dreaming about living a life “under the sea” by the subtle screams of a newly alert infant.  Much to my dismay she met my gaze while standing in her crib, her hands resting on the crib rail and her mouth firmly gripping the rubber pad we installed only a week or two ago.  We have enough trouble with naps and sleeping – her ability to stand will probably make it a little more difficult to keep her in the prone and sleeping position.  Plus at some point she’ll probably figure out how to Mary Lou Retton out of there and then will be in big trouble.  I’m installing a trampoline underneath just in case.

Finally, she earned her new nickname pulling herself up at the last location – the fancy gate we have installed near our staircases (we live in a split level).  When we are in the kitchen, she’ll crawl over to the gate, pull herself up, and reach through the bars, either longing for one of us to pick her up or trying to snatch our wallets as we walk by.  In any case, her attempts at circumventing our baby containment system now have us dubbing her with yet another nickname:

JailBreak.