Dinner with Dom

The following is an insightful and thorough commentary on important social issues. Nah, of course not. It's a bunch of photos of Dominic! Today's theme is Dominic in the high chair during dinnertime.

First Dominic demonstrates his mastery of the cow cup. The boy loves to drink... water that is.



After consuming a portion of vege mash, a refined gentleman always uses his napkin delicately. Or sometimes he just chews and sucks his bib.

Term 3 starts...

Holidays are now over and Matt went back to work today. I have tentatively made a bunch of daily rules for myself for this term - largely they consist of making myself exercise and write everyday as well as not eating any post-dinner snacks* and so far so good. It seems the no post-dinner snacking is going to be the hard bit because it's not that long after dinner and imaginary foods are already calling to me.

Dom and I also invented a new game today. It is an action movie inspired (as was the Mission Impossible game) rather unimaginatively called 'Indiana Jones game'. It requires a swiss ball, an enthusiastic baby and more arm strength than I have if you want to play it as often as Dominic does. It involves holding the baby just above the floor infront of the swiss ball and pushing the ball so that it rolls after him. You have to rush the baby along as he giggles hysterically about being chased by a giant ball. When you reach the other side of the room, you spin the baby around to face the swiss ball and he kicks out excitedly trying to kick the ball**.

This game soon developed into another version where I sat on the couch holding Dominic letting him kick or push the swiss ball and then laugh excitedly as it rolled away and then back to him. Who knew swiss balls are basically boomerangs and always roll back in the direction they were pushed?

* Fruit doesn't count because it is not real food in the naughty delicious way that chocolate/cookie are food. It's food that you can feel virtuous about eating so it doesn't count.

** A little known deleted scene from the movie is when Indy turns around to confront the rolling big rock in the tunnel, giggles like an infant and kicks his wriggly legs at the ball. Honest.

I shall have to get Matt to take a photo of Dominic playing with the swiss ball. In the meantime, here's a random Dom photo:

Lots of photos

So on our anniversary Matt took a bunch of family portraits as we realised that we don't have many photos of all three of us. We tried using the timer function but actually got some nicer closer picture with Matt just holding the camera out pointed at us and clicking away. I like this one because Dom is actually facing the camera.



Here's another photo of Dominic chomping away on one of his toys. We suspect more teeth are on the way as he spends a lot of time chewing these days and gets really wriggly and excited with he sees us holding the tube of Bonjela.



Whilst we were wrapping up a pressie Dom spotted the long brown cardboard tube from inside the wrapping paper. Guess what happened next?

Peekaboo Monster

Every month Matt likes to take photos of Dominic with his monster for size comparisons. The seven month photos seemed to turn into a game of peekaboo for Dominic resulting in few photos where both Dominic and monster are clearly visible. I still think they are pretty darned cute though :-)

Murder with cookies

Yesterday afternoon was good fun as my sister came round to provide us with some roleplaying and she also brought a batch of fantastic double chocolate chip cookies accompanied by the bloke who made them. Nobody actually died from chocolate cookies but I suspect this is only because we have all been building up an immunity to high levels of chocolate over the years as the cookies were indeed dangerously rich and chocolately. We were playtesting the excellent game 'Murder Most Mysterious' which is an Agatha Christie-esque whodunnit with a neat Cluedo card mechanic. You also get to play Red Herring cards on other characters to make them seem more suspicious. Much fun. I heartily endorse both the game and the delicious cookies although the overwhelming chocolateliness of the latter had me twitching away and bouncing around way after my bedtime. Thankfully having Season 1 of Veronica Mars DVDs made the staying up no hardship at all. Dom had actually been around for the entire playtest and was quite content hanging out either being held or playing with his toys as we gamed so that was good. He was all smiles and happiness when getting held or played with by his Aunt* and Austie got to brutually savage her uncle so really a good time was had by all. Gaming was much fun but I found that my brain has either gone a bit rusty on the roleplaying front or the months of tiring but fun parenthood have left me with a crazy lose track of what you're saying in the middle of a sentence disorder. Many a sentence was set out on boldly only to wander off into a haze of confusion to a random destination. For some reason I determined that there was a poisonious residue of Jojoba berries from Kenya. Given that I shouldn't reveal any plot spoilers, I'll not give away too much of the 'Murder Most Mysterious' but here are some quotes. "The writing is shocking. Look at this simile! '...as yellow as a banana', and he's talking about a banana!" "You'd be surprised how many times one comes for a stay in an English country manor only to have to a handful of murders to solve before breakfast." "No decent British jury would ever be swayed by physical evidence. We need a confession in the library!" "I would come up with a far more poetic way for a daughter to murder her father who abandoned her. Like abandoning him on a cliff to be eaten by vultures." "It may be a crime of passion, and what would you British know of passion." "Smythe![the butler] Go and fetch Smythe to be questioned!" "'She was trying to seduce you [the Great Danish detective] throughout dinner with her drinking and provocative behaviour.' 'Well she quite missed the mark. I'm no Spaniard!'" "Tell everyone in the house I know who the murderer is and I'll announce it in the library in half an hour. I'll wait here alone in the library with this candlestick, and you stay hidden with that leading piping. We'll lure the murderer out and what could possibly go wrong?" * Which means despite hearing warnings from listening to Jeeves and Wooster stories in Audioboook form, he clearly has not developed a healthy fear of the evils of Aunts.

8 glorious years

Yay! It's our 8th wedding anniversary today and Matt is on holiday! I think we have only ever had one or two anniversaries before where we weren't working.

Of course this is the first such occasion with a wee baby around which kind of changes the celebrations (in the best possible way). Less wining, messier dining, and a 6.15am start on a day off. No late night partying for us tonight :-)

It now feels like we have achieved most of original marriage goals - lived overseas, paid off student loan, bought a house and started a family. I believe we planned to have kids 'in about five years' for most the time right up until we actually started trying for a baby.

Now of course we need more marriage goals. Obviously we still have goals we want to achieve as individuals but it is good to have things you want to achieve as a team as well. We are open to suggestions for future goals of awesome. I'm leaning towards world domination as a goal - but I think Dominic is the most likely evil mastermind in the family, so we might need to wait a while before he's up to the challenge. Owning a cow is also a possibility - though the pooperscooper would be hard to weild. Becoming pirates would also rock.

Of course, no future goal can ever top the awesome that is The Dom:

Cowmooflage

Heh heh. We got Dominic some cow print pyjamas, partly because he is fascinated with mine but mostly because they're cute and tacky. He even has cow slippers to match.

Notice how the cat snuck into one of the photos. She has a sixth sense for cameras and is magnamious enough to grace any photo shoot with her elegant presence.

Oh, it's an anagram!

Hurrah for Season 2 of 'That Mitchell and Webb look'. It makes me happy that they have combined two things I really like - Numberwang and mocking the Da Vinci Code movie. Enjoy the trailer and marvel at how David Mitchell's ridiculous hair is still actually better than Tom Hanks' ridiculous hair.