Now, usually, when Ponch does it, he puts something on top of his head to mimic the Lemur King’s headdress. So that will help explain what Patrick’s trying to do here:

Apologies for not having video of Ponch doing his version.

P.S., photos from Patrick’s birthday are now up here. The week-long adventure included a nice family party, a trip to build-a-bear, and a trip to Sea World that Patrick still can’t stop talking about, nearly a month later.

When I was a kid, maybe 13 or 14, my dad got it in his head that he wanted me and my brother to see Shaft. No, you would not normally confuse my dad with being a fan of Blaxploitation flix. Nor was he particularly keen to let us kids watch the entire movie.

But he was giddy to share with us one of the prime musical pleasures from his early adulthood, the still-amazing theme song and score by Isaac Hayes. So my dad went to Randall’s, rented the movie  (remember VHS?), and let us watch the opening credits. Then he shut it off, figuring correctly that was as much as young teenagers probably needed to see.

Like pay phones and stamped letters, the idea of renting a video cassette just to see a movie clip seems archaic. If YouTube had been around, my dad could have saved $2 and just posted the video to my Facebook. Like so:

I thought about this the other day, when I introduced the wonders of YouTube to my own young son. Patrick LOVES the Spider-Man shirt I bought at Old Navy. He saw it in the closet the other day, and I started singing to him the old 60s theme song. But only the part I could remember from the Simpson’s movie.

So together, we both sat down in front of the computer and looked up the “spiderman theme song”.

First hit was a bingo:

Now when I saw the Shaft clip, I was confused, “I guess that was okay.” Only later in life did I realize how awesome Isaac Hayes could be, and it took a bunch of Quentin Tarantino and South Park to get me there.

Patrick has no such ambivalence about Spider-man. And he doesn’t need a cultural introduction to appreciate a costumed dude who swings around the city fighting crime. He’s in love. Every time we watch it, he simply asks, “Again?” So we watch it four or five times at a sitting. I’ve tried to get him into other YouTube videos, including the campy credits for Batman. But he’s not interested in watching other shows or cartoons or animal videos. He just wants Spider-man.

And since rewinding is painless and instant and free, I don’t mind indulging his newest first love.

He takes every opportunity to climb up on my chair and bash away at the keyboard.

This morning he even brought his own “starter laptop” out, and placed it on my desk in front of my somewhat more realistic PC.

It was pretty cute.

You might also guess that Patrick’s at the adorable age where he’s talking and learning new words about every 90 minutes. This is an exciting and head-scratching time for us. Because as wonderful as it is, we can’t always understand what he’s trying to say.

Or worse. We know perfectly well what he’s saying, but he’s trying to say something completely different. Witness his struggles with the word “computer.”

This happened a few days ago. Fortunately for me, Jordan has (correctly) assumed that this is an adorable mispronunciation.

Second, we’re proud to note that Patrick is now walking! He still can’t stand up without using a wall or a chair or a dog, but once he’s up he can walk all over the place. Here are a few videos that show of his skills. We took these a week or so ago. He’s improved even more since then.

Yes, this is quite on the early side. But we know better than to get too excited about our little genius.

Babies take different routes to the same destination. There’s no right way to learn to walk, for example, and there’s scarcely even a right time: The accurate range for when babies should start extends from 8 months to almost 20 months—an amazingly, almost meaninglessly broad stretch of time. The most interesting research on motor development in recent years treats it as the product of many different systems: the infant’s environment, personality, nervous system, and personal physical limitations. When all these variables interact, you get a lot of different results, as countless studies have made clear. You don’t get a chart that looks like something out of The Ascent of Man.

But the idea of the typical child is ever with us, never mind the volumes of research disproving it. As several prominent developmental psychologists have written, somewhat despairingly, "Ages and stages so thoroughly pervade our conception of motor development that every pediatrician’s office and developmental textbook sports a requisite table of developmental norms." These charts and tables make us anxious and shrink our sense of the possibilities of infancy. There’s no chart that can make sense of this photo of an 11-month-old Efe infant, in a rainforest in the Democratic Republic of Congo, carefully cutting a fruit in a half with a machete.

Of course, parents want some sense of what their children should be doing, and knowing that their baby girls technically might be able to use a machete won’t help much. But false milestones and misleading developmental narratives aren’t helping, either. It’s a sorry state of affairs: Even as developmental psychologists have discarded the idea of universal developmental milestones, those milestones are the only things many parents know about developmental psychology.

In the Preddy house, we’ve sorta figured that was the case. I learned to walk when I was 11 months old. Jordan learned when she was 9 months. I have a coworker whose twins started walking at 14 months. All within a “normal” timeframe.

But understanding the essential meaninglessness of these milestones doesn’t mean we aren’t excited and proud to see Patrick a few weeks away from taking his first steps when he’s barely 8 months old. For the proud parent, that’s the nature of the beast. You get excited about the big changes.

Here’s video evidence of Patrick’s new skills.

In case you were wondering, this is perfectly normal.

We’ve just uploaded a few videos to our YouTube.com channel, both of which document Patrick’s newfound mobility. In the last two weeks, he’s started crawling and pulling himself up. Not bad for just having turned 7 months. As he starts to get better with his feet, we’ve resigned ourselves to the fact that he’s probably going to be an early walker. That’s not to say we aren’t proud of his progress. We were just hoping we’d get to enjoy that golden period where he can sit up and entertain himself, but not yet be a moving target. No such luck, as you can see.

An administrative note:  If you are interested in keeping up with photos and videos of Patrick, you really should bookmark or subscribe to our respective Flickr and Youtube accounts. We tend to upload stuff way more than we post to this blog.

Obviously, we could just upload stuff to Facebook, but many of our family members aren’t on the Facebook. Also, Flickr and Youtube both work super well with the iPhone, which is popular amongst our otherwise tech-challenged parents / grandparents / siblings.

Man, I hope not. Also, I’m fairly certain that our crib isn’t intended to support my 6’3”, 185 pound frame + a baby Patrick.

In any case, we haven’t made the transition to crib yet. Patrick’s sleeping in something called a co-sleeper next to our bed, which we needed because he quickly outgrew the 15 lb weight limit of our bassinet when he was still 2 1/2 months old.

Did I say sleeping? He’s not really sleeping there. We put him in there to start the night, but he usually ends up in bed with us, either on top of—or right next to—Jordan. And once I get out of bed around 5:30 or 6, he takes up residence on one entire half of the bed. He loves it. Not sure whether he likes because he can be close to mom, or whether he thinks our bed is just more comfortable than the relatively hard mat inside in the co-sleeper.

We are talking about moving him to his crib, which has a much softer mattress that he may like better than the co-sleeper. And he loves his room. I take him in there whenever he’s fussy and quickly starts smiling again. But we’ve tried to get him to take naps there by himself, with decidedly unhappy results.

Whatever his preference, either for us or for soft bedding or both, I fear a rough transition. A future of the crying Patrick, standing in his crib, wondering why one of us isn’t crawling in there with him to hang out for the night.

Before we left.

With our pal Janess, who was also our hostess.

Notice the Manny Ramirez costume in back? Nice, huh?

Jordan baked a few cupcakes, as well.

_____

What’s that you say? You’d like more pictures? We’ve updated our Flickr site with tons of new pics, including some new additions to Patrick’s Greatest Hits.

Also, last night, Patrick rolled over for the first time. We captured it on video, and uploaded it to our new YouTube page*.

*Please note, we’re turning off YouTube in favor of Vimeo. We’ve replaced the video on this page accordingly. Also, we’ve added links to our other videos on the right-hand sidebar of the blog.  Yay!

Cheeseburger Cupcakes from Marshall Preddy on Vimeo.

We also took a few pictures, which you can also view on our Flickr account.

The last photo is the bacon. Actually, it’s made of something like fruit rollups. They’re called Kellogg’s Yogos Rollers ( I guess because they’re “yogurty”).