Summer Breeze

For anyone else like me who grew up enjoying Godzilla movies on Saturday afternoons and watching his enemies attempt to devour entire Japanese cities, I feel like I'm reliving those moments watching Ian eat. The child is an eating monster! But aside from that little loving description, Ian's doing great. It's very interesting watching him and noticing the differences between this second-born and Megan; the latter cried maybe once her first year, very unusual for any newborn, while Ian consistently cries at least once per hour, if not more (particularly when he wants held). I remember joking with Melissa that Megan had been so easy as a baby to care for that any subsequent child of ours must, out of a sense of Manichaean balance, be the anti-Christ. The little guy gets cuter all the time, though,coming out of that newborn, angry little man appearance as the days go by.

On the geek front, Christmas came early for me last week, with a 16 lb. package arriving from XFX that contained a 680i SLI motherboard and two GeForce 8800 GTX 'XXX' edition boards. This hardware is for the multi-GPU series I'm supposed to contribute an article toward this summer, and I can safely say that these video cards are an incredibly efficient marriage of features and performance; I finally have the graphics processing power to truly drive the 30" LCD I use. I'm still playing LOTRO quite a bit, though obviously not as much as pre-Ian. I downloaded the demo for DiRT over the weekend and Megan really seems to enjoy smashing into trees and other cars while sitting on daddy's lap with a 360 controller in her little hands. I also caught a matinee of the Fantastic Four sequel yesterday, which was a waste of time and money. Megan's been asking for me to take her to see the new Pixar movie, Ratatouille, which I'm sure I will after it's been out for a few weekends. Crowded theaters and little girls are not a good combination, at least for those sitting nearby if a certain little princess decides to act out that day.

My cousin, Josh, is getting married on Megan's birthday on the 7th of July, so we moved her birthday party to the following weekend. At age four she'll never know the difference. Melissa rented a space at a local park since these events apparently require more guests than our 2k square foot house can comfortably hold. Megan's been informing her parents that she'd like blue crocs and a Dora the Explorer scooter for her birthday, and I'm sure we can accomodate both requests. Though she's also demanded a Mickey Mouse cake with Mickey Mouse plates, cups, etc. I'm tempted to engage in some gender stereotyping at this point, but I'll refrain in the off-chance my wife ever learns of this blog.