Daryl vs Ryan

It was Daryl's first real encounter with a baby of similar size. Ryan (right), courtesy of Angry Eyes, is the more active of the two while Daryl (left) is extremely shy and slow-responding, just like his Mummy and Daddy. Perhaps it is time for us to send him to a playgroup, to teach him some badly-needed inter-personal skills?

Crawling Nowhere

So far, Daryl has been doing everything fine. He's passed the hand-eye coordination test by the local maternal and child health centre (albeit at the second attempt, as he was unwilling to cooperate with the nurse in the first try because she wasn't pretty) in flying colours, and his vital statistics are right about where they should be. But there is something he still isn't able to do, yet.

He can't crawl, yet.

We've been encouraging him to do so since his neck became strong enough when he was just three to four months old, but whenever we put him onto our bed, he would flatly collapse and lay prone, as if he's been shot in the buttocks (which is partly true because I always tell him that all buttocks facing the sky are liable to be spanked (by me), hard), or as if he's ducking to protect himself from gunfire and an air raid.

We've tried every trick in our sleeves. We've tempted him with food and his favourable electronic gadgets, but he would only look up and support himself with his arms, and just refuse to crawl.

When we told my parents about it, I was extremely worried about their reaction as grandparents are usually much more nervous than the parents themselves. And when I heard what they say, I became even more worried.

They told me that Daryl probably won't crawl as a baby, forever, without showing any emotion at all.

Relax folks. Before you go berserk, cry foul or scream for help, just keep on reading for the reason, but whether it's a well-justified one is up to you to decide.

My parents told me that all the family members in my family, including my parents, uncles, aunts, second cousin once removed and myself, did not crawl when we were kids. No matter how hard we tried, we just wouldn't crawl. And fortunately, they said that our inability to crawl has never hampered our growth and development (which I totally disagree given my lack of height, strength and athletic talent, in no particular order).

Does it make any sense to you?

I'll keep my fingers crossed and hope that Daryl will be much stronger and taller than I am, without being affected by his (thus far) inability to crawl.

And so there go our chances of winning any big prizes in the much-publicised and ultra-exciting baby crawling races.

Gourmet Daryl

(Note: After a couple of picture posts, it's time to go back to the normal posts.)

Daryl simply loves eating. But wait a second, he isn't that crazy about his milk or congee or those sorts of baby food. He's crazy about the adult food. (When I said the word "adult", I didn't have anything remotely related to NC17 or X-rated in mind. But now I do.)

And don't blame us. We are not the culprit.

As many of you can testify under oath, you didn't kill anyone, and elderly people are sometimes are just as naughty as the young kids. They will try every trick up in their sleeves just to poke fun at and annoy you.

Perhaps we have been way too protective. We simply don't want Daryl to be exposed to any risk or danger that the smallest thing may bring about, including food and other possible allergens. So we have been extremely careful in choosing and preparing food for him.

But like many other elderly people, my mother-in-law (Oops, this is a possible landmine situation. I've got to be very careful here. Otherwise my lovely wife will spank me, hard.) loves to feed Daryl with all sorts of food. Long before Daryl had had his first tooth, she had already given him bread, rice, soup and biscuits, all these kinds of things, when we are away for work. In fact, she's so naughty that she would feed Daryl the "contrabands" when our domestic helper looks or walks the other way.

I have known her for over a decade now and have never noticed her funnier and naughtier side, until now.

I don't have a problem about the food itself, as Daryl will someday start eating them anyway. The problem is, once Daryl knows how good the adult toys, no, food tastes, he will no longer want to eat his simple, plain and tasteless baby food. That's why whenever we are having meals at home now, he would stick his neck out like a giraffe, hoping to see what we are eating.

The other day when we showed him a piece of pork chop, a big drop of saliva came straight out of his mouth and onto our dining table, just like the B-2 Spirit bombers raiding Baghdad, as if he had been starving for decades.

Of course we didn't let him eat it. But hopefully that won't make him think that we are being mean, especially when he sees how fat his daddy is, which may have led him think that his daddy has eaten all his food.

And I certainly wouldn't mind eating his healthy food.

Movie Star

Some day, Sylvester Stallone will just have to retire ...

Cover Boy

Sorry Angry Eyes, my copycat instinct has gotten the better of me. Daryl is on the cover too, courtesy of fd's Flicker Toys once again.

Daryl vs Andy Warhol

(Courtesy of fd's Flickr Toys)

You Reap What You Read

Unlike most of my colleagues (such as Angry Eyes), I have never been an avid reader, which is quite bizarre given the nature of my work. Imagine a soccer player who hates playing soccer. That is simply unimaginable and inexplicable.

In fact, I am a selective reader. I don't read a lot of things, as I often find books and texts boring. But you can still find a lot of books and magazines in my bookshelf, the reason being most of the them are related to sports.

I have always been a sports fanatic, but my interest is strictly limited to being a spectator instead of a participant. When I was a small kid, I would tape a lot of sports programmes on TV (Italian Serie A and the NFL in particular) and watch it again and again whenever I had time, and so I could and can still remember nearly every word of the commentary. For example, my man Martin Tyler reminded us, after an excellent 2-1 home win over Bologna early in the 1990-91 season, to "watch out for Sampdoria", which would go on to win its first and so far only Serie A title that season. I still have a couple of seasons' (from the early to mid-90s') worth of Serie A and NFL tapes in my cabinet, ready for me to pop into the VHS player when and if I have time.

You may say that watching the same tapes again and again has made me more laconic, which is probably true. But the flip side is, the excellent commentary of Tyler and Peter Brackley, among others, has greatly enhanced my English proficiency.

Anyway, when I finally have some (NOTE: not "a lot of") money, I decided to buy sports books, lots of them. My collection mainly consists of books on Formula One, but the number of baseball books is also increasing at a rapid rate. When Michael Lewis' "Moneyball" created a lot of controversy a couple of years ago, I immediately bought one from my trusted old friend, Amazon. And being an avid follower of Rob Neyer, I just can't miss any of his work. But despite being a huge fan of soccer and American football, I don't have too many books on them in my collection.

As for magazines, there is only one that I have been reading regularly for nearly 15 years: Sports Illustrated. It has the two things that I am looking for: Excellent coverage of sporting events (mostly in North America) and fantastic columns by renowned columnists like Rick Reilly and Steve Rushin. To say that I am trying to imitate Reilly's style in this blog, but to no avail (possibly forever), would be an understatement.

Daryl is now nine-month old, and we hope that he would pick up reading as a habit, as experts always say that it would be good for his development in terms of speaking and writing. At the moment he can only play with his toy books, and still can't turn the pages properly. I know we still have time, but being his parents, we are always worried about a lot of things.

No, we don't want to force him too much, but there are just some things that we should tell him to and not to do. We want him to love books and we want to build a nice little library for him. But instead of a sports library, we want his to be a general one, with topics involving every aspect of mankind. Otherwise he would be like me, who know nothing but sports.

But first we have to find a bigger flat, and buying a Mark Six ticket may help realise our dream.

Pressing All the Right Buttons

For some reason, Daryl loves buttons.

No, it was neither the clothes buttons, the belly button nor John and Jenson Button. He is crazy for the buttons on electronic gadgets like the remote controls and phone at home.

We found out months ago when we put him on the sofa to sit on his own, which he likes a lot. As usual, he arms were flapping like a mad bird and slapping his legs and the sofa. It was no big deal for us as he had already been doing this for quite a while at that time and we knew that he could never lift off like a plane. But suddenly, we could not longer hear the clapping sound anymore. As we were worried that something bad might have happened to him, we checked him out immediately.

Something bad had really happened, but not to him.

It turned out that something really bad had happened to our remote controls, which had been put into a bag slotted along one of the sofa's armrests.

What happened was Daryl somehow discovered the remote controls on the armrest and decided to play with it (probably out of boredom). I am not sure whether it was a touch of genius (no pun intended), but I clearly saw him aiming his index finger right at the buttons of the remote controls. Amazingly, he knew that the plastic portions of the remote controls are not meant to be pressed.

If you are wondering what bad thing had happened to the remote controls, you must have too much free time at hand to read my random and senseless thoughts on this tiny little thing called "Blog". Here you go: Do you like your entire body covered in saliva? Apparently, we were a little too late in finding out the torture he's had inflicted upon the remote controls, as he had already tasted them and found them neither tasty nor chewable when we came to their belated rescue.

Talk about damage control: In the days after, we decided to remove the batteries of one of the remote controls and let him play with it under our close supervision, in order not to inflict any more harm on it again. I am not an expert on human biology, so I have no idea how Daryl could leave so much saliva on the controls which would have drown them to death but for my intervention (I know you're thinking mouth-to-mouth resuscitation). But my wife also told me that the remote control for our TV is not functioning properly these days.

Likewise, Daryl also loves playing with the phone. He would press the buttons and be amazed by the "beeping" sounds it produces. But when we put the phone onto his ear and asked him to listen and talk to person at the other end, it looked as though he was wondering how a fluffy and messy mass of fat like Yours Truly can sneak into the tiny phone at home. He was simply stunned, perplexed by one of the greatest mysteries of mankind.

If Daryl turns out to be the second coming of Albert Einstein, a lot of credit should go to these tiny little gadgets.

And if I turn out to be really good at mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on gadgets like remote controls, full credit should go to Daryl.