Just a couple of random recent photos of the boy…
Six Months: Happy Half Birthday, Nyan Thomas!
Six months ago today – at 8:27 a.m. on Tues., July 26, 2011 – young Nyan Thomas was born. Wait, what? Six months?! How’d that happen? It’s very much a cliché, yes, but where does the time go… Here’s a series of photographs of the boy through the months, each of them taken at roughly the 26th of each month…
(click to enlarge)
Another Adventure: West Mersea!
On the last Friday of 2011, we headed down to the seaside town of West Mersea in Essex County with brother Sean for some delicious oysters and fish-and-chips. (The oysters, it turns out, led to a bout of food poisoning for at least one of us, but let’s not focus on that; they were delicious at the time!)
Here we are inside the West Mersea Oyster Bar:
Afterwards we strolled the overcast, blustery waterfront, taking pictures of the boats, the oyster beds, the shoreline at low tide, and the lovely little English cottages overlooking the sea.
Outdoor Activities: Parks and Zoos
A few more pictures from our trip to the UK last month.
The weather wasn’t too cold, so late one afternoon we strapped him into the stroller and, with Noel and Lisa, headed to a nearby nature preserve:
The flash and the angle makes this next one look like Nyan and I were photoshopped into the scene. Nope.
Another day, we decided to take the boy to his first-ever zoo, the Colchester Zoo. It’s a fine mid-sized zoo with a decent selection of animals, though it was colder and more windy than we expected. Nyan was less than impressed at first, as he was in his stroller and couldn’t see much. So Daddy started holding him. He was ever so slightly more interested, but let’s be honest: five months old is a bit young for a kid to enjoy a zoo. Still, it was a fun family outing, and mom and dad certainly enjoyed it.
A pair of red pandas up there near the top:
Burmese python!
Some sort of vulture or California condor, maybe. About to munch on a dead rat. We stepped away before it got gory.
Wolves!
And finally, Colchester Zoo has a pair of lovely (if elusive) tigers. Here’s one:
Nyan with Pho Pho, Phwa Phwa, and more
A few pictures from our boy’s time in England over the holidays… Mostly our boy with Pho Pho (grandfather) and Phwa Phwa (grandmother):
Here he is with Pho Pho and cousin Poppy:
Christmas Day (Daddy was, at this point, passed out asleep after flying over on the red eye):
And finally with Phwa Phwa near the end of the trip…
Today’s photo: monthly update
Here’s the latest in what’s turned into somewhat of a tradition: Mommy holding Nyan Thomas at roughly four-week intervals.
Today’s poem: created kid/now tried
This one’s just for fun: turns out that Youtube has an auto-transcription feature for vidoes, using Google voice technology or somesuch to provide closed captioning. So I turned on that feature for the video from earlier this week (see it here) of Nyan Thomas’s first solid food.
Let’s just say Google voice technology still has a ways to go. But it does make for some interesting poetry. Here it is.
much one child
welcome but but but but but
go to a lot for the camera the future
depicted
scraps spent
you accepted
using he’s plates at this point
handcuffing the portrait
burke young then you’re going to administer the vote ten years twenty years
happily situated
we project these are the big three d_o_ legrand speech
created kid
now tried
through first
he’s got the huge but
stop
inferences that and
made under which the two you see onto with
stuart
uh… block
stupid
predator document about it
Today’s video: First Solid Food!
A big day in young Nyan Thomas’s short life: his first solid food. Okay, it was just rice cereal mixed with formula, and he spit out some of it. But still. Big day!
And of course we captured it for posterity…
Today’s video: watching the news
We’re not big TV people in general, and don’t intend to let Nyan Thomas watch much TV, for obvious reasons (i.e. much of it is trash). And we haven’t let him see the screen, period, until now, because of research that shows that TV watching early on can mess with the brain’s development and even trigger autism, if other conditions are there.
But while in Colchester, the boy’s grandfather – a trained psychiatrist with many years of experience – checked him out and declared him fine for watching some TV. No music videos or other flashy trash, but nature documentaries or news (and even soccer (aka football), with its long shots and good colors) are okay. And sho’nuff, the kid took to news programs especially; he often talks back to the screen, apparently thinking the news readers are talking to him. Here’s one example.
Nyan Thomas L's Blog 