Today is Gavin’s half birthday. He’s six months old! In the last week or so he’s started babbling a bit. He says “ba ba ba” and “da ba ba” and “ma ma ma” and variations of those three sounds. He can’t say “the quick brown fox jumped over the fence” but he’s working on it.

so erin went to copy pics off the camera today and lo and behold the computer would not detect the camera. i played with it a bit and my expert opinion is there’s either a problem with the cable or with the port on the camera that the cable plugs in to. feh. so no pics until we can figure this out. feh, again.

technology sucks.

~c

right now gavin is very happy, extremely joyful. he is giggling and grinning at everything. it is his happy time of day, a few hours after getting up in the morning. when he is happy, it practically pours out of him. when he is upset, hungry, tired it’s the same.

it seems gavin doesn’t “express” his emotions as much as, he just embodies them. he has none of the filters i put between my feelings inside and what i show, or tell the world outside of my head. i’ve learned to hide those things: happiness, anger, loneliness. gavin doesn’t hide them, or think about whether or not to express them, and in what way to express. he just is happy or sad, etc. i think the loss of ability to be the way you feel as an adult is unfortunate. of course there are reasons…social interaction patterns, and shortcuts within communicating, that make things easier, at least some of the time. but it seems a huge loss. i think this is part of the reason that i have had “the most fun since i was a kid myself” since having gavin around to show me what happy looks like.

i’ve decided to start writing some thoughts and reflections about Gavin, myself and our time together.

it amazes me to think of how gavin used to be two cells, so small he couldn’t be seen, and how he now is the size of my chest, with all these identifiable parts…nose, ears, eyes, some functioning internal organs. how he grew all those from next to nothing…i just can’t get my head around it. and they all turned out right too, with no extra nose instead of a knee.

some friends were visiting the other day and they say that gavin looks like “a combination” of chris and i. i honestly can’t imagine he’d look any other way since he is, in fact, a combination of us. it seems that people choose to see which parent the baby looks like, perhaps according to which parent they are closer to, or spend more time with. i can’t wait to see what gavin looks like when he is ten years old, twenty years… i imagine he’ll look the same to me, like my parents friends who hadn’t seen me since I was three , who said “You look exactly the same.” when they saw me twenty two years later.