Month: March 2005

Self-inflicted barbering

One of Maxim’s recent hobbies is barbering. Since he is still way too young to use any machinery or even scissors, he uses his bare hands. When someone picks him up, and holds him long enough for him to realize that person has hair, he opens his fist maximizing the distance between fingers, than he stucks it into the person’s hair, than he closes the fist as strong as he can and pulls. If not stopped, he repeats the procedure. Once he got stuck in Olga’s hair and she had to ask my mother to help her free the baby.

But, of course, person who suffers the most from this habbit is Maxim himself. He is still learning that his hands are in fact his and that he can control them. This thought can be seen in his eyes when he can see his hands. The problem comes when he moves his hands too far to the side or to his back. In that position he forgets that these are his hands. Often he would catch some hair on the back of his head, close the fist and pull. This hurts. So he cries. And repeats. Someone has to actually take his hand from his own head. Otherwise he can pull some hair out. The skin on the head becomes read from all the pulling…

Sometimes I feel pity for him. That makes me want to cut his hair. He never did it long enough though for me to actually barber him. Poor thing…

Finger activity

Fingers are Maxim’s most active body parts without a question. He moves his fingers all the time. And I mean all the time. He moves his fingers when he sleeps, eats, baths, dumps the load, plays, goes outside… You get the idea.

With all these movement, some of the figures or gestures he displays are really funny. The problem with capturing them though is that they don’t stay. He changes the location and position of his fingers constantly. Rarely, when he focuses on something else, like sleeping or eating, his fingers stay a few seconds in the same place.

We are having lots of fun watching him move. The best time is when he is awake and his fingerwork happens simultaneously with his funny faces. At this time he can impersonate anyone – Eminem, The Presiden of The United States, Cyprus taxi driver, Marilyn Manson’s fan at the concert – anyone.

Sometimes I am fast enough with the camera setup to capture the complexity…

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-03-24_POTD/

Rethinking ‘Picture of the day’

This has been on my mind for some time now, so I decided to finally do it. My ‘Picture of the day’ project is going well. In fact, it grew out of the original idea. These days I am blogging a lot and many pictures that I post to the ‘Picture of the day’ can be instead used to annotate my other posts. So, instead of creating two posts – one POTD submission and another a regular story without a picture – I will do one.

Here is how it will work. If I have a picture and the story, then I will write a single post with text and image. If I have just a picture, I will post just a picture in the relevant category. And only if I have a picture with some photographic value, I will create a post in the Photography category, with the picture and the description of the value, lighting conditions, and stuff like that. I might leave it as just a picture too, but I will try to avoid the laziness like that.

All these single pictures will still remain in the POTD directory in my photo albums.

Pediatrician check

Max was on his weekly check with pediatrician today. Everything looks good. He (Maxim, not pediatrician) is growing as he should. He gained about 300 grams during the last week and now weights 4160 grams. He also gained about 2 centimeters to his size and he now measures 55 centimeters. Something else that I was always forgetting to mention – the diameter of his head. He is growing his head about 1 centimeter per week. Now it has a diameter of 38 centimeters.

Maxim has no troubles focusing on the face of the person and following its movement for a few seconds. He also can move his hands and legs just fine. Dr.Simos suggested that we start doing some gymnastics with Maxim. He showed us a couple of exercises that Maxim should do daily.

Another interesting thing that we’ve learned is about names. Dr.Simos said that there are a lot of Maxims getting born. He alone has 5 (!!!) patience with this name. These are good news. Having a unique name is usually hard upon the child and its the last thing we wanted for him. Certainly, though, we didn’t expect it to be so popular.

Million Dollar Baby

I know it is hard to believe, but I actually had time to watch a movie today. “Million Dollar Baby” is one of the freshest items on my wishlist. It doesn’t mean though that I wanted to see it any less than any other movie on that list. And I am really glad I did. I even consider it to be one of the Top 10 movies that I have seen during the last 5 years or so.

IMDB rating: 8.3
My rating: 9.8
Celebrity highlights: directorship and production of Clint Eastwood. He also delivers an excellent performance as one of the lead roles in the film, where he starrs together with Morgan Freeman and Hilary Swank.

Continue reading Million Dollar Baby