Benjy's Date with Rice Cereal

Well, Benjy has started on the road to solid food today. He ate the rice cereal like a champ, and seemed to really like it. Here's a video of the experience:



There are also some good still photos on my Picasa site.

Benjy dances

No, he didn't dance at shul today. But we do have a video of Benjy dancing to his favorite song. Yes, that's Steph singing. :)

Benjy goes to shul

Today, we took Benjy to a Bat Mitzvah -- one of his very first shul experiences. He was such a trooper -- being generally well behaved and very cute for all the folks who wanted to hang out with him. I was worried about how the morning would go, but I was pleasantly surprised. Perhaps we should take our very mature boy on more long outings. We stayed long enough for a quick shabbat lunch, and Benjy was very interested in my plate of food. He's ready for solid food, and we'll start introducing him to it next week after we move.

Benjy grins

With our move only a few days away (on Tuesday), packing has begun. There are lots of boxes around, and I've already had to open one to get out a kippah for a Bat Mitzvah we'll be attending (for a while, anyway) tomorrow morning in Brookline.

Here's a picture of Benjy that Steph took this morning. Check out that fabulous grin.

Father's day

This year was my first Father's Day as a dad. I was fighting a cold that Benjy brought home (was it my first Father's Day present from Benjy?) and I was really feeling crappy. But Benjy made me an art project at school for Father's Day, and this really made my day. (Neato presents from Steph and from my parents were also a highlight of the day.)

School pictures

A few weeks ago, Benjy had photos taken at his school. These aren't the greatest-ever photos of Benjy (his Saba has taken many that are far better), but we've been enjoying them as the start of an 18-year run of school pictures.

His class photo below is a riot. Getting the babies in chairs or in arms and looking at the camera must have been a challenge. Benjy looks a bit bemused at far right, with two fingers in his mouth.

Powerful ad

I just watched this ad from MoveOn.org, and it's a doozy. MoveOn offers some quotes from John McCain as substantiation for the ad. The "100 years" part seems to be taken a bit out of context, but there's no question that McCain would continue W's Iraq policy and depend on our sons and daughters to do so. I've never before thought of Benjy serving his country under continued Republican administrations, but the thought now frightens me.

I think it's gonna be a long, long time

Well, it's certainly been a long, long time since the last time I posted. And I've got all sorts of great stuff. But it'll mostly have to wait. What have we been up to? Oh, not much. Just...

• Buying a house
• Planning our move
• Working with contractors to get the new house ready for us (they're hard at work over there even as we speak)
• Selling our condo (with all the craziness that goes along with it)
• Working hard for Brandeis, and doing some special things for my CIO P's retirement
  
• Getting sick, again (yep, Typhoid Benjy brought us some icky presents -- I'm hacking away as I type)
• Celebrating my first father's day as a dad
• Prepping something fun for my parents' 40th anniversary
  

So, that's all. I've got a few neat things to post over the coming days, so watch for them. We move next Tuesday, so it'll be back to radio silence for a long, long time. Sorry, gang.

Benjy & his buddy

On Sunday evening, Steph and I got a babysitter for the very first time and went out for a nice dinner to celebrate her impending birthday. (Dinner was amazing, as it always is at the Oleana restaurant in Cambridge. The only downer was that our friends F and B had to cancel.)

Benjy's babysitter B was one of the teachers at his school. B loves Benjy, and Benjy loves her. So it was perfect. Here's a picture of Benjy, just post-bath, that B took.

Obama has Latino "problem"?

One of the arguments used by the Clinton campaign to tout Hillary as the stronger general election candidate centers on constituencies, such as Latinos, from whom Obama arguably has less support. This blog post from Politico.com reports on the Clinton argument, but the update (at the bottom) is telling -- even though Hillary is stronger among Latino voters, Obama still leads McCain among these voters by a wide margin. (I wonder if the polling data indicates a similar phenomenon among blue-collar voters.)

Ben Smith's Blog: McAuliffe: Obama has Latino "problem" - Politico.com