Today's Smiles

This is becoming a baby only blog now ... i don't really want that ... but for now its all i have to show ya'll ...

Little Man

Today has been a good day. above is a pic of lil man and his brother -- the other boy was born in the same room, Yushi and the mom knew each other and she gave birth a few hours before Yushi did.

From Now On

Dorian turns two weeks in a little less than an hour. The following is an altered message I wrote to a friend and is the post I was trying to write all week but never really had the time or the energy to put it all down. So thanks, Melissa, for getting me to spit it out ...

there is so much to tell. first off, he is doing good. he eats regularly and A LOT and he poos yellowish green. so that's supposedly good. he sleeps pretty decently, maybe 2 hours or so between suckles and at night he gets in a good 3-5 hours. He has these little pimples, little white heads, on his forehead right between his eyes that drive me berserk. i use this salve on them and it works, they are much less than in the beginning, but they aren't gone. i know today is his second week and things go slowly, but it bothers me.

he chokes on the breastmilk sometimes and i have to burp the hell out of him, takes a while, but it usually works well and he ends up passing out on my shoulder.

he has about periods every day, just at dusk or after his bath or maybe when the noonday sun reaches in, when he is super curious and he stares about 2 inches above my head as if there were sprites teasing him there. he looks at everything and has a whole series of expressions.

his arms and legs are (abnormally?) strong, he can bust through most swaddling and i have to hold him down when he gets angry, when he wants out, when he wants to eat and when he otherwise want to kick and squirm his way into/out of something that I haven't really figured out yet.

every time he sneezes I think he has a cold. he sneezes a lot. stresses me out.

Yesterday he tried to kiss me. he leaned in real close and we looked at each other and i could feel his recognition, his appreciation his love and his inability to express it all and i felt his animalness and also the chaos beneath as all of these emotions were washed away suddenly by the flickering of lights on the wall.

my feelings for him are very simple, but hard for me to express or fathom. He is a part of it all, from now on, and that's basically it. It doesn't feel like the lightning flash some people talked about, or the One Consciousness Hippy Love that others gushed over. He just is and therefore I am ... a Father and Guardian.

There were two lil poems I wrote in the past couple of weeks and both of them were mystic and lofty. I wonder if they were the watershed moments of emotion that surround the daily burping, pooing, suckling, half-smiling, blurry-eyed reality of a two week old whose existence depends utterly on my ability to take care of him.

Beginning to feel the 安

安 means peace and is represented by a woman under a roof. I always figured this character was a bit patriarchal ... but now that i have a mama and a lil one under my roof ... i know what them old sages were talking about.

Its the 30th according to the Chinese Lunar calender, so its a new year, out with the OX in with the Tiger. All is good. here are some pics from the last few days ... from contractions to today's chill session ... Holla:


It all started with a game of Risk ...


... then the contractions started.


Got worse.


Next thing I know, me and Pops are peeping through windows.


Josh and Heather showed up with Aixi and we checked up on mama ...


Then Lil Bean aka Lil Man aka Ninja aka the Boy aka Dorian aka aka aka was in our arms




and now he's a part of everything we do ... what a trip ...

Bean's Belly

Some pics from this evening:

Rape is the Consort of War

That just kind of came to me earlier today while reading this story here about Somalis in Minneapolis becoming "radicalized" and then heading back to Somalia to be warriors.

I was envisioning the journalist interviewing one of the young boys who went back to fight and having the young boy go into a tirade about

"how sick he is of the media and the images the terms the media has placed into the minds of Westerners whenever they think of Islam, Jihad, Arabs, the Middle East, Somalia etc. and how furious it makes him that he has to convince this journalist not of the validity of his story but of his own sanity. He has to convince the West first that he is not a crazy men hellbent on self-annihilation in the name of an oppressive, backward religion. He has to convince everyone first, by saying things like: my home is on fire, and you in the West not only accuse me of inciting violence when i trry and put the fire out, but yu pour gas on my house as it burns!! but this does nothing either because all it is is a metaphor for a feeling that in the West is brushed away as impossible, just like all of the rapes that go on in war. Impossible, not by oour troops or our allies,. There must be a reason. We are Americans. We are the force for good."

I dont know if i believe all of this, but for a minute there i was sunk into a Somalis head as i can imagine it and there was a lot more but basically the above paragraph summarizes it.

BTW all that took place in my old neighborhood, the West Bank and if you read the story they say the place is called the Towers, but it aint, thats only what they told the NYT its actually called the Crackstacks and we all know it.

Anyway that story linked above got me thinking as did a movie i sat through yesterday called Four Fingers with Ryan Phillipe and Laurence Fishburne. Oh Lord that movie was wak as all hell. The ending though, was somewhat provocative, Thank God. Phillipe tries to do a Dutch accent in this movie and he fails so utterly that his entire character is reduced to a blubbering clown.

i dreamt of babies laughing in my arms yesterday or i guess this morning. That was a giddy dream.