I've got a nice selection of photos today, so I think we'll go with a gigantic super-post. Reid had a good Thanksgiving, as you can see. On my side of the family, we celebrate the fourth Thursday in November with a gigantic multi-phase meal consisting of a full Italian course of homemade ravioli followed hours later with a two-turkey and all the fixings traditional dinner like the lots of other folks have.

Reid's overall eating habits have remained erratic these days. In the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, Reid was spending some nights not eating at all, merely frustrating his parents while giggling away the dinner hour. At times, he showed an incredible tenacity to eat, proving to us that it wasn't a scientific inability to eat, but rather a mere caprice about choosing to eat at that moment. (Breakfast has always been an exception. Reid loves his Puffins.)

However, Thanksgiving was an amazing success. Reid has begin to eat more and more with his own utensils, sometimes even successfully delivering food to his mouth. I think he feels that success with this work moves him forward. This trend reached a new high over Thanksgiving weekend. In the Italian course, Reid devoured ravioli with wild mushrooms, bleu cheese and whetever else we could throw at him. A few hours of hard play with his cousins later, Reid was ready to take on cornbread stuffing, mashed potatoes, smoked turkey, roasted turkey AND deep-fried turkey (we are not shy at Thanksgiving time). Like he had been eating massive turkey dinners his entire life, Reid drilled right through this meal. We were all pleased.

Sadly, upon returning from Thanksgiving, K had to head off on another one of her international trips, which re-opens another photo-heavy chapter in the life of Hardly Born: RPOD Volume 2. [To keep Reid's mom up on the constant stream of incredible cuteness issueing forth from her son, this dutiful father and toddlerblogger will include at least one photo of Reid each day (RPOD=Reid Picture Of the Day).

Today, a compound photo series. Reid apparently is quite interested in the musical arts these days. K and I are entertaining getting him some sort of children's guitar product for Christmas. This would seem to be a good idea. Today, with no prompting, Reid sought out the white Fender Strat knockoff electric guitar I keep in an undisclosed corner of our office. He then nearly knocked the whole thing onto the ground. But that's not important. He wanted to play with it. So I let him. He had a great time. Then he got hungry, and ate very well. Jammin' on the couch is hard work.

We've been having a good time with Reid's newfound powers of speech. It's strange, because he seemed like a slow starter in the speech department. He wasn't really saying a lot of words, but he was talking a great deal. Still, his list of words wasn't growing that fast. We didn't say anything, but we wondered about it.

Still, I wouldn't consider him a wordsmith. But what has happened is something very impressive. He's completely talking, in sentences with complex sounds like "cth" (as in icthyoligist" and "nch" as in "inchworm"), but he isn't making a whit of sense. He thinks he is, clearly. It's just that, more precisely, we don't understand the language he's speaking.

He walked up to me in the bathroom the other day and said "Na huth ka itch rara?" It was clearly a question. About what, I have no idea. He gestured toward the living room and then looked away. Then he looked back and seemed to repeat part of the earlier inquiry, as if further pressing me on a certain issue. "Itch rara?"

I didn't know what to say.

This is happening more and more. We recognize a lot of words, like apple, banana, mommy, daddy, quack (the answer to "what does a duck say?"), duh (our dog's nickname in Reid's mind, for more reasons than just that it's short for Dixie), and others. But they come up in 'conversation,' it seems, and I wish we could figure it out. Some of the time, it's pretty clear. Most of human conversation is in the context. When Reid is holding a box of cereal and says, "He tutu rif gunth gra," it is generally known that he is asking for more Puffins. But the bathroom conversation relayed above remains a mystery.

Reid got a Mr. Potato Head recently. As soon as he removed all of the arms, feet, eyeglasses, eyes, noses, lips, teeth and ears from the chamber on Mr. Potato Head's back, he couldn't believe there was nothing else inside. "Where's the rest?" he seems to be asking, though what he said was "Rho gostil ichth treyfo?"

This week's picture bonanza continues. The major news this week is that our young man took a strong step towards big-boy status when he graduated to a booster seat. Reid has been all kicking feet and straining against the five point harness of the highchair recently. He has also been enjoying sitting in a regular chair for some handy snacks (like Yobaby and whatnot) that don't require a table. So we figured it was time.

The Fisher Price booster chair we bought was virtually indistinguishable from the others. It was purchased in a whirlwind trip to Target, which is like crack cocaine for thirty-somethings like ourselves. Even Reid seems to like it there.

Anyhow, Reid has really taken to the new seat. To make it work, of course, we also had to go to Ikea to buy Reid his own kitchen chair, and the entire arrangement still leaves our kitchen feeling smaller than before. But to have him sit with us at the table, I think, makes him feel like he's on a level playing field for the eating. As regular readers know, Reid eats sparingly at dinner if at all. More frequently he is a player at suppertime rather than an eater. Tonight, we had a 40-60 eat to play ration with some pasta, broccoli and chicken. That was pretty good.

The booster chair buying experience puts us on track from some other jarring upgrades, including a big boy bed and potty training. But right now, he's just our baby, sitting on a plastic chair, throwing egg noodles at the dog.

Obviously, there's been a lot going on lately, and I am struggling with what to talk about. I am of the mind that politics should be left to my other blog (which is supposed to be about music and politics but is really about 90% politics), and I don't want to risk offending folks for some reason or another. I think K and I will probably have to consult more before we sort of share some of the concerns we've discussed recently.

I have a big old pile of pictures to post here, but I want to stay in some sort of sequential order, so I'm going to include two from Halloween. As I discussed in my earlier post about All Hallow's Eve, I ended up buying two costumes for Reid to wear because we waited too long and ended up at the K-Mart in a low-end Halloween shop-a-thon. The costume Reid ended up wearing last Sunday was the frog costume, and you can see a closeup below.

However, the costume Reid didn't wear was a bee. It was a terrible costume, and remember I came up with it after engaging in hand-to-hand combat with Latinas and Korean women while clutching a baby who refused to wake up and help me shop. K thought the bee was cute (probably cuter than the frog) and several times we struggled with Reid to get him into the bee costume. For some reason, Read abhorred the costume and rebelled with every ounce of his being, which mostly means he just shouted a lot. A whole lot. Seriously. This picture doesn't do the agony of wearing the bee costume justice. He hated it.

Stay tuned for pictures featuring Reid's new booster seat (!) and some amusing experiments with cardboard boxes. In the meantime, here's Reid in the frog getup.