Just a few words

About Ian and Daniel -

People call Ian my clone - Russians use the word "kopia," which translates itself.

And he really does look amazingly like me. The very moment he was born (I'm not exaggerating) I was overwhelmed at how incredibly familiar he looked; I felt like I had always known him. I was expecting a funny-looking baby of the hospital photo variety, with some subtle hint (perhaps) at my genes or Amy's, but I felt like I was looking at a beautiful and very, very familiar person, more of a kindred spirit than a baby per se.

But Ian's personality partakes more evenly of the gene pool, and has some of its own very curious twists.

Amy revels in the traits that she assumes (for whatever reason) to have come from someone other than me, particularly - his extreme common sense in general, and in particular regarding technical dynamics and creative aesthetics, his strong sense of responsibility, his apparent distaste for (my) endless wacky surrealism in favor of good common sense, etc.

I have to admit, I don't know where he got his overall seriousness from, because neither parent can take credit (or responsibility) for that. But he has some very Amyish qualities, particularly in his ready willingness to take charge and impose order according to his own blueprint. And he does have a tremendous sense of logic, order and dynamism, some of which likely came from the same source that manifest such a proclivity for engineering and technology among Amy's brothers and father. (High tech is also my bread and butter, but I don't pretend that my left brain dominates outside of work, and even at work, creativity kicks in pretty constantly.

One thing about Ian that could be ascribed to either side is his enormous koala-like cuddliness and affection. The lad hardly goes a night without crawling into bed with his parents, despite the fact that he always begins the night in his own bed. Ian Z. is extremely loveable and loving, and there's no doubt that there's plenty of that on both sides of the family, and we have really embraced it as the prevailing spirit i n family life.

One thing I say (half-) jokingly is that one of our boys got Mom's looks and Dad's personality, and the other got Dad's looks and Mom's personality. Draw your own conclusions.

Which brings us to Daniel James.

What a lad! We were anticipating some quota of problem-child after the wonderful experience of having as sweet a child as Ian - kind of like presuming that the second will somehow offset the first, but we were quite wrong. Instead, what we got was joy in overdrive. Daniel is one of the very, very happiest babies I have ever known, and he's also one of the most driven. Pure engergy. He's crawling at 10 months - not that war-movie creeping attributed to younger babies, but the full, upright crawl - and this boy crawls absolutely everywhere he can go. His most recent tour de force was figuring out how, like the dogs, to slip between the bars at the edge of the livingroom to cut to the staircase without having to contend with the child-obstructing gate. This discovery made us very happy that we live in a split-level house! Now we have to figure out how to keep history from repeating itself.

Daniel, as part of his larger overdrive, is a pure eating/digesting machine. On Sunday everning we polished off one jar of baby food, at which point Amy mixed cream of wheat and bananas in a glass, which he practically inhaled, followed by another jar of baby food (yes, ten months). And the best thing is that he never just eats - he also grunts, almost like a garbage truck ingesting the love seat that someone left out on the sidewalk for pick-up. He grunts a lot. And if you make the mistake of sitting on the floor and trying to eat anything, he will figure out 100 different ways to get to your food, and will change strategy as soon as you relocate it, completelly in lock-step with the dogs.

One thing we find encouraging about the boys is that the both absolutely love the dogs and the guinea pigs. They both chase them around the house with on agressive affection campaign. Just today, I picked Baby Daniel up and showed him the dogs up close, on my way to work, and of course he laughed. Ian calls D.J. and Nikkee "Deeday Gheegay" (without the conjunction) and always looks forward to seeing them when we leave the house for any period of time. And he slips them food, quite aware that that's officially verboten.

It's a fun, frolicking zoo of children and animals, and we can't get enough of it.