This afternoon, in the immortal words of Sir Mix-a-Lot, I “stopped at Taco Bell for some Mexican eatin’.” James took to it like, well, a kid to messy food, as you can see.
This was necessarily followed by a bath.
Lucky and Hanna came in to see what was going on and James took a break from playing with his armada of bath toys to stand up and see who it was.
“Cat,” he announced, articulating it loudly and clearly as he sat back down.
He’s been working on “cat” for a while now, but the T phoneme has escaped him until now, turning “cat” into “caaaaaaaaaaaah.” Not today. Today, it’s official: He’s got his first word, and it’s “cat,” with a T, thank you very much.
Now that the Florida adventure is over — my first flight with the iPhone and kid — there’s some things I’ll do differently next time:
1) Bring my old school 20 GB iPod with me for listening to purely audio stuff, like the audio version of Carl Hiaasen’s Nature Girl that I’m still not finished with. There’s no reason to run down the iPhone battery when I need it to check e-mail and SMS on layovers and want the iPhone to be good to go for showing They Might Be Giants’ kid music videos to the kid to take the edge off when he gets a little frantic after being cooped up in an airplane seat as long as he was.
2) Bring the right charging plug. I somehow ended up with an old Firewire plug-in cube, which was totally useless for recharging in the airport.
3) Invest in some portable iPhone speakers (with a horizontal display of the iPhone) for the kid to watch his TMBG videos, Sesame Street video podcasts and (next time) Looney Tunes cartoons. The iPhone external speaker just can’t compete with airplane noise and putting earphones on a 13 month old kid is too foolish to contemplate, especially if I want the earphones back in working order.
4) Invest in a back-up battery, just in case.
Overall, though, the iPhone was a great asset, letting me keep up with work e-mails (there’s a big pending arrest I’ve been covering for two months, waiting for it to go public, and didn’t want to miss it if it happened while I was in Florida) even as I was playing with James in the Gulf of Mexico outside Bradenton. It didn’t do anything my trio of Treos couldn’t do, but it did it all so much better and more elegantly that it was really a pleasure to use in comparison. Taking pictures and checking e-mail on the beach while chasing a kid down the shore would have been a good recipe for losing the phone or the kid with my Treo, but was totally natural with the iPhone.
It was amusing to see that, when we took off from Ontario, literally half of the plane seemed to be using iPhones, but the further east we went, the more exotic it seemed to my fellow passengers. I guess Californians really are trendy when it comes to their toys.
We’re back from Florida. The threat of a hurricane never ended up materializing in the Tampa area.
Saturday night, as I was wrapping up the August 19 edition of the Hesperia Star, Jenn and James dropped by to take me out to dinner. (Peter calculated a few weeks ago that I’ve written more than 1,200 stories for the Hesperia Star. I probably haven’t even composed a tenth that many pages. Assembling the paper is stressful for me.)
James enjoyed the kid zone Sharon has set up at the front counter; when there’s only one person at the paper to handle processing legal ads and classifieds, it’s important that the kids who commonly come in with their parents are quietly occupied. The toys certainly worked for James.
More images after the jump.
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