Baby page
Christopher Luchian

"I'm not running down sex. If there is a purpose in life more important than two people cooperating in making a baby, all the philosophers in history haven't been able to find it. And between babies, the practice-runs keep our zest and make tolerable the fact that raising a baby is one hell of a lot of work." -- Robert Heinlein: Time Enough for Love (pp139-140)

Click on any picture to open a larger version. The caption for each picture can be read by leaving the mouse cursor over the picture. This page is going to be the seed of our son's album. Even if he's not a new millenium baby, he'll be a new millenium boy, man, etc. so the new medium for this album, (D)HTML, fits him well. I'll stick here pictures, animations, charts and sounds that I like. Irena may join me in augmenting this album or she may create one of her own. But enough talk. Here they are, in reverse chronological order.

Jan 17, 2010
Chris is almost 10 now, and not a baby anymore. There are many pictures of him in the intervening years in our many Google albums. This will probably be the last entry in this page, thus we need a continuation. How about his Homework page :)

May 29, 2002
OK. It's official now. Cman's in full WHY mode. To anything we say he replies "Why?" [ua:a:i?]. Exasperatingly cute.

May 9, 2002
Corina, a colleague from AUBG asked how Cman was and I gave her the lowdown, so I add it here now.
Christopher has problems sleeping. He wakes up n times a night and cries or asks for milk or calls me, and since Irena works 7days a week, most of the time I'm the one who goes to rock him, caress him, sing to him, calm him down. Otherwise, he's growing. He goes to daycare, is addicted to cartoons, learns the alphabet, colors and numbers, we play with Lego blocks (I make the toys, he pulls them apart), he's drawing all over the place as soon as he finds a pencil, pen or marker (especially on walls, doors and on the fridge door), and in general he's nice and sweet.

June 5, 2001
For some reason, the Boring Clause didn't get past the firm's lawyer, who could not find its implementation anywhere in the CIC bylaws or whatever they have. So now we're doing a totally different employment dance. They are going to get me a long-term employment visa, so I'll work full-time and study part time for two years or so. I guess we need to talk about this. I had thought all's OK, and then all of the sudden, the situation blew up in my face at the end of last week. The job is great. Real-life knowledge modeling for a domain with lots of potential market value - the financial domain. I'm having fun picking the inconsistencies out of several models done by business and investing specialists. But I work like crazy, coming home after 20:00 almost every night. The domain IS huge. Cman was sick - he still is. Bronchitis. For the last 2 weeks and our "family doctor" didn't catch it and kept dishing out prescriptions which turned out to be wrong (causing allergic reactions), and we never used. We spent almost $100 on bull medicine On Wednesday I caught a cold that kept me like a zombie until today. Last week Irena staid home to take care of Cman while I was working, then this weekend she caught my cold too and now she's the zombie .

May 1, 2001
Daddy had a very urgent-past-the-deadline paper to write, but Cman decided that's irrelevant. He was cranky and sleepy and didn't want to eat, and cried in the bath, and generally played the miserable kid. So Daddy had to play with him and listen how Mommy says how badly Daddy treats the baby. Arrr! Frustrating.

April 11, 2001
Happy birthday, baby! Daddy didn't have much time to write in the diary, because the baby was at home... The nanny had to go see her dentist. So the party planned for C-man with his day-care friends fizzled. Still, we had a small party at home with Jonbor, Csilla, Aniko and Zoltan. And Cman got a nice singing truck, some more books, a set of large construction blocks and a set of smaller construction blocks. (the pictures were taken with a real camera, so I'll have to scan them first)

March 31, 2001
Big gap here. Daddy's Master's Thesis, the move to Canada, busy times here as we adjust and confront the reality of an economy in decline... Anyway Daddy could not keep track of baby's achievments here. Some of the facts were recorded in Romanian, in prima scrisoare, a doua scrisoare, a treia scrisoare, a patra scrisoare, a cincea scrisoare and a sasea scrisoare. Also, there were instructions on emailing.

June 22, 2000
Until today, Mommy was so afraid that C-man may catch a cold, that she kept him wrapped like an eskimo. It turned out that he looks so much better with some skin showing. Here he poses as a low-level Sumo fighter:

June 16, 2000
We went to the polyclinic for the monthly check-up. He's 2 months and 5 days old, weighs 4kg85 and is 58cm long. Here's a snapshot of one of his tracking tables (left); mostly, those numbers mean he's a happy one (right).

June 11, 2000
Mommy finally braved her camera-fear and decided to document how Daddy rocks the baby, calming him for the bath (left). And later with his little lamb (like Mary's little lamb, since he's Christos phuros), on the table for washing (right).

June 5-6, 2000
C-man was very active today. So I took the camera at him and shot, and tickled and shot again. If you click on the thumbnail (left), to open the slide show, you may point the cursor to the thinking bubble to see what I think he was thinking during every camera-buzz :)
Gurgles not included.

May 12-13, 2000
Mommy got a new shirt for Christopher "so that he grows in it". Looks more like Mr.Muscle or an American Football player :) Our efficient feeding process: Mommy pumps out the milk; baby tries to cry and Daddy plays with him (left); Mommy puts baby on breast; baby gets his fill from the bottle; baby burps and falls asleep (right).

May 11, 2000
Christopher's one month old!!!
These weeks passed strangely... Daddy's pacifying the baby during the night, while (read: instead of) working on his papers and projects and Mommy's taking care of Christopher during the day.

April 19, 2000
Interesting... I hate ironing my clothes, or any clothes in general. But somehow, now when Irena's Mom wanted to wash and iron Christopher's clothes, I felt jealous :| And I quite enjoy ironing his little white paraphernalia. I don't remember playing with dolls, but I bet it's fun :)

April 18, 2000
OK, so he was late coming out, now he was late coming out of the hospital. But here I am (left), happily holding Christopher for the first time. On the right, I'm spilling the water from his first bath for the benefit of the tree which grows in front of our window.

April 15, 2000
Tomorrow they're coming out of the hospital, so I decided to see his eyes. No way. Irena says she has trouble waking him up to get him to eat. I hope everything's fine and that he'll continue being quiet and happy. :)

We got a card from Sorana.

April 13, 2000
Irena took the picture on the left, I took the one on the right (not enough light on the corridor, so I raised the brightness levels in the picture). It seems there are some problems with the kid's firmware, he's not the normal timed bomb with sound. His roommates make the lovely ear-splitting sound one could hear in the spring around lakes, but not Chris. Nooo, he sleeps and sleeps and sleeps.

Mrs. Ionescu wrote a little poem for Christopher

April 11, 2000
Hip, hip, HURRAY! He's out and fine. Just like me, he was about to get strangled with the ombilical cord, but he didn't and now Christopher is a separate body. Not too heavy, at 3.45kgs, but with a big head (poor Irena ). 51cms long and totally silent. Irena's OK, though she sounds tired. The bad part is that they don't allow me to see him I'll get a picture up here ASAP.

March 30, 2000
Well, there's only a little time left, or so we are hoping. We have several ETAs for him, and the first was the 3rd of April. (the others are the 7th, the 15th and the 21st; I -Radu- am told that I was 2 weeks late: lazy all my life :) So he may decide to come out in May. I can understand him, can't you? He's lucky to have such a cool mommy.

January 26, 2000
This is his first picture; an echograph slice. We didn't insist on knowing his sex, but the doctor from Maichen Dom, Sofia, BG, had her own agenda and gave us this. If you don't see the 'duck', a red circle flashes around it every few seconds.