So I'm sorry I've been so slow in getting to the new round of pictures. Here's another sneak peak, and you can check out the photos at this link without any witticisms, which I know are meaningless to any of you but which give me a delicious excuse to stare at pictures of my son while writing about him as well.

That said, we've been busy lately, welcoming a new baby born last week to our best friends and otherwise distracted with the regular minutiae of life and whatnot.

However, Reid-wise we've had some nice developments. At his daycare (Ms. Mendoza's House), Reid has graduated from a smaller baby-sized crib to a bigger one with taller rails for babies who stand up a lot.

I don't have a super-chatty relationship with Ms. Mendoza, perhaps because I'm generally the morning-delivery parent who drops off Reid and has a bus to catch, and doesn't want to linger over the act of painfully walking away from my son every morning. But we have a very cordial relationship. This week, I was greeted with the new configuration of cribs in the daycare and a warm "Reid got a promotion!" from Ms. Mendoza. Reid seemed to like his new digs, though he is spending less time in the crib and more time crawling, cruising and rolling around under foot, from all reports.

Also this week at Mendoza's, one of Reid's daycare-mates is celebrating a birthday. Another side-effect of my speedy exits in the morning is that, unlike my wife, I don't learn the names of the other kids in the daycare. So each of them gets a nickname, and usually one I only use internally. Tomorrow is One-Shoe's birthday. This kid only wears one shoe, usually the left one, and often carries the other one in his hand, like some sort of talisman. He will wave the shoe and move towards you erratically, whereever you stand in Mendoza's small daycare emporium, like the slowest ghost in pac-man, only armed with a tiny shoe. I shift around to avoid actually getting caught by One-Shoe.

Happy Birthday, One Shoe. I'm going to dress Reid in a sailor suit for your b-day tomorrow, and I'm sure Reid will horribly mark it with spit-up.

I've got a new batch of Reid photos coming soon. They are currently undergoing the painstaking editorial work of adding witty commentary. In the meantime, here's a preview.

Eerily, the pitter patter of little feet wandering unassisted through our home has not yet developed. Instead, Reid has apparently decided to hold out on us, after his walking debut Friday.

Perhaps he was jarred by our knee-jerk decision to immediately dispatch to a mall and purchase baby shoes. Within twenty hours of his first steps, terribly cute shoes were strapped to his little feet, forcing him to uncurl his toes (which, it turns out, are curled much of the time). He dragged the pair of clodhoppers across the floor of the Stride Rite store, and looked up at us beseechingly, "Why would you put these...these...things on my feet?"

Perhaps he is confused by the sudden changes in his environment that were precipitated by his first two-footed adventure. The "side-tables of death," two sharp-edged boxes we use as a replacement for coffee tables, have disappeared (leading to hilarious conversations between Katrena and I as we sit stiffly on the couch, balancing our meals, beverages, the baby monitor, the remote control and the phone in our hands and on our legs like sideshow freaks). Gates have been erected around the "room of death," the office with our bookshelfs (baby ladders of death), CD towers (ibid), and countless chaotic brambles of electrical cabling too multi-directional to possibly understand. These gates have led to confusion for Reid (who, admittedly, doesn't have a ton of retention memory) and our dog, Dixie, who, having endured neglect since the dawn of Reid, now has physical obstacles to deal with as well.

Or maybe Reid is refusing to walk more until he locks in a five-year deal with a signing bonus. Maybe we were just getting a taste, so we would lock him in with a contract that would set a new standard for the industry.

I sure hope not. All that baby-proofing stuff cleaned us out.

Well, it took me a little while longer than I expected, but I have (largely using another Blogger template) redesigned the Hardlyborn.

Yeah, I think it looks pretty snappy, too.

But that's not the most important thing that took place today. Earlier tonight, as we were preparing to take Reid upstairs for a bath, the little man walked.

He absolutely took bold steps out into oblivion, sporting that huge grin that has melted every heart it's met. He walked from K to me, sitting by the couch, engineering four or five daring but wobbly steps on his own before collapsing into my arms.

Immediately, Operation Enduring Videography was launched. Truth be told, prior to this moment, we mostly took humorous video of Reid clambering all over one of us, or mutely sitting with an adult whose tongue was also suddenly stilled by the all-seeing eye of the video camera (a Canon ZR-65, if anyone cares). The other day, Reid fell asleep in his highchair, literally in the middle of the act of chewing some food. Just zonked out like a narcoleptic. K got out the video camera and shot carefully narrated footage of the discarded meat, snubbed sweet potato, ignored jar of mixed vegetables, and even the dog carefully grooming the seat around the sleeping boy for escaped morsels of food. Reid gently snored through the entire exercise.

But walking was what Operation Enduring Videography was meant for. At first, we feared a WB-Frog moment, wherein Reid would never repeat his amazing walking stunt as long as the camera was on him (but would, following this to its logical conclusion, sing "hello my baby" as soon as he heard the ping of the camera shutting down). But instead, he remained game for the walking, conducting another cross-living room traipse and then a daring ten-second free-stand, during which his face experienced such a staggering range of expressions that it seems as if he may just explode with emotion.

Operation Enduring Videography being what it is, all of this subsequent activity was captured on semi-grainy digital video (because Operation EV is just getting out of the gate, both of its principal engineers forgot to turn on the overhead light, natch). As the delayed but necessary bath of Reid finally got under way, I sat downstairs busily importing video onto my laptop, editing clips like I had even a half a clue of what I was doing, and creating a hasty two minute chronology of Reid's walking exercises (from a hilarious assisted walking adventure in which Reid insists on holding the family phone while pacing through the kitchen, like a little baby talking to his broker through to tonight's actual walking).

With pride, I exported the 129 seconds of baby-related bliss into a file I was assured would be small enough to email. I mean, that obviously is why video on the internet is so crappy, right? It's shrunk to the size of a nickel so you can email it, right?

The file is enormous. One set of grandparents has high speed internet access (these are technically grandparents after all), so it was dispatched. For the other grandparents, Operation Enduring Videography was forced to resort to the description services usually reserved for blind people in movie theatres. "Reid walked!"

I just noticed that tomorrow marks the one-year anniversary of this blog. On May 12th, I posted the first, rather timid words in this space about Reid's forthcoming arrival. In some cultures (certainly not ours), it is considered bad luck to talk about the baby too much before it is born. In this day and age, that basically doesn't mean much. You don't toss around names at brunch the way other expectant parents do, you may not have a big baby shower, and you probably don't post pictures of the sonogram on the internet.

To tell you the truth, I weighed some concerns about being too frank a chronicler of K's pregnancy and Reid's life. I worried about bringing down the wrath of the gods who care for babies in the womb by chatting about our little man with such ease. But I think in my calculations I figured that a blog is so ephemeral, it was just the right balance of chimera and diary that nobody should be too offended on earth or elsewhere about my presumptuous musings on his time in utero and beyond.

Perhaps this anniversary would be a good time to change things a little here. (I'm truly only certain I have one reader who isn't actually related to Reid [hi Jenn], but I think that small but incredibly dedicated cohort wouldn't mind looking at something different every once in a while. So a redesign of hardlyborn will have to be considered.

Speaking of new things, the old Blogger got itself overhauled as well, and I think I've added some comments to the permalinks of these entries. If you click on the time stamp at the bottom of this post, you can offer something. Of course, you could always just email us here. In the meantime, keep a lookout for a new look.

According to the baby doctor books we immersed ourselves in (okay, K immersed herself in; I went wading) when Reid first came into our lives, this was bound to happen. Still it is jarring.

As anybody who read this work much in the first seven months of Reid's life knows, Reid was not a sleeper. He remains adversarial towards sleep, addressing it (rather like his father) as if sleep were a tedious chore he would rather speed through or skip altogether. (His mom, on the other hand, relishes sleep like a luxurious bath in the fountain of youth.) Still, in the last few months, it seems Reid has made his peace with the land of nod, usually adhering to a fairly basic but still trying schedule of fitfully slipping into sleep around eight and then popping right out of bed at six in the morning, raring to go.

But the books told us that another change was possible, one which coordinated with his recent fascination with walking. It seems that the whole idea of self-directed locomotion is such a powerful one that Reid will sometimes be jarred from sleep by the very concept of walking. Once awake, however, he doesn't just lay there and yell like he once did.

(In fact, since he has skipped crawling entirely, Reid would awaken and then propel himself on his stomach across his crib in what the pediatrician called a "commando crawl." The commando crawl has no reverse, however, so we would respond to Reid's shouting and find him comically [if it weren't so tragic] lodged headfirst in the corner of the crib with a panicked expression and a full-bore wail loosening from his mouth.)

No, it is now frighteningly routine for us to walk into his room and see him smiling at us, all the sadness of his wailing just a ruse to get his parents in the room. The smiling face is perched atop a little body ... proudly standing in his crib. There he stands, eyes wide at the very notion that this previously impervious prison has a porous boundary up top and he has pierced it. His smile is irresistable, but the omen of our little man up and about is a dark one indeed.

On doctor's orders, this family returned this very eve from the first of several expeditions to baby proof our house. More from this adventure soon.

Reid's grown dangerously close to walking. The video camera is constantly within arm's reach, which sadly increases ten-fold the chance that Reid will destroy it, making my stomach roil with potential expensive-item trauma.

He is a bold young man, and he will sometimes fix his gaze on something and take a few steps from his shaky perch at the couch before falling to the carpet or (more often) into the arms of an anxious first-time parent. He has a little scooter-looking thing he is supposed to use to learn the walking. He effortlessly glides across the floor, but the device's steering mechanism is dubious. So he wrecks into furniture near a parent and immediately reaches up, seeking not to be carried but to be "participatorily walked," in which a parent's hamstring and lower back is destroyed.

He exhibits no fear when he experiments with walking. He sees a target, or targets nothing in particular, and casts an arm in that direction, sets a steely green displaying four, six or even all eight of his teeth, and takes the leap of faith...

Our lives will never be the same.

Looking over the past few entries into the Hardlyborn, I've noticed a decided lack of status reporting.

So here goes:

Reid has eight teeth now. I know of other babies his age sporting only a pair of choppers, so Reid is officially an industry leader in the field of dental unit production. This octet of teeth are tremendously useful to him, now that he's eating a wide variety of solid foods.

His food intake is another important status item. What began as a dabbling interest in Cheerios while sticking mostly to the molten food varieties we all think of as baby food has now become a full-blown diet of solid foods. Although Reid still takes in a stready stream of extruded strained fruits and vegetables, he's much more likely to be spotted around town eating hummus, ground organic beef, steamed peas, fresh bananas and a variety of yogurt products.

As with the Cheerios, things travel an interesting route before actually being eaten by Reid. Sometimes these bite-size chunks of food will be picked up by Reid; sometimes they will just stick to his hand as he sweeps it dramatically through a food-field on his ballistic plastic eating surface. These food refugees -- a pair of Cheerios, a smashed chunk of potato, some beef -- will fly through the air as Reid conducts a little baby-food symphony in his head. Sometimes they smash into his head -- which represents one of Reid's favorite games -- where they are washed away later in the bath. Sometimes Reid will bring the entire food-laden ordeal to the general region of his mouth -- only to drop everything but a single Cheerio into the patented crumb-catching device on his bib.

If you're keeping score, that's Reid: 1 Cheerio, bib: potatoes, ground beef and some Cheerio as well.

The Cheerio that entered the mouth gets chewed awkwardly on the eight teeth, all of which are in front. This creates the impression that Reid is dramatically chewing the cereal to its doom to spite us. We crack up.

Much later in the meal, when the parent-interaction period of the session is long-over, and the feed parent* is now running damage control and wiping everything down with a hot towel, much of the food is retrieved from the bib, which has become the most fascinating thing on the planet for this five minute period (MFTPTFMP). All feeding efforts are lost once the food-smeared bib is noticed and converted into the MFTPTFMP. Regardless of the feed parent's skills, few can compete with bib-fascination. This means we rarely resist Reid's efforts to carelessly fill the crumb-catcher on the bib with spare food. Eventually, when every inch of the bib is carefully examined as peas and sweet potatoes dry and crust above Reid's right ear, the food in the crumb-catcher will take on mythic importance, and will certainly be consumed.

Outside of the kitchen, Reid is really enjoying his special brand of assisted walking. That means that a parent walks endlessly in circles around the house. This parent is often my wife, whose petite-ness is finally coming in handy (for me, at least). I can do it for a short time, but then Reid wants to assisted-run somewhere, and my hamstrings start to burn from hyperflexion and I initiate one of daddy's favorite games, ClimbMe.

Sadly, ClimbMe is just a diversion, as all Reid wants to do is stand up and walk places. ClimbMe is a method wherein I attempt to slow him down as much as possible in his quest to stand up and start walking. This game is fun to watch, but difficult to be in the presence of, since Reid yells through the entire thing.

Another great game Reid likes to play (which is parents find challenging) is carry the most fascinating thing on the planet for this five minute period (MFTPTFMP) while assisted walking around the house. Importantly, this activity occupies one of Reid's hands, so the assisted walking is sort of like flying a kite upside down. So fascinated is Reid with the MFTPTFMP and walking that he will twirl on an axis formed by the one hand he gives the walking parent and the foot he has awkwardly places somewhere about a foot from his center of gravity.

He spins around there, not a care in the world, eyes fixed on the MFTPTFMP, as the walking parent strains to keep his little gourd from cracking into whatever piece of furniture he has lurched closest to. Good times.

This started as a status report. Last month, we had our nine month checkup, in which we discovered an earache. We also discovered that Reid is at about 29 and a half inches, which puts him at the 70th percentile for height. His head circumference and weight remain firmly at the statistical center of the curve, 50th percentile both. His is about 20 pounds, and the circumference of his head, in all reality, is a meaningless metric measurement I almost immediately forget. His head is just fine, is what I'm saying.

Anyhow, this weekend will be Reid's first opportunity to give his mom something for Mother's Day. The dadaist in me (there's dada in DaDa?) wanted to take him walking in a department store and buy K whatever item Reid crashes into or obsesses over briefly.

The prospect of presenting K on her first Mother's Day with a handsomely giftwrapped container of tennis balls or size 12 Easy Spirit pumps makes me rethink this plan. Maybe a nice mug instead.

*The feed parent is very often K, whose constant patter of sweet noises lulls the boy into eating, as opposed to the opposite outcome which results from my increasingly shrill call of "Reid. Reid. Reid. Reid. You have to eat, son. Reid. Please don't take the spoon. Reid, please. Open up. Reid. [Popping up an octave now.] ReID? REID? Here's some food, Reid. Reid?"