We had Joni’s one-month checkup yesterday. He now weighs in at just over 4 kilos and he responded very well to all the poking and prodding. Luckily he likes human contact in just about any form, although he wasn’t entirely pleased with the lady taking blood out of his heel. Next week we have to go back for another blood test, as his hemoglobin levels seem to have fallen quite rapidly. Mummy and daddy are trying to decide how concerned we ought to be at this stage, given that baby appears to be healthy in every respect, but we’re not medics, so we’ll see what they say next week.
I improvised us a sling using a single bed sheet, mostly for the times when he is grizzling but doesn’t appear to want anything. It’s not Joni’s favourite mode of transport, but in the scale of things he likes it better than being abandoned to whinge in his cot. This is the view I have of him when I cross my eyes and look down my nose…
Here we are cleaning the bathroom together… To be honest he’s not a great asset to the cleaning process. But he is quite useful as a fashion accessory to hide my “not quite yet back to pre-pregnancy” stomach.
Some lovely friends sent us some money for Joni, so we had fun shopping for presents. This is his favourite, a cot mobile with beany-animals, which spins around and plays a truly dire version of Frere Jacques. Joni loves it. Martin is hoping that his musical tastes might improve as he gets older. He played him Beethoven’s Eroica the other day to try and help the refining process along a bit…
And this is a multi-sensory baby gym type affair including a textured mat, and things hanging over the top of it. He’s just getting the idea that a good swipe at one of the hanging rattles makes for a satisfying noise. We’re hoping that he might see this as an interesting environment for practising his skills, as an alternative to swiping the contents of the bathroom work-surface onto the floor, and rolling himself into the sink…
Now we have a car. It’s not as photogenic as a baby, but it is more functional as a method of transport. We received some insurance money from Martin’s road accident; and Dany, our friend and colleague in Latin Link Argentina was selling his car. It seemed like a good swop, and saved us from having to deal with dodgy secondhand-car-salesmen. Dany also did all the paperwork with us which was a big bonus, knowing what we already know about paperwork and Argentina.
This is us looking halfway scrubbed and presentable at Joni’s official presentation at church, which took place on Sunday. 
The presentation / dedication ceremony is a little rite of passage in practice in many churches, particularly those who reserve baptism for adult believers. We were brought to the front, Joni held up for all to see (imagine sound-track with lots of ooohs and ahhs), the elders prayed for him and for us, and he was officially welcomed into the family of the church. 
Exodus 29:41 “Sacrifice the other lamb at twilight with the same grain offering and its drink offering as in the morning—a pleasing aroma, an offering made to the LORD by fire”…. Oops.. wrong passage….
This little person in our lives is 40 cms long, he does nothing except eat and sleep, and yet he has taken over the universe. Forget WMDs, if you’re looking for global domination, this is the real thing. How does he manage it? At three o’clock this morning while I was feeding him (need to have something to think about if we’re going to be awake at three in the morning) I realised that eight out of every 24 hours are taken up with the feeding / changing thing. And that’s before we factor in the washing, shopping, cooking, and all the other aspects of “general living”.
Monday we were back to the civil registry for another “Argentina day”. That took three hours. Then we thought we’d “pop” into the post office. That took another two hours during which we nearly lost the will to live a few times. Note to self; “pop” and “post-office” should not be used in the same sentence. We are very grateful for three things… one, that we live in a country where it is perfectly socially acceptable to breast-feed ones baby in any queue that one happens to be sitting in; two, that we managed to get out of the post-office alive; and most of all, that Joni now has his Argentinian DNI (ID document). We’re ridiculously excited about that, if you think about Argentinian paper-work as a game of snakes and ladders, then we’re like a pair of little kids who’ve rolled a six to go up one big ladder.
Thursday we went to the childrens’ home in San Marcos for the first time since Joni was born. The kids have all charted the progress of my growing belly from gestation to three days before the birth, so it only seemed right that they should meet him in real life while he’s still new and little. Inevitably we ended up doing some work, impossible not to, but mostly we spent the day playing outside in the sunshine, while Joni had a whale of a time being mauled and prodded by young and old. Luckily he really likes people, noise, movement, and going on the bus!