He is growing up quickly; just in the last couple of months he’s seemingly gone from being an “infant” (ie, an eating/pooping machine), to being a real “little boy”, with a distinct personality. He’s happy, curious, and always fun to be around.

The “fun” part was something I didn’t expect. We really do have a good time playing together. There are few things that I like more than making him crack up laughing by letting him pull on my hair or by making ‘undignified’ noises with my mouth. In retrospect, he’s a perfect match for me — we both have juvenile senses of humor. (Much to his mommy’s dismay.)

So while the first seven months have been lots of hard work, I know that going forward we’re going to have great times together.

making a ruckus!

Loving the outdoors!

My last post was a bit of a downer, so I figured I should write another to talk about all the great stuff Reed has been up to. Not everything has been tummy issues and unpleasantness — in fact, there’s been a lot of fun stuff going on in Reed’s life. And he’s been an absolute joy to have around. He almost never cries and only gets fussy if he’s starving or needing a nap. Most of the time he’s just a fun, energetic, curious and amazingly social little guy. It blows me away to think about how much he’s accomplished in these short 5 months.

On Thursday, Reed turned 5 months old. The next day, he sat up unsupported for a very brief period of time. On Saturday, he actually sat up for nearly a minute (photographic evidence can be found here). He’s really been into his feet — putting them in the air and grabbing them — which I think helped with the sitting up process. He’s been trying to get his foot into his mouth, but isn’t quite limber or long-legged enough. But I’m sure he’ll get there in time. He is absolutely huge now. He was almost 17 lbs. about 2 weeks ago and he has definitely gone through a growth spurt since then. It amazes me how big and sturdy he is — I was always in the bottom percentiles for height and weight and I don’t think Adam was exactly a giant either. Reed constantly gets taken for a much older child, but part of that may just be his hair and the fact that his head is proportionate to his body (as opposed to having one of those deliciously round pumpkin heads many babies have).

We’re still slowly working on the solid foods thing. His favorite food is definitely sweet potato — even after trying apples and pears, he still prefers it. Cereal has been tough since stopping breastmilk. He loved rice cereal with breastmilk, but hates it (read: will cry if it’s put in his mouth) with formula. We tried to give him a new multigrain cereal with water this morning and he seemed to like it ok. I tried it and it basically just tasted like flour and water. Yum? I may try mixing the cereal with sweet potatoes and water — that would definitely make it more palatable. He’s still not eating enough solids to sleep through the night. In fact, during the night he wants to eat every 3 hours on the dot, which is starting to wear on me and Adam. His teachers at daycare comment that he eats more during the day than a lot of the kids twice his age. He’s not that chunky, so he must have a killer metabolism. So I guess he’s just a really hungry guy and we probably just need to work towards giving him more solid food before bed.

Reed's first swim!

Reed went on a plane trip for the second time in his life. Two weeks ago, he flew to Florida to visit his grammy and grandpa (my parents). He had a good time playing with the million toys grammy bought for him and even went in the pool! It was pretty obvious though that he was happy to come home and get back into his routine (we like routines too!). He got sick while we were traveling and then got us sick. At first I thought he’d gotten sick from daycare, but it turned out that none of the other kids had what he had (parvovirus B19). It made me realize that perhaps air travel may not be a good idea this Fall and Winter with the regular flu and H1N1 going around. With all of his allergies and sensitivities his body is taxed enough. I’d hate to expose him to all those germs on a plane again.

Since getting back from Florida, we’ve been trying to enjoy what’s left of the good autumn weather before we have to hunker down with him at home for the winter months. We’re already getting some pretty chilly days, so much so that I had to bundle him up and put a hat on him when we went to a harvest festival this past Saturday. But today is gorgeous and sunny, so as soon as the little man wakes up from his nap, we’re going to take a nice walk around the block. Being with him and watching him play and grow is such a pleasure.

All bundled up!

In the midst of this personal frustration, something really interesting happened in my professional life. I don’t talk about it much, but I have a number of side projects that I work on.

Since December 2000, I’ve been constructing and running a site called ODwire.org, which has become the largest social network for eye doctors. I actually started it at the behest of my father, a retired eye doctor, just as a way for him to keep in touch with his peers and old friends.

When I started the initial design for the community I thought the site would be a major flop (sorry, dad), for several reasons:

• It wasn’t clear to me back then that folks of my father’s generation would take to the site, or that highly paid professionals would take the time to browse such a site
• I did not think my father would have the sticktuitiveness to act as a site facilitator without alienating large chunks of the member base.
• My father also demanded that the site should be run as a closed community that required registration and manual verification before a user could “enter the club”. He felt that professionals would want a more private space to share their feelings, and without some degree of privacy, no one would want to chat or open up about issues of substance. Great idea, but this made it really difficult to get noticed by search engines, because search bots couldn’t get inside the site. As far as the bots knew, our content was limited to 3-4 pages.

Despite my initial concerns, and much to my amazement, the site didn’t flop. It has grown from nothing to being an important, legitimate media property serving the profession.

This morning, we went over the 10,000 registered, verified user mark. This may not sound like a lot of users when you think about general social networking sites like Twitter, but in reality it represents 1/4 to 1/3 of ALL optometrists in the United States, and it is a highly targeted, sought-after population. The site does over a million page views a month, and it is far and away the biggest site of its kind in eye care. Not bad for a ‘gated online community’.

Meredith has long asked me to comment about how we managed to build the community and keep it relevant and growing over the past 8-9 years. I’ve been reluctant to share, simply because… I don’t know the answer! That is, i’ve never really taken a step back to analyze the success factors or ’secret sauce’ that made our small community into an important venue.

Meredith is going to teach a class about online community for SJSU in January, and she’s asked me for some real-world examples that I can share with the students. So it is probably high time that I wrap my head around what it is we’ve built, why it is so popular, and how it can be replicated. Or at the very least, come up with some anecdotes about the pitfalls of building a community like ours so that her students won’t make the same mistakes we did along the way.

In commemoration of our 10,000th registrant, Meredith was kind enough to get me this awesome Boston Cream Pie this morning. Yay chocolate! Yay creamy goodness!

Thank You, Meredith!

Who knows — maybe the cake will push her into active labor, and we’ll have something even more important to celebrate today