Heatwave

I would have blogged earlier, but it's so hot, and the fans on our beater of a not-so-old Toshiba laptop are so clogged with cat fur, that the damn thing just keeps conking out on me.

We spent the better part of the weekend holed up in the bedroom huddled around the air conditioner, venturing out only to retrieve ice cream from the freezer. After the week we had, it was all the excitement we needed. Jen came down with a case of mastitis, which mercifully cleared up after a course of antibiotics, but she was in bad shape for a few days there.

Oscar and I did brave the heat for a mid-day Sunday stroll down the carnival of Italian-American kitsch that is Mulberry Street, Oscar in his abhorrently cute floppy hat (above), augmented by Jen with a Keith Harring baby patch, and me wearing the iPod Jen got me for Father's Day (along with a copy of Griel Marcus's Lipstick Traces).

Jen has remarked that going anywhere with Oscar is like travelling inside a bubble of goodwill. Strangers stop and smile at you. Gina, the gruff old Mayor of Spring Street, remembers your name and pulls you aside for a friendly chat -- the better to ogle your angelic progeny. The crowds part for you. Even tourists. Traffic stops for you. Even yellow cabs. Especially yellow cabs.

Lose the baby, and suddenly you're just another schmuck among 8 million. Cabbies wouldn't stop for you if you were Angelina Jolie, naked but for a strategically-placed stack of Benjamins. Gina won't have nothing to do with you. Doesn't matter if you've lived in the neighborhood nine years (in fairness, she's lived in the neighborhood nine times that many). Never heard of you. People in a hurry jostle you. People not in any hurry glare at you, if they can be bothered to acknowledge you at all.

Anyway, after a nice walk punctuated by a couple long, aimless detours through refreshingly frigid supermarkets, Oscar and I again retreated to our air-conditioned eyot in the sky before Eden talked us into coming over for one of her sumptuous dinners, where we were again bathed in goodwill and ate well.

We've had a good run of the supper circuit lately, having also dined twice this week at Casa Leonard, where Oscar met his other great grandmother Ruth and his great cousin Suzanne (yes, we invented that term, but she really is great).

If Oscar were a mafioso, his nickname would be The Tongue. Just in these last few days, he seems to have discovered it and now delights in playing with it. I know I'm repeating myself here, but while we're ticking off developmental developments, his hand-eye coordination is really coming along. He gets this look of studious concentration on his face when he's playing with things and seems to be puzzling it out (seen here with dragosaur from Grandpa Jack).


His distance vision has really come in -- he now responds to stimuli at least ten feet away. And Gramma Sue, who spent a good part of the week looking after Oscar and a sickly Jen, reports that he was mirroring her movements a few days ago. I haven't been able to get him to repeat this performance yet, but I believe her. Those little synapses are just exploding in there.