These new movie poster style birth announcements from 5-Star Baby are pretty cute.

I especially like the fact that they try to come up with cool movie titles that incorporate in the kid’s name, and also include the doctors and hospital in the small print at the bottom.

I have to admit though, I don’t envy their task of taking the grainy out of focus photos that new parents send in and make them look like movie posters.

I know I took about a hundred pictures of Hank in his little newborn hat trying to get just the right shot to put on his birth announcement, and even then it was a little dark and fuzzy (trying not to use the flash in the dim light of the nursery was maybe not the best technical choice).

Well done 5-Star Baby!

- Zac

So we’re trying to Ferberize our kid which isn’t something you get at the dry cleaners, but rather a method (devised by some guy named Richard Ferber) on how to get your baby to teach themselves to fall asleep and soothe themselves back to sleep if they wake up in the night.

Basically this wicked method requires that the parents just let the baby cry in the crib for certain set intervals, and only going in to soothe the kid for a few seconds before leaving the room again. The theory is that the baby knows that if he/she cries, Mom or Dad will come in and pick ‘em up. This method tries to break that connection by only giving minimal comfort to the kid at increasingly spaced-out intervals and eventually they catch on that they should just go to sleep.

So right now Hank is up there screaming his fool head off and sounding like Rod Stewart gargling shards of glass, and we are downstairs counting off the 5 minute intervals until we can go up and calm him down for for a few seconds.

Did this work for anybody out there?

- Zac

SomethingAwful.com has some children’s books that I would love to read to Hank (right up until he was old enough to start asking questions).

- Zac

What is up with my kid wanting to jam his fingers into every hole in my face?

Seriously, whenever the kid is near me he’s all up in my ears and nostrils. I thought maybe for a while it was an interest in my teeth (since he’s so new to the game), but it doesn’t stop there.

Remind me not to show him my butthole any time soon.

- Zac

I simply can’t stress it enough.