Balls

About 45 minutes after Zeke was born, he was whisked away to the nursery to be cleaned up and weighed and whatever else they do to newborn babies. Having gone through 29 hours of labor, including 4 hours of pushing, I was, to be honest, happy to have some time to get some rest. Jason stayed with me for a little while in the room, but was antsy to see his boy, so he went down to the nursery.

A while later he came back, all excited.

"What's up?" I asked.

"He's got the biggest balls of any kid down there!" Jason said proudly.

"That's nice," I responded. I rolled over and went back to sleep.

Not much has changed.

I don't mean that I go around comparing the size of my son's balls to those of his contemporaries. But from time to time, his balls, and balls in general, seem to occupy an inordinate amount of focus.

My good friend Andrea came to visit this past weekend. We had a wonderful time, relaxing, going to the beach, surfing, driving around the island. She's an incredibly easy guest -- smart, funny, fun to talk to, interesting, and unfazed by the bawdy conversation that seemed to predominate.

While we were at the beach this past Sunday, I let Zeke run around naked because, really, why not? And after playing and wearing himself out, he fell asleep in the sand in the perfect baby pose: head down, mouth open and drooling (and covered with sand), ass up in the air. Which meant that everyone around us who turned over on their towels found themselves face to face with a pair of low-hanging baby balls.

Andrea took this picture, and tried to just make it a cute baby butt shot, without all the spare elbow skin hanging down. But there was no way to avoid it. They were just .... there. We looked at this picture alot this weekend, and talked about it even more.

"I was really trying to keep them out of the picture," Andrea lamented. "I just couldn't get the right angle."

"He's an Armstrong, mate," Jason explained. "He's all stones."

I guess I should be proud?