Letter to Brenden Month 4:

Well my goodness, honey; you are developing. You roll over occasionally - you went from your belly to your back once while we were in Oklahoma and you occasionally go from back to belly at daycare. You are really good at rolling on your side so you can see or grab something. And you are getting great at grabbing (say that 3 times fast). I love playing "grab the toy and chew on it" with you. I either hold out or place a little stuffed animal on your belly, and you laboriously grab it and try to stuff it into your mouth. Loads of fun! Especially in the bathtub.

You are getting more use out of your Gymini which is a play mat with arches over it that have various toys dangling from it. You will grab at everything and I got some good laughs at when you grabbed the legs of the toy octopus and tried to stuff it in your mouth but were stymied because the legs wouldn't reach. You complained and growled a lot. Have you been spending too much time with the cats?

Your talking is pretty neat. You of course make absolutely no sense, but your tone of voice is so telling. I can tell when you are tired, when you want to do something different, when you are frustrated, when you are having fun, or when you just want to talk. Very little of this communication is actually ear-piercing cries. And the best part about your vocalizing is your reactions to other children and people around you. The daycare lady said you giggle like mad when the other kids are giggling and having fun. Inversely of course you cry when they cry. Still, what a neat display of empathy. I'm glad you are getting exposed to other kids.

Maybe I'm simply genetically programmed to not regard your crying as annoying, but you don't do the ear-piercing screams. Not yet anyway. Keep up the good work, kiddo! You'll be crawling in no time.

I am so happy; I have found a TV series that lives up to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the X-Files before it. I'm not talking about quality, by the way, though in their time both shows were definitely the best things going on TV (though the X-Files lost its way before the end).

I'm talking about Battlestar Galactica. I found the first 4 hour miniseries to be a little shaky and slow, but ultimately on the geek forums I defended it. I felt vindicated when the story quality took a quantum leap with season 1, and the first half of season 2 has maintained that level.

Like BtVS and the X-Files, I enjoy the story but it's the characters I appreciate the most and the Galactica is chock-full of fun ones. My favorite is Starbuck, who in this incarnation of BSG is a woman, which of course pissed off a lot of geeks. But Scully and Buffy were my favorites too, so it's tradition. And like Buffy and Scully, Starbuck has some great personality flaws. She's promiscuous and impulsive, and has made seriously bad judgement calls. She is the counterpart to Apollo, who in this incarnation a straight-arrow tool who nevertheless tries to go by his own judgement (and his calls are *much* better than Starbuck's) and is very much a leader.

The original Battlestar Galactica's bad guys were the Cylons, who were evil robots. The only reason the old series had evil robots was they could shoot them/blow them up with impunity and the TV censors wouldn't bat an eye. I have to hand it to Ron Moore, the creative genius behind the new BSG. These Cylons are enigmatic, resourceful, and have reasons for doing what they do. I even care about one of them, even if I don't completely trust her motives. Did I mention the human-looking Cylons only have 8 models? That means the actors who play these 8 models have a steady job no matter how many times their characters are killed. Chris Carter and Joss Whedon must be way jealous that they didn't think of that.