Twelve years ago, I did my graduation project with a university in Hong Kong. A few of my student friends from Holland were doing a traineeship in Auckland, New Zealand, while others were back in Amsterdam.

This was still the time of expensive international calling rates, but still we were able to communicate daily - for free. This was all thanks to “email” which was then in it’s early days. We would all log into an obscure mainframe type system (VAX), used “VI editor” to type and edit email, and then hoped it would end up to the other side of the world. It was the first experience with near immediate online messaging over the Internet, and everything wasn’t as user friendly as it currently is. I remember frequently loosing whole draft emails because I used the wrong escape character code and mistakenly deleted emails.
But we were happy with it. Every day we exchanged our “academic progress reports” as well as a few lines on what we were up to in weekends

Now it’s a mere 12 years later (dang I’m getting old), and guess what, I can show off my brand new son to my parents back in Holland in full colour, full motion, and with sound. All over the Internet, and all virtually for free.

Thanks to Skype 2.0 which made an excellent update to their VoIP voice communications software and now supports video. I haven’t seen a software that’s this easy to use and yet offers a very acceptable quality image and sound.

~M

Two weeks later in the world for Matthijs and a lot of interesting stuff happened!

Matthijs is now grabbing hold of things with his little fists, although holding on tight is still difficult. He also seems to beging to teeth. All the major signs are there: drooling, wanting to bite on stuff (such as mum’s nipples…), and getting extremely interested in putting things in his mouth.

At the same time Matthijs is now starting to eat his first time real bits of food; a daily cup of rice cereals in the morning, and some papaya and apple after breakfast.

Every time he sees mum or dad eat, he’s just infatuated observing it all. Seems he can’t wait to eat some juicy steak himself!

Eating rice cereals:

Eating some papaya:

Matthijs is also getting very interested in anything with buttons, lights, switches etc. How do we get this out of him? He’s starting to behave like dad in this respect. Darned.

Enjoying a nice nap:

~M

Matthijs’ first visit to the pool!

As is the case with many basic things in life, they can be pretty scary if you’re 11 weeks old. While we were in Cebu in our friend’s house, we felt we should let Matthijs take his first dip in their pool. It’s a nice 30 Celsius here in Cebu and the pool brings a welcome refreshment in this climate.

Ofcourse, Matthijs so far is only used to his cosy warm sponge bath, so this is going to be a surprise.

First thing, get your feet wet:

All fine here, nothing really shocking about this for Matthijs.

However, when Marc pulled him down slowly into the water, things were getting pretty chilly especially on the back!!

Yikes dad - get me out-a-here!

Still chilly - not liking this!

Hang on - it’s feeling better now…

Hey - this is actually quite cool!

There you go - you’re floating with just one hand helping you. Well done on your first lesson.

Next lesson: free style stroke!

Happy New Year!!!

We’re just back from a trip to Cebu where we celebrated the start of the New Year. Initially we weren’t quite sure if Matthijs’ passport would be ready before our trip, but in the end we could pick it up on last Friday morning. And thus we hopped on a flight at 4pm that same day, to land in Cebu two and a half hours later.

Matthijs has been a real easy traveler at his age of 11 weeks - no real problems at all. Here’s a photo of him sittin’ pretty with Nadine:

We stayed in Nadine’s house Friday night and left Matthijs in the very able and welcoming hands of ‘lola’ (grandmother). Nadine and I went out same night to meet up with some friends.

We filled the days with lots of family gatherings, and it was a great opportunity to introduce Matthijs to so many of his relatives.

Relatives like Grandpa, Mikey, Bea, and Richard:

And Grandma and Mark:

And with godmother Irene and Alicia:

And from all these visits the little Matthijs is pretty tired:
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…