He showed up a whole month early, but he and his new parents are all doing great!

Eli Nate Noah was born at 6:52pm on January 11, 2010, weighing 6 pounds, 3 ounces.

I’m having trouble uploading pics from my phone, but a few are on facebook, and many more will come!

This is a real thing.

It’s a Wii game called Baby and Me, and it comes with the creepiest controller peripheral ever – a baby doll.

To play the game, you place the Wiimote into the doll. You can rock the doll to sleep, and if the “baby” is fussy, it will cry through the controller’s speaker. If you have a Wii Fit Balance Board, you can use that to teach the baby how to walk. And, somehow, you can even feed the baby. I’m really not sure how that works, nor am I sure that I want to know.

Is this going to be my main video game of choice until Baby Noah arrives? Can I use a motion-controlled game to give me some training in handling a newborn? As it turns out, the game will only be released in Australia, so I guess I’ll just have to settle with New Super Mario Bros. Wii. (Which, as far as I know, contains no babies, though you never know, Baby Mario could show up in a cameo…)

For some reason, babies tend to be measured in fruit sizes.

When I tell people how big Baby Noah is at any given time, I usually use fruit as an analogy. And it’s not a conscious decision on my part, that’s just the way it’s done. Every week I get an email from the nice folks over at babycenter.com that details Baby’s developments, and it always includes Baby’s size as compared to an item of produce. Here is, according to babycenter, a fetus’ growth, week by week.

Week 4: Poppy seed
Week 5: Sesame seed
Week 6: Lentil
Week 7: Blueberry
Week 8: Kidney bean
Week 9: Grape
Week 10: Kumquat (because everyone knows EXACTLY how big a kumquat is.)
Week 11: Fig
Week 12: Lime
Week 13: Medium shrimp (What, there’s no shrimp-sized fruit?)
Week 14: Lemon
Week 15: Apple
Week 16: Avocado
Week 17: Turnip
Week 18: Bell pepper
Week 19: Large heirloom tomato (People leave tomatoes to their kin in wills?)
Week 20: Banana (In length.)
Week 21: Carrot (Again, in length.)
Week 22: Spaghetti squash
Week 23: Large mango
Week 24: Ear of corn (In length.)
Week 25: Rutabaga (Again, I can’t off the top of my head picture a rutabaga for the life of me.)
Week 26: English hothouse cucumber (In length. And, hey, thanks for specifying; I wouldn’t want to have gotten confused with a Scottish cold barn cucumber.)
Week 27: Head of cauliflower
Week 28: Chinese cabbage
Week 29: Butternut squash
Week 30: A good-sized cabbage (Which is apparently bigger than the Chinese variety.)
Week 31: Four navel oranges
Week 32: A large jicama (Is that a thing? My spell check doesn’t seem to think so.)
Week 33: Pineapple
Week 34: Cantaloupe
Week 35: Honeydew
Week 36: Crenshaw melon (We must be running out of melons!)
Week 37: A stalk of Swiss chard (In length. Has it really been that long since I’ve been in a grocery store that I have no idea what the hell these things are?)
Week 38: Leek (In length.)
Week 39: Mini watermelon (No mention of if it’s seedless or not.)
Week 40: Small pumpkin (Aww!)

Thankfully, someone out there made a handy conversion of these sizes to something that your average man can more easily identify with; it’s a pretty cool blog I stumbled upon called hisboyscanswim.com. Anyway, here is His Boys Can Swim’s answer to all those fruit sizes.

Week 4: A tiny dot visible under a magnifying glass
Week 5: BB pellet
Week 6: A nut (As in a washer and nut.)
Week 7: The power button on a TV remote
Week 8: Quarter
Week 9: Marble
Week 10: The head of a hammer
Week 11: Golf ball
Week 12: Small tape measure
Week 13: A car’s gas cap
Week 14: Stress ball
Week 15: Baseball
Week 16: Small stud finder
Week 17: Hockey puck
Week 18: Small electric shaver (I don’t think I’ve ever had an electric shaver that was slightly larger than a hockey puck, but whatever.)
Week 19: Softball
Week 20: “One nice-sized boob” (His words, not mine.)
Week 21: Beer bottle (In length.)
Weeks 21 – 24: Over-inflated football
Weeks 25 – 28: A 13 inch boot.
Weeks 29 – 32: A Big Wheels’ front wheel
Weeks 33 – 36: A 17 inch computer screen (Or, presumably anything else that’s 17 inches long.)
Weeks 37 – 40: The electric motor of the 2008 Tesla (I am nowhere near manly enough to be able to picture that in my head. Is it about the size of a small pumpkin?)

Well, I clearly have some issues with both of these lists. So, without further ado, I hereby present the official alannoah.com version of how big a fetus is at various points of a pregnancy. (It’s a safe bet that both of the first two lists were far more thoroughly researched and fact-checked than mine, so take the below guidelines with a Week 4 Fetus.)

Week 4: A grain of salt (See what I did there?)
Week 8: One candy corn
Week 10: Nintendo DS cartridge
Week 12: Swedish fish
Week 14: Gamecube disc
Week 16: A stack of a year’s magazines (In height.)
Week 18: Archos 5, 120 GB
Week 20: My novelty Mets helmet/ice cream cup
Week 22: Wiimote and Nunchuck (In length.)
Week 24: Citi Field hot dog (In length.)
Week 26: Star Wars Original Trilogy boxed set on DVD
Week 28: A rolled up T-shirt shot out of a cannon
Week 30: A half-gallon of iced tea (In weight.)
Weeks 32 – 34: Courtney’s 2 pink dumbbells (In weight.)
Weeks 35 – 37: Sherlock’s height (In length.)
Weeks 38 – 40: Bowling ball (In size, probably not weight. Unless you bowl with a kid’s ball, or your baby is a giant.)

Baby Noah is 24 weeks today, which means that s/he is about the size of an ear of corn, an over-inflated football, or a Citi Field hot dog, depending on which scale you prefer.

But the important thing is that Baby is kicking, and now Courtney and I can both feel it. YAY!

Baby Noah loves that thumb!

So we don’t want to know the gender of our unborn baby, which means we have to do twice the baby naming planning.  Now before, we had said we were going to be planning the names in secret, but I’ve since decided it’d be better to share our ideas here, and see where that leads.  Here now is the full list of probable names for our kid, separated by gender.

If it’s a Boy:

• Luke Anakin Noah
• Boba Fett Noah
• Wicket Ewok Noah
• Milhouse Thrilho Noah
• Noah Noah Noah
• Sherlock Jr. Noah
• Mario Luigi Noah
• Jack Bauer Noah
• Jeremiah Bullfrog Noah
• Superman Batman Noah

If it’s a Girl:

• Leia Organa Noah
• Leia Ihardlyeven Noah
• Fresca Fanta Noah
• Daisy Peach Noah
• Chesty Larue Noah
• Buffy Summers Noah
• America Freedom Noah
• Turanga Leela Noah
• Autumn Fall Noah
• Scaramouche Fandango Noah

Can work either way:

• Bangkok Lucious Noah (first name suggested by Daron)
• Clinton Clinton Noah (suggested by Clint)
• Cornell Smarterthanyou Noah (approved by Raf)
• Yankovic Weird Noah
• Don’t Youdare Noah

For the last one, I always thought it would be great to name your kid Don’t, because that way whenever someone yells at him, he doesn’t have to do what he’s being told to do.  As in, “Don’t, go to your room!”  “Don’t Youdare, finish your homework!”  And so on.

Two college kids in love, May 2001

Then comes marriage…

Our wedding day, October 6, 2007

Then comes…

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Baby Noah, photographed via sonogram, August 3rd, 2009