And in this corner...

I forgot to mention an important milestone for Zachary -- at yesterday's appointment at our local hospital's post partum center, he weighed in at 7 lbs. 12 oz. He's now back over his birth weight, several days ahead of schedule. (Apparently, babies typically lose around 5% of their weight after they're born. Zachary had left the hospital down about 4 oz., or 4%. Docs like to see babies back at their birth weight within two weeks.) This also gives us a data point showing he gained 8 oz. in 6 days! By my calculations, this means that by his 18th birthday he will weigh in the neighborhood of 540 lbs. Take that, Freakonomics guy -- I can totally manipulate limited data to silly extremes much better than him.

Tonight we're trying out a new parent class, again a service offered at the excellent local hospital. We're not entirely sure what to expect, though I hope we get to meet other new parents and possible future friends for Zachary! Meh is also taking him to a new parent group earlier in the day -- hopefully more from her on that later. Speaking of which, I've also got to hunt down a local PEPS group, another strongly recommended resource for us to take advantage of.

Lastly, a new nickname debate is now brewing (did we ever really settle the Ziggy one?) -- it's Zach v. Zack. Granted, the kid is already in trouble with our ever-popular last name (alternate spellings/pronunciations include Selton, Seflon, Shalfont [I kid you not, this one occurs all of the time], and even variants on the names of our distant relatives the Sealfons), so why not have a confused first name as well? I still think we should just cut to the chase and go with the more exotic Zaq (it works for Shaq...), but here are some brief negatives to the two options.

Cons:

• Zach: Meh thinks it looks like it would be pronounced "Zatch". Some other friends have suggested that Zach is only used as a nickname for Zachariah rather than Zachary.
• Zack: He's a well-known lego maniac (wow, did that ad age poorly or what?). The 'k' also seems more associated with actors and fictional characters than the 'h', at least in the Wikipedia listings.

Not that anyone's going to settle this for poor Zachary, nor that it even really matters all that much until he starts spelling his own name and chooses whether to go for the long or short form, but Meh suggested posting this as a poll question. So we present our very first straw poll (over in the right frame), with perhaps only slightly more meaning than that Iowa thing. Sorry for the hard-to-read colors for days remaining and votes taken; Blogger's colors don't appear to be editable for this control. You can drag/select it to see what it says (the poll expires September 1). Happy voting!