Superbaby! or How to find out if you like someone

Superbaby!
Originally uploaded by billyjoebob.

Reading the Family Man's blog this morning, punkin, I'm struck by how lucky he is that he gets to go to the hardware behemoth with Superman and Batman.

Of course, as soon as you were born (in fact, if truth be told, some time before that date), I began searching for a Batman costume for you. Batman is, of course, the best superhero, mostly because he's not a superhero, but more about that later. Suffice to say that this did not meet my requirements, and that we will have to wait some time until we find one that's exactly what you need for conducting secret missions in the backyard.

Of course, you already know this, but we spent time with some people from other babyblogs on the weekend. It was an interesting experience, not least because when we arrived, the lovely Rae opened the door and greeted us by name. Not a particularly earth shattering experience, but when one takes into account the fact that we've never met her, it brought home to me the idea that people have been watching you grow on this page.

Naturally, as soon as we walked in the door and got settled (which in this case means that both your mum and K started feeding their respective munchkins), I settled into an exhaustive inspection of Rae and Tony's DVD and book collection. It became immediately obvious that they are Good People.

I'm not sure, punkin, when the historical moment occurred, that people's DVD collections began to tell more about them than their book collections (certainly in my case it's a combination of the two that gives me the most information, but I think that the relative weighting of media types is beginning to shift in my head)

I wonder, by the time that you're ready to walk into someone's house and make snap judgements about whether you like someone based on what's on their shelves, what you're going to be looking for?

I'm sure that you'll think having an entire collection of Buffy is dreadfully boring, especially if it's actually on the original DVDs. I'm sure that you'll be astonished to think that people used to OWN media, that it used to come packaged in pretty boxes and that we, punkin, paid to have it sitting on shelves when we weren't even using it.

With the move away from concrete media, will you run a query on their home media collection from your palm device to see what the last five films they watched were? Will you ever have the pleasure that is cricking your neck to one side to see what someone has got on their shelves? To know how interesting it is to see how someone's got their collections organised?

It will be easy, punkin, for you to click a button and get all of your movies alphabetised, but to actually sit down and do it with your own fair hands?

That, my sweet punkin, is the mark of a couple of cinephiles. A gaggle of obsessives. A bunch of geeks. An Our Kind of Family.

Love you.