Pither.com

One of the things the NHS give you as a new parent is a small red book in which to record your child's first few years of medical history.

This book has pages that cover basic details of the baby's birth, lots of pages for notes, various pictures (eg for recording teeth) and a number of charts.

One of those charts is to track your baby's weight and another their height. Each graph includes a number of guide plots, one for the average, another for the 25th percentile, 75th percentile and a few others.

Ever since Edward recovered from his initial dip in his first few weeks he has been quite nicely tracking just under the 91st percentile. However this week, for the first time he has landed directly on the 91st percentile with a whopping weight of 9kg! And he's still less than six months old!

Despite still having rather chunky thighs; the height graph tells us that he is also exactly on the 91st percentile, so apparently in perfect proportion!

Approximately two weeks ago Edward discovered that lifting one leg up underneath him and pushing hard while pulling with his hands could propel him quite rapidly across the floor.

He spent a few days doing this very successfully, although intermittently. He could easily cover a couple of feet in a minute or two when the mood took him. Since then he has been progressing further towards a more traditional form of crawling.

This currently means that he's quite good at getting either his legs or his hands in the right positions, but not so good at doing both at once. His general ability to cover distance also seems to be, temporarily I'm sure, reduced to almost nothing; or a small distance backwards.

On a related note, I'm quite convinced that Edward is perfectly capable of sitting up on his own. However he's yet to really prove this as he will never sit still. There is always something just out of reach that's far too interesting not to try and stretch for, which inevitably means falling over.

A short while after Edward was born, it became apparent that we needed to start cutting his finger nails (as he was starting to scratch his face).

Since that time it has been my job to perform this task as Liz has been too concerned about cutting his fingers off.

So every week or two I have been using a pair of baby nail scissors to cut Edward's finger nails. The complexity of this task has varied a lot depending on how long his nails were and how much he wanted to struggle (he doesn't even like having them being cut when he's asleep!). Overall though it has been getting gradually easier as he, and his fingers, get larger. He has certainly managed to maintain all of his fingers throughout.

A few weeks ago I decided that moving from scissors to baby nail clippers would make things easier and reduce the risk of any fingers falling off.

Unfortunately on one of my first attempts with the nail clippers I managed to include a small amount of finger! I drew blood and everything! :-(

Surprisingly Edward didn't seem to mind, so at least there weren't any screams to make my guilt even worse.

With the confession over, I'd just like to add that since then I think I've worked out what I did wrong and have managed a couple of further clippings without any more fingers getting in the way. The lesson remains though - nail clippers really aren't any safer than scissors for cutting baby nails.

While trying to get a new Ruby on Rails application up and running on one of my servers, I came across this:

$ ruby script/server   
./script/../config/boot.rb:29: undefined method `gem' for main:Object (NoMethodError)
        from script/server:2:in `require'
        from script/server:2

Being the first thing I ran after rails <myapp> this is quite an early point in the process to start failing!

The fix turned out to be:

$ sudo gem update --system

The slightly puzzling bit is that this machine already has other RoR applications running on it! I suspect the key difference is that they were developed elsewhere and only run on this machine under apache.