Wee One...

So, I got to meet my nephew on Monday.

Nathan was much less ugly than I expected. And not quite as small.

Being a thirty-five week premie, I guess I was expecting something tiny, especially when Ken said that he was only 4 pounds, 13 ounces at birth. But, he's tall (18 inches), and he has a big head (12 inches circumference). He just needs to put on some weight and fill out. Right now, he's all head and limbs. He's quite cute. In an ugly way, of course.

I have this theory: All newborns are quantitatively ugly. The level at which one finds a baby cute depends on how emotionally invested one is in the child. Since Nathan is my nephew, I can't help but find him cute. But there are a lot of ugly babies out there with people fawning over them like they were the cutest thing since this. I can only surmise that they're incredibly emotional invested, or they're complete liars.

But back to Nathan. He's still spending most of his time in an incubator in the neo-natal ICU, but he's not confined to it by any means. When I went down to the hospital, I didn't only get to meet him. I got to hold him. That made my day.

While I was talking to Ken and Kathy, I got to thinking about the type of world this kid is going to grow up in. And I don't mean that in terms of politics, economics, or the environment. The thoughts were generated while Kathy was telling me that her manager at work knew the name of the baby even before she'd had the chance to talk to her.

It's a virtual, wired world we now live in -- where six degrees of seperation is nothing. To keep abreast of happenings in our friend's lives, we used to have to talk to them, write letters, communicate on some form of one-on-one level. Now, news has a way of filtering out on its own. Blogs. Facebook. Twitter. When the baby was born, Ken and Kathy told family and their close friends. Some of us have blogs. Being the excitable people that we are (especially when people we care about have babies), up went the blog posts. The entries, of course, mentioned the name. Mine was particularly egregious, with the baby's name being the entry's title. (Well, it's since been changed, but when the post went up, the title was 'Nathan Elliot (Chinese Name TBD) Mo...')

Ken and Kathy's blog is listed on on their Facebook profiles. Ken made a quick entry on Saturday, saying that the baby was coming, then headed to the hospital. That was their last update until Tuesday, when they managed to get online again. On Sunday, the name appeared on the blog. See, they had a list of links to other blogs, mine included. This list also displayed the title of the last entry on all of these blogs.

That's the type of world we live in now. A world where information is real-time, and out there should you know where to look for it. A world where we google the names of dates to see whether they're psychotic or not. A world where so much is public and we have be extra careful to control our privacy. That's the type of world Nathan's coming into.

I felt kind of bad that, in my rush to express my joy over being an uncle, I'd inadvertently taken from my brother and my sister-in-law (you know, the people that actually did the work and produced the little miracle) some control over how information was to be disseminated. I didn't even think about that.

So I'm not going to publically post photos until Ken and Kathy have a chance to get some out there. Well, except for this one from when I was holding him. I can't resist. Because he really is very cute.