this is my beautiful 9-month-old baby boy. i know he's scowling a bit, but he is, afterall, eating his first few bites of yogurt and he had to aquire a taste for it, very unlike his older brothers who inhaled it from their first bites. but that is not why i'm posting this photo. first, a little background:

i went to calvin college, which is located just under the half-way points between the pinky finger and ring finger of the right palm. (i didn't know what that meant either until i lived in michigan, so if you don't get it, don't worry.) roughly 94% of the city is dutch. 98% of the college population is dutch. these statistics might be slightly off as they are guesses based only on my experience at the college. to give you a taste of the dutch culture of calvin college, i give you the names of a few of the dorms: schultze-eldersveld, noordewier-vanderwerp, kalsbeek-huizenga.

if you think pronouncing them is difficult...try learning to spell them.

there is a little known fact that dutch people are above average in height. i stand at a whopping 5'4", and i was way below average height in college. my older brother married a dutch woman and their kids are off the charts when it comes to height and weight percentiles. they joke about it being the dutch blood.

getting back to the picture of my beautiful 9-month-old baby boy. normally i'd emphasize the "beautiful" in the description, but i'm emphasizing his age to prove this point: doesn't it look like he's 4 months old? could it be because he's SWIMMING in that bib? the bib reads, "there's a place for me at calvin college" and i received one for each of my kids when i updated my alumni status at the college's web site, reporting the birth of each of our boys.

folks, this bib FINALLY fits rowan. rowan is nearly 4 years old and 4-year-olds don't wear bibs! the bib manufacturers for the calvin college baby-congrats-gift MUST be dutch. they must have used their very own children as models for these bibs, and only dutch babies can, in fact, wear them when they need to wear them.

i'm afraid our boys will never be of dutch height. kenny, although strapping and handsome, isn't much taller than me ("5'8" on a good day" - his words, not mine) and our boys are always under the 50th height percentiles at their checkups. i'm hoping that they'll be interested in calvin as a potential college, but it's not going to be because they wore these bibs telling them of their placeholder at the college.

but they'll never remember the bibs they "wore" any way. do you actually remember any of the bibs you wore as a baby?