Had a spectacular afternoon at the pool with my son today. The pool was crowded but the weather was perfect. And taking him to the pool is always a joy because this kid loves to swim. He jumps into the pool with no encouragement and he loves to dunk himself under the water (particularly amazing since he’s not quite two years old).
Hapi olmost halawin by jeffreymcmanus.
Celeste writes letters to characters in the game Animal Crossing nearly every day. Her spelling isn’t terrific (she’s six, so it’s no big whoop) but it’s really astonishing to see her pursuing this with such vigor when six months ago she was barely able to read or write her own name.
This reminds me of when I was in fifth grade and I got my first real creative writing and public speaking experience through dungeon mastering. Why can’t more learning activities seem like play?
Link: Boy, 6, Tries to Drive to Applebees
"A 6-year-old boy was hungry and decided he’d go to Applebees. So he grabbed the car keys, took his booster seat from the back seat of his grandmother’s car and placed it in the driver’s seat, then made a go of driving himself to the restaurant Tuesday.
He made it about 75 feet. Unable to take the car out of reverse, he crossed the street and ran into a transformer and communication box, knocking out electricity and phone service to dozens of townhomes.
Nobody was injured and the boy, whose name was not released, got out of his car and told his grandmother what happened."
For the first three to five years of a kid’s life pretty much everything they say is a tape recording of something they’ve heard you say. Once they turn five, they start school and they start picking up all kinds of new stuff to say. Most of the time it’s amusing.
Yesterday after work in my office at home I was trying out a demo of an extremely violent first-person shooter video game. Watching me play extremely violent first-person shooters is one of Celeste’s favorite spectator sports, so she was sitting next to me watching. Within seconds of starting the game, I got blown up spectacularly. Celeste tried to comfort me by saying "Cheer up, emo kid."
I wasn’t going to post anything about this on the blog (like, ever) because I didn’t want to contribute to the ongoing grief-o-rama — and also, to be honest, this isn’t terribly easy for me to write about. But after reading Marybeth’s eloquent post about how she feels on 9/11 as a parent, I thought I’d finally write this down.
My younger sister (who I’ll see in NY this weekend) was visiting us the weekend before Sept. 11. She took a red-eye flight home to New York and was in the air most of the morning of Sept. 11; her plane landed in New York a few hours before the attacks and was in her apartment in the east village when the first plane crashed. Fortunately, she had the presence of mind to wake us up with a phone call ("I’m okay. Turn on the TV. Talk later. Love you. Bye.").
We watched events unfold on television in silent disbelief, grateful that my sister was okay but wondering what was going to happen next. Since it was just after six in the morning where we were, my wife and I watched the TV news in bed. Next to us on the bed was our three-week-old daughter. Our new baby was the lens through which I evaluated everything that happened that day.
Because we were relieved about my sister and totally stunned at what was happening, we didn’t react emotionally to what was going on, at least not at first. But after the towers collapsed, we saw a live TV shot of a father with a child about the same age as our daughter strapped to his chest, running away from the debris cloud.
That was the scene that caused the emotional dam to break. We certainly identified with the father — holy shit, we live in a big city too, and that guy could have been us — but for me there was something much bigger at work. Having a baby is an act of supreme optimism; you have to feel pretty secure in your relationship to society to want to bring a kid into the world. But at that moment, I felt utterly (and selfishly) miserable for our own baby. I felt like she and her generation had been cheated. Through tears, I kept saying sorry, baby. We thought we had brought you into a great world, and now it looks like the world is going to be not quite as great.
It took more than a year for me to get my thoughts and emotions sorted out about this, but when I did, I realized I had it completely wrong. It may be the case that the world is a little worse than it was before 9/11. But all that happened in the past; if you’re focused on the future, you can look at anything in a more constructive way.
It took me way too long to figure this out, but things made a lot more sense when I realized that the world is not a gift we give to our children. Our children are a gift we give to the world.
Somehow in the past couple of weeks our little baby boy started walking around the house. What a pain in the butt. Now he’s yanking stuff off the shelves and appearing in inconvenient places. This is going to continue to be a pain until he’s able to go to the fridge to get daddy a beer.
Last day of school by jeffreymcmanus.
Congratulations to my #1 girl Celeste, whose last day of kindergarten is today.
It’s funny, I’ve been pumping her up for months about how cool it is to get out of school, to not have to do homework and to be able to vegetate for two and a half months. But she’s feeling wistful, which I suppose is a good sign. She loves her school and her teacher and doesn’t want it to end.
Our plan is to spoil her with camp, swimming, family road trips and other activities all summer. First up is a big-time luncheon with Mom downtown on Wednesday followed by a four day family road trip this weekend.
We’ll see how eager she is to go back to school after the summer we subject her to.
Happy birthday to my main main Rev, who turns 1 year old today.
lunch by jeffreymcmanus.
You know what’s weird? When you have a 10 month old baby and a 5 year old kid, and the baby is sitting on your lap and he says “cookie” and then he sort of matter-of-factly says “galleta” and you have no idea what he said until your 5 year old with the nearly 1 year of bilingual kindergarten behind her says “he said ‘cookie’ in spanish!” That’s what’s weird.
First rollover by jeffreymcmanus.
We were just sorta sitting around and without warning he rolled over onto his belly. Milestone!
Stern grove by jeffreymcmanus.
We’re back at stern grove this afternoon to listen to hawaiian music.
Celeste feeding Rev by puttopal.
This is kid #1’s first shot at feeding kid #2. There is something deeply satisfying about this, like having a car that drives itself or something.
Wife (standing at the baby’s changing table): "I have a question for the man of the house."
Me (sitting in the next room): "Would the question happen to be penis-related?"
Wife: "Yes."
It’s fun when you get to the point in a marriage when you can almost finish each other’s sentences.
By the way, as evidenced by the above, I’m going to turn up the crank on the blog-o-matic at least once daily for the next month and see how that goes. (That means the dreaded spew factor might increase a bit, but hopefully it’ll all make sense.) If all goes as planned, this elevated level of chatter will increase into a crescendo of spazmodic excitement to culminate in the mid-to-late August timeframe, at which point I’ll be blogging about something different. (If that sentence seemed meaningless yet tantalizing to you, then I would urge you to stay tuned, as they say.)
To get caught up on my reactions to news for the past week: I’m doing OK, the family’s doing great, I’m still loving the MacBook Pro 110%, I don’t care about Rocketboom one way or the other, I’m happy to see Om asking about Web 2.0 for the enterprise, I worry about Tantek, I think that Jordan leaving eBay is a much bigger deal than the launch of Google Checkout and that this week’s mindless selloff in eBay stock makes me want to acquire its shares for the first time since I sold all my options in April 2005. So there’s that.
Fully alert in dad’s lap by jeffreymcmanus.
He’s quite serious.
We’re hanging out killing an hour before Celeste graduates from preschool. She’ll still attend preschool until August when she’ll start kindergarten in the city; today is just the official ceremony featuring juice treats and paper mortar boards. I’ll post pix of the ceremony later.
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