tongue tied

I listen to a lot of audio books during my commute, and I've developed a new found respect for those readers. I can't even get through Sammy The Seal without tripping over every other word, much less stay coherent hour after hour. I know they don't do it all in one take, and in some of the less-polished works it's painfully obvious where the cuts are made, but it's still impressive.

Sometimes even the authors read it themselves, which is a mixed bag. Neal Stephenson has a pleasant voice and can make his books feel like he's just chatting to you. On the other side of the spectrum, Stephen Hawking actually read his own book, Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays. It's like listening to a Dalek explain theoretical physics. Almost as bad was Ray Bradbury reading Fahrenheit 451, who sounds so much like Andre the Giant that I kept expecting him to shout, "I am the Dread Pirate Roberts!"

The bigger they are...

Like any boy, The Boy is fascinated with all things big. His current fetish is construction vehicles and fire engines, but I'm sure dinosaurs and tanks, jets, and other implements of destruction are not far down the line. I remember when my nephew, back when his age was still in single digits, became obsessed with the fact that I was one of the few people he had ever met who was bigger than his dad.

I'm trying to figure out how this mindset fits into brain evolution. For hunters it makes sense to want to figure out how to take down the big game. A single woolly mammoth could feed your tribe for a week, and in a calories-in per calories-expended ratio it's probably more efficient than chasing after rabbits all day. There's also the fact that males are territorial and like to size up the competition (which makes my nephew's behavior a little unsettling).

In the end, I've concluded that the biggest draw to fire engines and dinosaurs is the fact that... they're just so darn cool.

Romancing the stone

Ironically enough, the weekend that I experience the "joy" of a kidney stone is the same weekend that The Boy decides to eat a pebble. So now it's a race to see who passes his stone first.

I wonder if this counts as father/son bonding.

That new baby smell

When The Boy was born a lot of mothers looked at him sadly and said they missed when their own kids were that age. At the time, and for a couple of years after that, I thought they were crazy. I figured it would be much better once the kid was walking on his own, because I spent 90% of my day carrying The Boy around and was ready for a break. Little did I know that when I picked up my cousin's newborn boy the other day I would look at his wrinkled grinning face and suddenly realize that I spend much more energy chasing after my toddler than I ever did lugging him around in a sling.

Those women were probably talking about some kind of sentimental emotion thing, but for a guy it's all about the caloric requirements of parenting. I shall watch my son play Little League with a smile on my face, enjoying the fact that he's out there working up a sweat while I can finally sit on my ass and eat chips.

Let's get ready to Roomba!

The Boy's favorite toy at the moment is the Roomba, a small robotic sweeper that putters around the room cleaning the floor. While I agree that the way it zips around can be mesmerizing, with The Boy it practically becomes a nightly religious rite. He'll point with glee when the recharge light turns green, then we'll bring it to the middle of a room and turn it on. And when I say 'we' I actually mean me, since The Boy at that point has scrambled onto a bed or couch or whatever is around. This is because it's firmly believed in our household that the Roomba is a deadly killing machine, despite the fact that the worst it can do to you is lightly bump against you. Even if, somehow, you managed to get a body part under the chassis and near the sweeping brush the worst you'll get is some minor tickling.

There have been times when The Boy has found himself in the middle of the room with the dreaded machine steadily coming towards him and, instead of moving away, he'll freeze up and start bawling. But Daddy has consistently come to save him before he loses any limbs, so the risk of death is a small price to pay for the privilege of watching Roomba work. For me, the risk of childhood trauma to my son is a small price to pay for clean floors.

Religion and politics

A guy at work just had a baby, and I'm avoiding him like the plague.

The problem, you see, is that I'm sure he's doing countless things with his child that I don't agree with, so it's easier to just keep my mouth shut by not talking about babies at all. I've learned over the years that child rearing falls under the same category as religion and politics, topics that just piss people off. That's because people can't help but listen and feel that it's a slight against them. Either you take offense to how you raise your kids or you take offense to how you were raised, claiming that you turned out okay so what makes me think your dear old mother did you wrong?

Well, let's ignore the fact that the number of Americans depressed and/or on drugs is rapidly rising, so the odds are good that you're not as emotionally stable and secure as you claim. Let's also ignore the steady increase of physical illness and autoimmune disorders in children. While we're at it, let's gloss over child obesity and the lack of effort put into studying baby's nutritional needs and food sensitivities. Plus the fact that cribs, strollers, formula, and vaccinations go against a million years of evolution...

... So yeah, I'm not going to ask him how his baby is doing.

Let's make a deal...

The Boy has become quite the little bargainer. At some point he learned what "little bit" means, and now every demand for candy or television is punctuated with "little bit!" I'm pretty sure it's never actually worked, so I have no idea why he thinks this'll help his cause.

I thought this was just some automatic response, but the other day I was fortunate enough to watch his brain in action. The Wife was making deviled eggs and had scooped a spoonful of mayo out of the jar. The Boy, thinking that mayonnaise was now fair game for anyone with a spoon, toddled over to the silverware drawer and opened it up. The part that impressed me was that this master negotiator, after a moment of contemplation, passed over serving spoons, soup spoons, and even his normal cereal spoons and picked up one of his old baby spoons. He knew there might be some disagreement about allowing him to stuff mayo straight into his mouth so he picked the smallest utensil he could find in order to meet us halfway.

It showed more forethought than most adults so it was tempting to actually let him get away with it. But you have to draw the line somewhere, and even I balk at eating mayonnaise without even the pretense of other foods.