Supplemental-- An Open Letter

Dear Mr. Benjamin Franklin,

You may find it odd I chose to write you a letter, considering the fact that you are long dead. Well, you deserve to be long dead, you jerk. You are credited with proposing Daylight Savings Time in a satirical article...shame on you, Ben. You should have known better than to do so, considering that a bunch of humorless beaurocrats would inevitably read your work. Given, others pushed this idea along, but YOU started it.

My son, Aidan, would like to formally register his complaint to you regarding this matter. However, as he is only 11 months old, his only method of doing so is unabashed crankiness that I sincerely hope you can hear from beyond the grave. His schedule (such as it WAS) is now thoroughly mucked up, and he sees fit to destroy my sanity because of it. He is not sleeping well, whether it be day or night. Why, this very morning he awakened me at 3:00 to greet the day with him. I know you say "early to bed, early to rise" (which, by the way, is a whole other crock of shit you should get a letter about) but even this should seem extreme to you.

What to do about this quandry? I propose-- nay, demand-- this solution to our current situation: you must rise from the dead and march on Washington. Feel free to eat as many brains there as your little zombie heart would like (although I daresay you're wasting your time looking for any on the hill), but do not forget your reason for return-- you must lobby Congress for an immediate repeal of this ridiculous custom. Were we still an agrarian society, lacking in such amenities as electricity and therefore adequete lighting, I would side with you-- however, it is, by my watch, the 21st century and there is no further call for this sort of ass-hatery. If you do not comply with this request immediaty, I will take Aidan into Philadelphia so that he may pee all over every image of you in the city. Once this task is completed, I will hold him over your grave so that he may scream at you for as long as he sees fit. If I can't rest in peace, neither will you.

You bespectacled, gout-ridden, wooden-toothed bastard.

Sincerely,
A Concerned Citizen

Past Due

Sorry for not posting last week-- there is a good reason, I promise. Wednesday we got a call from Aidan's daycare saying he woke up from his nap cold, clammy, and shaking slightly. That, in a nutshell, scared the ever-loving CRAP out of me. My first thought was "Oh no, he's diabetic like me." Because those are all things that can and do happen when my blood sugar gets low. That is somethign I wouldn't wish on anyone, let alone my little boy...it's hard for me to imagine sticking him with needles every day, and harder yet to imagine him having to go through life without knowing the pleasure of absolutely gorging himself on candyat Christmas or Halloween as a child. Hmmm...come to think of it, maybe I shouldn't have gorged myself so much. But I digress.

My wife got him to the doctor right away, and by the time I got there they were still waiting for him to pee so they could check his urine for signs of diabetis. Apparently, my son loves me so much it makes him tinkle, because as soon as I got there he did, and they got thier sample.... thankfully, no ketones or sugar there. So they scheduled him for bloodwork the next day, and we sweated out the night.

It's indescribable how scary having a sick baby is, because they can't really say "Hey Dad, I'm feeling kinda bad, and my stomach is upset. Don't worry, it's definitly not anything serious, but it's not fun either." So you're stuck with your poor child, angry that there aren't swarms of Ivy League certified doctors checking your angel's every heartbeat, until you can get to the halls of medicine for an answer. The next morning we took him to get his blood drawn, and the lab techs weren't able to find a good vein. I don't blame them at all, as they had 3 different people look and didn't stick him needlessly. But at the same time, I was disappointed because I wanted an answer. Sooooo....we took him back home and called to get further instructions from the doc.

Long story short, we ended up taking him to a children's hospital to have the tests run by very kind and wonderful lab techs, and all the really icky evil things it could have been seem to be ruled out. Even better, by Friday morning he seemed back to normal. We're still waiting for a few stragler tests to come back but we're hoping it was just a strange part of a growth spurt. So that's why I didn't write....sorry for the seriuous post, but as I said, it scared the crap out of me.

SuperAidan, Up, Up, and .....Down.

There is a long hidden secret, guarded throughout the course of time and previously known only to Masons, the Knights Templar, and the occasional monk. But the time has come to reveal that secret, to you, the common man (or woman), and I, at great peril to my own person, will do exaclty that. Ready? Here it is: babies are really all tiny X-Men. Superheroes. Benders of time and space. It's true-- babies have an amazing array of superhuman abilities at their disposal. I think it says somewhere in the Baby Powers Use Code that they're not supposed to let their parents see them used, but Aidan slipped the other day. It seems that his particular gift is the ability to surround himself with a pocket of lessened gravity, which he can manipulate at will. I'm not saying he can float blocks around or anything (although he may very well be able to, I'll have to ask his daycare about that) but it's really the only reasonable explanation for what happens when he is standing up and falls over.

Ok, so it's not all that reasonable, but it IS amazing, regardless. There's simply NO WAY he follows the same laws of physics the rest of us do. When he's standing around, hanging onto whatever piece of furniture currently has the most interesting lint on it, he will eventually fall over, or at least onto his knees. Now, I remember physics class. F=ma and all that Newtonian goodness that always made me want to test it by throwing apples around. But when Aidan falls over, he does it very, very slowly. And somehow, he actually seems to DE-celerate as he gets closer to the ground. By the time his little butt hits the floor, it's as soft as settling down onto a down pillow at night.

Unless you're the kind of person who delights in slamming your head down before sleeping. In which case, it's considerably softer.

My Son, the Backwards NASCAR Driver

Aidan continues to develop his crawling skills. Up to about last night, he had a small limitation. He could crawl pretty well, faster and faster as time went on. He could sit himself back up like a champ. But he couldn't turn right. Striaght, cool. Swing left, fine. Swing right....what's "right"? Honestly, I didn't realize he had this problem until he overcame it. Last night he crawled into the kitchen, and something off to the right must have caught his eye....because he stopped, then got really excited, and started exploring. Nothing new was over there, so I can only assume that he discovered this new ability. He still tends to drift left, but now he's strated looking about while he's moving. Pretty cool.

Also, his understanding of sharing is getting even more interesting-- now, if he has somethign he thinks I might want, he'll try to give it to me without me even asking. More to the point, if he has something in his hand, and he wants to pull up on the furniture, he'll give me whatever he's got while he does his thing, and get it back once he's up. It's pretty amazing... he has figured out that I am, in fact, useful for something other than wrestling.

And it only took 10 months. Took his mom a lot longer to ge to the same conclusion, and I'm not entirely sure she reached the right conclusion sometimes.