Category: family

Max has been on a creative tear lately. He’s been making up interesting games, songs, etc. He’s also been full of energy from dawn to dusk and not taking naps. I guess he’s really three now.

Last night, I came home from work to find Max and Jen sitting on the sunroom floor building “sand castles” out of pieces of toilet paper. Apparently, while Jen was downstairs doing laundry, Max found our stash of TP and decided he could make sand out of it. He ripped up the entire roll in the sunroom and proceeded to build things with it. When Jen came up, he hastily pointed out, “It’s sand!! I building SAND CASTLES!!!” I think he was trying to tell Jen he wasn’t being naughty, but had a reason for mutilating the roll. Jen, of course, sat down with him and started playing. When I got home, I took over with the camera. Max thought it was really cool to pick up a bunch of pieces, throw them up into the air and walk under them. We had a TP fight, made some TP origami, wore TP hats and Max stuffed a bunch of it down my shirt. Who knew TP could be so much fun?

My mom and little brother bought Max a $5 laptop last week with Windows 3.1 on it. It’s an ancient Texas Instruments with a floppy and clip-on trackball. Max loves it. It stays at mom’s house and Max plays with it when we come over.

We were over there for dinner last night. We were sitting at the table talking like we always do and Max was in the living room playing with his new favorite toy. We heard some frustrated grunting and the stomp of little feet walking towards the dining room. Max opened the door and with a sullen look on his face declared, “My computer’s dick!” Of course, we all lost it. Thankfully, Jen translated for us that his computer’s really just “sick”, but his computer being “dick” is really much funnier. I’m going to start using it in every day parlance. “How’s my computer? It’s dick!”

Think it’ll catch on?

I’m thinking that I’ll put the rest of the Halloween pics up in the new Photo Log when it’s done (like I said, hopefully this weekend). Here’s a preview. Max had already finished trick or treating when his little friend, Sam came over to take some candy. He and his little brother had the best costumes ever.

My med student little brother and his wife the accountant sent Max a lovely birthday card and little stuffed tree frog. It’s a lovely green and orange frog with big amber eyes.

Max opened the card himself, and then wouldn’t give it to us to read it to him. He wanted to read it himself. ‘Lo and behold, he did! He read the entire ten line poem Tim wrote in the card all by himself. We only had to interpret one word (which I’m blaming on Tim’s penmanship, not Max’s reading ability). It was just amazing.

After reading the car, Max opened the frog and went nuts. He loves it. We decided it needed a name and started giving Max options, Fred, George and my personal favorite, Pesto (to go along with the little British Palace Guard Heather got him on her trip to London named Basil). He looked at us after each suggestion, then looked at the frog. Then, he declared with finality, “His name is Rocketship!” He then started teaching Rocketship to blast-off and ran the poor little frog around the house. I think three is going to be a good year.

You know how you read something really great, but after a while it slowly slips away and you forget all about it? That’s happened to me and Bone. It’s this amazing comic by Jeff Smith, full of wonder, humor action and amazing characters and it just slipped out the backdoor of my mind without so much as a good-bye.

I think Max would love it… maybe for Christmas (shhhh, don’t tell him).

So, my submission to The Mirror Project was accepted. I’m really happy with the picture and how it turned out.

In other photographic news, Max’s birthday pics are up! We had a great time, and better yet, Max had a ball. We watched Monsters Inc., played around a lot and had a lot of fun. We let Max stay up late and he slept in until almost NINE this morning.

I’m still recovering…

In the spirit of documentation, here are even more pictures! As a little birthday treat, we took Max to Chuck E. Cheese. I’m not sure who had more fun.

I told you about it before, now I have photographic evidence to share. Today, my son turns three. Three years ago we were in the hospital, nervous, full of anticipation and ready to welcome him into the world. I love him more than I can say, and his mother more than I’ll ever be able to express. Happy birthday, little man!

Max got his hair cut today. Jen took him in, and in the heat of the moment had them cut off almost all his hair! He has a quarter of an inch left all around (or less). It’s really cute, but makes him look so much older! He already looks like he’s four, but the hair makes him look like he belongs in Kindergarten. Then, he opens his mouth and out comes his practically (Friday) three year-old babble and that makes it that much cuter!

Jen had a thing at church tonight, so Max and I played. We played rocketship on our bed. Max steered and provided the countdown while I provided the rumbly rocket noises, status updates and turbulence. It was hilarious. Then, we played Leap-Daddy, came downstairs and played Jak and Daxter, changed a diaper, read a story, tucked him in and came downstairs. He’s so much fun.

This is a difficult topic for me, and one that I hope I won’t talk about again for a very long time. As the anniversary approaches, I’ve been thinking more and more about how to commemorate it. I’ve decided a few things:

• I won’t be watching the “specials” on the news or any other channel.

• I won’t be going to any candlelight vigils, prayer services or sing-alongs.

• I won’t be going to the Pentagon.

It’s easy to say what I won’t be doing on Wednesday. It’s not so easy to say why, or what I will do. I think I was more affected by last year than I noticed before. We were at my parents’ house for dinner last Thursday, and we ended up talking about that day, what happened when, and where we were. I started talking about watching Aaron Brown on CNN standing on the roof of the CNN building as the towers fell behind him. I couldn’t even start talking about it. I got choked up. I’m tearing up now just writing about it. I can remember every detail of that day, down to what was on the floor of the sunroom when I came home, how empty the house seemed because Jen and Max weren’t home, and how thin our walls felt. I was scared. I live and work (the path is wide, and I live very close to work) under the approach path to Dulles Airport. Every day I see planes fly over my house and work less than 500 feet above my head. Every day since the planes started flying again, I cringe a little when a plane flies low overhead.

Memorials are built long after events are over. It doesn’t feel like a year has gone by. It feels like only a couple months, and apparently, the scab I’d grown over my feelings isn’t as thick as I thought it was. In the year since, too many things have happened connected to that day that make me ill. It started with the first commercials on TV for commemorative pins, and durable vinyl car flags (easy to install and long-lasting). It kept going with my growing distrust in our administration, and the effectiveness of our government in general. It’s gotten to the point that it’s hard to keep the events separated. It’s hard to separate the enormity of the attacks from the completely different enormity of the mess-ups, the lies and shameless profiteering.

How do I memorialize something that I haven’t been able to forget? How do I memorialize something still burned so sharply into the back of my head that I remember every little detail of that day? How can I do watch anything about that day on television without being sick with wondering who’s making money off of it?

I’ve decided that since I can’t answer those questions, and I haven’t come to terms with my own feelings on it, that I’m not going to say anything on this site on Wednesday. I haven’t decided if I’m going to take the site down, or just not post, but there won’t be any new content here. At least for this year, I’m going to spend September 11th celebrating a holiday of a religion that’s not my own. Rosh HaShana is the Jewish New Year, a time of self-examination and repentance. I don’t know what I’ll find, or what I’ll repent of. I won’t tell you that you should do what I’m doing, or think what I’m thinking. You deal with it your way; you say what you want to say. For me, I’m not going to say anything more until Max is old enough to understand, and then I’ll hopefully have something to tell him.