October 31, 2005

For those regular committed readers who have been with us from the beginning I owe you an apology.

If you will remember this time one year ago we posted some fairly gruesome pictures of our son's first October 31 Family Fun Night. I bet you thought we could never top that. Unfortunately we did and if you can believe it, the pictures are even worse and due to our state's child protective service laws I am unable to publish those photos on this site.

Lets just say that it was not uncommon to feed early Christains to the lions. David became the unwitting victim of a ferocious man eating lion named Ben. Don't be fooled by the mild mannered name. This lion was a total killer.

Trust me, you do not want to see the pictures.

On the bright side we will be holding auditions for the "New David" starting later this week. After much consideration Jason and I have decided that the "New David" needs to be as cute as the original, however he would not need to be quite as smart, clever, and free willed as the previous David was becoming. Any information or referrals are more than welcome. Open audition calls will start Friday.

Blessed are those

I guess a few weeks ago David learned how to say "bless you". I thought we made it clear that you are to say this after someone sneezes. Aparently he didn't quite catch the specifics and now he says "bless you (insert name)" after any bodily function type noise.

Me: cough
David: Bless you mommy!

Me: (blow nose)
David: Bless you mommy!

Me: (clearing throat)
David: Bless you mommy!

Sometimes he just gets into a riff and says "bless you mommie, bless you daddy, bless you nina", about a hundred times.

So this morning I am lying in bed trying very hard not to cough and failing. I turned my head into the pillow and coughed a few times. Just after I finished my sleeping child said "bless you mommy".

thank you

thank you
Originally uploaded by jandjgilbert.

I'm enjoying m&ms as I post this.

Round baby

David (mumbling, wandering about): "round, round, round"
Jason: "You spend me right round, baby, right round, like a record baby--"
Jaime: "I think he is refering to 'wheels on the bus'"
Jason: . . . (to the tune of Dead or Alive) "The wheels on the bus go right round baby, right round, like a record baby round. . ."

Ariel Sharon: "Wipe Iran off of Google."

Israeli prime minister escalates mid-east rhetoric with threat of indexcide.

In a press conference Tel Aviv, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon turned up the heated rhetoric with Iran by threatening to "De-index Iran from Google." Responding to reporters' repeated questions about his response to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's threat to "wipe Israel of the map," Sharon was derisive: "who cares about maps any more? You want to get rid of someone? Huh? Well we'll see about that. how about we wipe all references to Iran from Google searches?" he continued, referring the popular internet search engine. "How about removing all books that make any reference to Iran Google Print, all images from Google Images, all groups that contain reference to Iran from Google Groups, no Iranian products purchasable through Froogle, and yes, complete removal of Iran from Google Maps? 'Wipe Israel of the map'? Ha! By the time we are done with them, no one will even know Iran exists--or at least they won't be able to confirm it. Iran will be relegated to the obscurity of second-rate resources like Yahoo search, Alta Vista, and the Encyclopedia Britannica. Wikipedia won't even know what information is correct and what is not."

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan voice strong concern for the increased intensity in the developing war of words. "Like Iran, Israel needs to remember that they have vowed not to threaten the use of force against another state. This includes acts of information indexcide. I am dismayed that Sharon, who has otherwise been an active advocate for peace in his time as Prime Minister, would threaten these measures."

Many believe that Sharon's comments about removing Iran from all Google searches are more than empty rhetoric. Many human rights organizations have confirmed fears that the Israeli Secret police may be developing such technology. They site evidence that that a former president of Palestine cannot be confidently identified. "We know that Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas is fairly new, so someone must have held the position before him. But we can't currently confirm with our normal research methods--namely a Google search. This seems extremely suspicious."

2

Sorry it's been so long since the last post. I got a new bicycle. More about that later, but suffice to say I have been occupying my time with bicycle-related stuff rather than composing play-by-play about the boy.

David turned two this weekend, which is a great surprise to us since he is only 19 months old. Apparently he decided to simply round up. By "2" I mean willful, contrary, defiant, demanding and endlessly repetitive. A typical conversation goes like this: "morepleasemorepleasemorepleasemorepleasemorepleasemorepleasemoreplease, etc."

This was a bad weekend. One that involved Jaime giving me a pep talk about how we have gotten used to David's unusually good behavior and maybe our expectations are a little too high. I suppose she is right, but I am skeptical. He can string together three words now, so when I say "jump," "how high" should be well within his grasp.

It makes me feel terrible when I lose my patience with him. So, I spent most of the weekend feeling terrible. I know that any stranger is amazed by his level of cooperation and comprehension and he is still very charming, but he has taken to simply doing what I ask him not to just to gauge my reaction.

Enough whining. Developmental moment stories:

We were at Cabella's on Saturday. They have these display bins that are wire cages that sit on the floor and are about 36" deep, which they fill with sundry merchandise. A couple of them were filled with large pillows shaped like fish. We played with them for awhile until I got bored and moved us along to something else. David wanted to play with the fish some more, so he ran back to the display kennel and proceeded to climb up the outside. Seeing no obvious danger, I spotted him in case he slipped but didn't actually touch him. He climbed all the way up and flopped himself over the top into the pile of pillows. This would be his first vertical climb. If you have never been in Cabella's you should understand that the store is filled with more stuffed dead animals that actually exist even in nature. Our environment suffers from a lost of biodiversity and most of it is at Cabella's. Of course this is a dreamland for David.
(Loudly) "Cow!"
"No, that is a deer"
"deer! deer! deer! deer! deer! deer! deer! deer! deer! deer! deer! deer! deer! deer! deer! deer! deer! deer! deer! deer! deer! deer! deer! deer! deer! deer!" etc. as we wandered through until every deer in the store was correctly identified--approximately 3,200 of them. Of course it comes out of his mouth as "deeow," which is very very cute and charmed the wool socks with microfiber sweat-wicking lining off of every outdoorsperson in the room. They have a several enormous glass-fronted aquariums just full of fish, every single one of which David had to identify as such. There is also a turtle not to be overlooked.

Later, deer fans.

eulogy

I just got an email from the son of a member of one of the scientific associations I work with. He is notifying the association that his father has died. He ends with these lines:

He was a wonderfully talented and curious scientist. He was an even better father.

I hope that, when I die, my children will be able to describe me as wonderful in some aspect of life, and even better at fatherhood.

funny looking?

I am playing aroud with the format of this blog. If it is causing a problem for you, please let me know.

StumbleUpon this

There is something fun about David at the end of this post.

But first.

Do you want to increase the value of the time you spend on the internet 10-fold? StumbleUpon is your answer. It works like this--sign up and activate your interests from hundreds of different categories. I personally have 85 different topics of interest chosen. StumbleUpon puts a few buttons on your tool bar (may be Firefox only, I don't know). You can select "all" or one of your catagories and then hit the "StumbleUpon" button and it takes to a random site within that catagory or categories. The sites are ranked and reviewed by other users. Then you click "like it" or "not-for-me." If you like it, it bookmarks the site for you. You can write reviews, suggests sites, etc etc etc. It is one of the best things browsing tools I have found. I found it at the Firefox extensions site.

If you are not using Firefox, then Collaborative Rank is similar, I believe. It works with del.icio.us, another service that I use. Which means that I am going to have to evaluate both, determine which is best, and stick with it or I risk suffering toolbar creep.

Back to our story.

David's fun new game is to throw mommy's bathrobe over his head, completely covering himself from head to toe, and then walk around. He can just barely see through the cloth. He looks like either cousin It, ET in the ghost outfit, or a young girl learning to use her burka.

laid-off dad

Have I mentioned this before? Blogger is acting like I have. Anywho, I would like to direct your attention to a daddy blog that is becoming one of my favorites--Laid-Off Dad. Fairly humorous, insightful and generally PG13 without the fears of wondering in to AC17 areas that Dooce so often does.

Enjoy, and then return.

inertia

If you ask David to please back up, which you will have to do if you are holding anything that is interesting to him, he will simply walk backwards until he encounters an equal or greater force.

Fortunately, when he was backing towards the front porch steps, the force with which I grabbed him was equal to or greater than that of gravity.

it's just me

David is playing with the baby/dog gate when I get home. He has been told not to, so I take it away. This upsets him and he begins to cry. I ask him to go upstairs, please, so that he can play while I talk to Jaime and change clothes. He dallies at the bottom of the stairs, so I pick him up, which sends him.

When I set him down in the bedroom he is wailing and screaming with such intensity he can hardly breath and he falls slowly and dramatically to the floor where he screams and kicks his feet. Jaime and I are dutifully ignoring him, but it ain't working. Finally, she sits down in the rocking chair. He gets up and walks to her, flopping down in her lap, still sobbing. She asks him what is wrong.

Wailing, he replies, "Daaaadddddyyyyyy! (sob) Daaaaaadddddyyyy."

Walk

Walk
Originally uploaded by jandjgilbert.

David and I went for a walk this evening and I took the camera. As

usual, this image is looking glass that will transport you to a world

of images with a click of your ruby mouse (if I may mix my metaphors).