Here we go.

Ok, silent long enough. Obama is in da house and he seems to mean business. Good. Go for it. I hope it works out ok for him and all of us. He's off to a good start.

I don't know what it is that is in Felix's food but the kid's hair grows so fast that we have to cut his bangs almost every week (it seems). He really does have a moppy head. His hair is thick, but straight, which is odd since neither one of us has straight hair.

short story

just had to share this:

This morning Felix wanted to play at taking a nap (its his new favorite game in the morning...wake up and take a nap). He pointed and said he wanted me to lay down too. SO I did, and as soon as my head hit the pillow he said, "Daddy, story!" Ah ha! It was a trap.

I turned it around on him and said, "I want a nap. You tell me a story." So he thought for a second and then said:

Little boy

jump over

rainbow.

Little doggy

jump higher

 over rainbow.

Fountain

jump that.

Felix jump that.

The end. (I added that part)

empathy

In some ways, I feel like I've become rather cold or unempathic. When it comes to death, I'm very divided. When it comes to older people, understand and feel some remorse, or at least imagine what I think that someone who is close to that person might be feeling, and feel sympathetic. But it generally doesn't affect me directly, emotionally. When my uncle died this summer, I felt bad and sad, and really I felt bad for his daughters and wife who were part of his every day life and I felt bad for my parents and their siblings who were also very close to him. But I also felt detatched from it. I didn't burst into tears because I was overcome with grief. I wrote at length about my mixed feelings regarding his death and death in general.

However, when I hear about a relative stranger, or even a fictitious instance, of a child dying, I am tremendously emotionally affected. When Andrea and I watched Benjamin Button, at the end he dies, having finished his aging process and becoming a newborn baby. Even though we followed the story and understood that it was an old man drying, the imagery was that of a baby closing its eyes and stopping breathing (I'm starting to get a little choked just writing this sentance), and both Andrea and I were just sobbing and sobbing. Today I read about the death of John Travolta and Kelly Preston's son, Jett, and again just reading about it I had a very hard time keeping from bawling outloud. It makes SENSE to me, since one of the foremost events in my life right now is raising Felix. It just brings home the notion (not sure if I heard this somewhere and I'm paraphrasing or if I'm making this up, but I think it holds true, SHOULD hold true) that once you become a parent, every child becomes your child.

And perhaps its an evolutionary mechanism, even if it clearly does not work for everyone. After all, if evryone felt this way, things would be a lot different in a lot of ways.