I realized that I don’t have any pictures of my Family on here, well here is a picture of Ethan, My Wife, and Aiden. This photo was taken by the incredible Mike and Rejana Krause of BluDoor Studios, more photos can be seen on their blog here: http://bludoorstudios.com/blog/2008/05/29/ethan-aiden-brothers/
The Fam
Last Monday, I stopped by Walmart during my lunch break on a hunch. It was the first shipping day after black Friday, and it takes a while to process a truck. I managed the warehouse for a Compusa for a while when I was in college, and that was our schedule. Well, I made my way back to the electronics department and after about 5 minutes, they rolled out a cart from the warehouse with about 16 Wiis on it. All week, Jessica and I have had fun playing it. I didn’t want to buy a game system that we couldn’t enjoy as a family and after testing the Wii out a couple of times, both Jessica and I were hooked. So the last couple of nights, I have started an experiment. Is it possible to teach a 2 year old to play Wii Golf. It is. Ethan actually likes it. Tonight, him and I played through 9 holes. By the end of it, he was wacking the ball at full force. Most of the time, when he is close to the green, he knocks the ball out of bounds, but he thinks it’s hilarious. “Look dad!!! I hit it into the water!!!” Now we just need to work on swinging easy. When he does sink a putt, he yells “High Five Daddy!!!” Now, I need to work on bowling and boxing, since Jessica always beats me at those.
I don’t think anyone likes being sick, but uggh. I had my first experience of Ethan getting his parents sick. Welcome to the world of parenthood has been the general concensous from friends. To make matters worse. Ethan was feeling 100% yesterday and Jessica and I were at -100%. So here we were, confined to the couch and floor, while Ethan ran around all crazy like. I felt bad, but we let the TV raise Ethan yesterday. We usually restrict TV watching to a minimum, but yesterday was an exception. Of course we had to watch some Backyardigans, no day would be complete without them. We also tried to read some books with him, but trying to focus on something for more than 5 minutes was difficult. Every single joint and muscle in my body ached. Luckily, Jessica had heard about this stuff called Zicam, so we mustered up some energy and made a trip to the store to get out of the house for a little while. That was the hardest shopping trip I have ever made. I felt bad when random people would stop us to say Hi to Ethan (common occurence when we go out) Here we were potentially infecting them. Anyways, back to the reason we went out (plus the fact that the fridge was empty). The Zicam Cold and Flu medicine worked great. Within 10-20 minutes after taking it, the soreness started to subside and my head got clearer. Now we bought the spoon verison of the medicine which is pretty gross. It’s like pouring a thick syrup into your drink and it doesn’t difuse well. So you have to slam your drink to not get sick with the consistency of the syrup. It might work better in a hot drink. But grossness aside, the stuff works awesome. Luckily Ethan took a 3 hour nap after our shopping and lunch break in the day, So I was able to get some much needed rest. Through out the day I kept changing from pants to shorts and back to pants. For about an hour I would be freezing and then I would shift to burning up. It sucked. Thankfully, when the alarm went off this morning, I felt much better. I would write more, but since the time I started to write this entry, I have had to reply to about 20 emails, 5 IMs and 3 phone calls.
Well last night I had my first experience of panic, chaos and fear as a father, related to the well being of my son. When ever Ethan and I come home together, it is a ritual. He lets Lacey out of her Kennel and runs to the back door to let them out and go with them. But it was warm and I wanted to be wearing shorts so I got him to follow me to the bathroom. As I was changing, Ethan found Jessica’s razor on the counter top. He quickly picked it up to show it to me as I ran to stop him. Unluckily, he pick it up with his thumb on the razor and it was new, so his smile of “Look dad, look what I got for you” turned into a frown and scared look of “owww, what just happened” My heart sank. I panicked more than he did, which only frightened him more. I quickly put him in our bath tub with the water running, since Ethan LOVES water. If there is water running anywhere, he wants to put his hands in the stream, so i used that to my benefit. What made me panic so much, was the flow of blood. It wasn’t slowing down and I couldn’t get a bandaid on it. Darrell, a friend at work, explained that children bleed a lot due to the child’s blood ability to clot. I found this on the internet today: “Most wounds in healthy children bleed a lot because the vessels supplying blood flow to the area are very healthy…..Even wounds as small as 2 mm on the scalp can nearly cover a shirt with blood. ” source To make matters worse, I couldn’t get a cel phone signal, so I had to go grab the home phone. On the way to get the phone, I kicked the dog bowl over (Shattering it) since my dog had pushed it out into the middle of the kitchen. I called Jessica, who got me to calm down and scrub my plan to goto the ER. My fear was that if I cut my thumb with a razor, my thumb is pretty large, so the blade can only go so deep. Well, Ethan’s thumb is much smaller, so the ratio of depth is greater. I hate needles, knifes, and blood, so this only worsened the experience. Well, I got him cleaned up and wrapped his hand in a towel to apply pressure, which is really difficult to do with a 19 month old. Jessica gave me the idea to just watch some TV to get him to sit still, so we went up stairs with a cup of milk, sat in the game room and watched Sagwa and named items in a learning book (Apple, Boat, Cat, Dog, Egg, Flowers, …) He looked pretty tired, so I picked him up and put him in his crib. I was so shaken by the whole experience that I just wanted to climb into his crib and hold him all night, but I think I am over the weight limit for that crib (or any crib for that matter). I kissed him goodnight, and turned off the light.
I watched him on the crib cam for about 10 minutes before I switched over to the VMA’s which were horrible BTW. I could write about how bad they were, but anyone who watched, already knows. The only highlight of the show was the lighting production teams use of high powered video projection to create really interesting scenes. If it wasn’t for Tivo, the whole show would have been unbareable. I blooped through the commericals, intros, outtros, thank you speeches, and “the nominees are video montages”.