On Dragons and Grattitude
Years ago, I wrote an email back from Reno Nevada saying that I had the cure for all of your problems. It wasn't money, or more hours in a day, it was perspective. At the time, I invited anyone who thought they had problems to come visit me in Reno, and hang out at "marginalization central", namely a 24 hr Wal Mart on a friday night.

Today, I found one better than that.

If there is any problem you have in life that you are having trouble overcoming, I have a quick fix for you. Visit any hospital where children are being treated, and just hang out in an area where medecine actually gets done.

Voila! Perspective.

I should note that everything is fine. Noelle had to go back for a third ultrasound, because there were some issues with the first two, but we spoke to someone who was much better at interpreting ultrasounds than the people we had been seeing in Toronto, and there is nothing to worry about.

However, while I was in the Ultrasound waiting room, a 21 month old boy was brought in for an ultrasound for a growth on his...well, let's just say a growth somewhere no little boy should ever have one.

I can not describe how heartbreaking it was when he started crying as they began just the ultrasound! Totally non-invasive, but cold gel on the nether regions nonetheless. Thank God Noelle was getting her ultrasound in another part of the ward, where she couldn't hear it.

To say nothing of the couple who came out of their meeting with the genetic counsellors with the father to be grim faced, and the woman nearly in tears.

Suddenly, the little annoying things in your life don't seem that bad, you know?

On a brighter note, it was Isaac's first time trick or treating tonight, and he was splendid. All done up in his Dragon costume, he was the hit of the street. He marched up to every door completely fearlessly, knocked on the door (ok, Dad helped with that part, but he did knock), and when the person came he said "Trick or Treat", and when they gave him candy he said "Thank you."

Of course the first time I had to remind him to say thank you.
"Say thank you, Isaac" says daddy.
"Thank you Isaac," says Isaac.

Like I said, cute beyond beleif.

So now he has a bucket of loot, and Dad has some absolutely priceless memories (to say nothing of the photos) of his little Dragon on his first Hallowe'en.

Quite the contrast from this afternoon.

I guess I don't need to belabour the point, but I guess this Hallowe'en I am way more thankful for what I have than I was at Thanksgiving.

Life is funny that way.

Two Things.
So today Noelle and I had what would be politely perceived as a "domestic disagreement." Not a dispute, just a lack of seeing eye to eye, which is actually quite uncommon over the last 15 years or so we've been together.

What is not uncommon, was that it was over housecleaning. You see, the last three or four weeks, Noelle has either been quite ill, or out of the house on cleaning day (usually Saturday), so I have taken it upon myself to "clean" the bottom floor, anyway, and often scrub the bathroom as well.

Now to those of you familiar with the way a guy "cleans", you will understand why I put the word clean in quotation marks. It seem that women (and I know I'm not the first person to say this) see dirt and untidyness that men, well, just kind of miss.

For instance, today I finished tidying the living room, swept the floor and was getting ready to start mopping, when I was brought short by Noelle who said "But we're not finished cleaning the top half of the room." So I looked around, and things looked pretty good. Big mistake. Then I made a bigger mistake, and said "Why, what's left to do?"

Within minutes, I had a pretty clear picture of the piles of toys, the clean laundry, and the paint roller...yes, the paint roller, underneath the chair, all of which I had missed.

Now I used to accuse Noelle of being able to see dirt on a subatomic level. Dirt Quarks, if you will. But even I have to admit that a bright red paint roller underneath the chair I had just swept under (and keep in mind this is one of those Ikea bent wood armchairs, so it's not like it's hard to see underneath...it's a matter of standing about four feet back and looking down), should have been a little more apparent.

So to simplify the whole cleaning process, I shut my mouth, and went to Ikea to buy her presents. Specifically a bed. We have been married for 13 years, and this is the first time we have ever owned a Headboard and Footboard for our bed. Getting it home strapped to the top of Evanrude (our hatchback) in 65 km/hr winds was an adventure. Suffice it to say that the twine they give away at the Ikea loading area is very very strong. Strong enough to keep a virtual wing attached to the top of a small bubble shaped car at about 50 km/hr with a vicious cross wind. 'nuff said.

The second thing, is that Isaac it seems, has gotten a wee bit...well... bossy. We are now at the point that if he doesn't say please and ask nicely, he doesn't get what he wants at all, which usually precipitates a fiesta of howling, which results in him being even less likely to get parental buy in to his initial idea. So we are aware that everything can become a war, and we manage expectations accordingly.

However in the car today, on the way to buy a pumpkin, I turned right in a responsible way, and from the back seat I hear "No, daddy no do that!"
"Do what?"
"No do that!"
So I ignore it and keep going. Then few hundred metres up, I change lanes, again in a responsible way, and he shouts "Daddy, NO DO THAT!"
"Do WHAT?" demand Mom and Dad in unison.
"Daddy no make ticking noise."

That's right, he was telling me how to drive.

It turns out that he found the turn signal indicator annoying, and he wanted me to stop using it. We explained at some length that it was the proper thing to do to signal your turns in advance, and he stopped yelling at me about it, but I don't think he was convinced.

Now I have visions of him ending up as a cabbie on the Danforth 20 years from now. God knows most of them have never even heard of a turn signal; he'd fit right in.

Finally, I was reminded this evening of why we named him Isaac. The word in Hebrew means "laughter", which is what Sarah broke into when the angel informed her that she was pregnant at the ripe old age of about 95.

We were in the tub this evening, and he was soaking merrily away, when I took his little caterpiller bath toy, put it on the side of the tub and started singing...
"You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy, when skies are WHAAAA!" and threw the caterpillar into the tub.

Typical daddy game, I know.

Anyway, he thought this was the funniest thing since Cosby doing Noah, and made me repeat it about 40 more times. I eventually ran out of songs, and had to put a halt to it.

So if nothing else, the kid does redeem himself with this wicked sounding throaty cackle/giggle which for the life of me I have no idea where he got it from :), which he uses fairly frequently.

So I guess parenting, as in all things, is all about appreciating the little things.

End Times
So I've found a way to make watching the news more interesting. Just as the opening sequence comes on, I open up my Bible to the book of Revelations, and just check things off as they go!

But if you really want a cast-in-stone sign that the end of the world is nigh, I give you:
http://mobilebusiness.sprint.com/blackberry7130eand8703e/?id9=Ad_mobile_business_blackberry8703e_office_road_trip

What else can I say? Other than "It's the end of the world, as we know it, and I feel fine..."

On Bunnies, and Choking.
So for several weeks now, Isaac has been on us to "go see animals." We live quite a long way from the Toronto Zoo, which is quite expensive, and takes at least two days to see all of. Challenging when one is potty training a toddler.

We do however, live at the heart of Southern Ontario's lively agricultural industry, so we took him to Andrew's Scenic Acres U-Pick, to look at the 'animals.'

Well, the animals in question were a large number of bunnies, a small flock of very majestic looking hens and roosters running around a big fenced in area with two longsuffering goats. I should mention that the bunnies were in hutches seperate from the other animals.

So we got to the farm, and after the obligatory washroom break, headed for the animals. Isaac saw the bunnies, and went nuts. Then he discovered (thanks to Mom) that if you push a blade of grass into the hutch, the bunny will eat it quite excitedly.

Well this was fine for a few minutes, and then we went to check out the chickens and rooster, but Isaac "wanna see bunnies?" all the time, so we went back.

Then the keeper of the bunnies showed up, lifted one out so Isaac could pet her, and started feeding them all lush juicy clover. Bunny heaven. Isaac managed to aquire some of the clover that had fallen, and you can now imagine how the rest of the afternoon turned out.

Yes, so Isaac spent the afternoon going too and fro from the hutches, and playing on the occasional playground toy, and asking at every available opportunity "see bunnies?" It was quite a day.

We were all exhausted, piled into the car, and were at a stop light in Milton, when Isaac starts choking. Normally he figures it out after a few seconds, but this time he didn't. He kept choking worse and worse.

So I pop on the Hazard Lights, dive out of the car, wrestle him out of the car seat, and start pounding on his back in the middle of the road. It soon dislodged, and he started howling, so Noelle had to get out and take him, while I backed the car into a nearby gas station.

Several observations spring from this.
1. The other drivers were really good. If this had been downtown Toronto, I might have gotten bad looks, or even honking as people went around me, but everybody here was pretty cool. Realized I had a bit of an emergency on my hands, and calmly went around us.

2. Once I got Isaac out of the car, I wasn't exactly sure what the best procedure was for getting an object dislodged from a toddler's windpipe. I started whapping him on the back, but not in the way that I later found out is highly reccomended by the American Red Cross.

So if you are curious, go here: http://www.babycenter.com/general/todfirstaid/toddler/toddlerills/11241.html
and look up what to do if you are around a choking toddler. It's about a three minute read.

3. Isaac doesn't get yogurt covered raisins while riding in the car anymore. Normally they're not a problem, but if we had been on the 401 doing 120 km an hour, it would have been a much bigger issue for us to pull over.

So that's The Laddies Home Journal public service message for the week. Enjoy.

And no, we're not buying him a bunny. Not for a while anyway. I heard somewhere they make really wierd noises.

So no. No bunnies.

Ballistic Birthday.
So for those of you in the know, it was Isaac's 2nd birthday on Sunday. What a day.

We did not, for the record, throw a party. I know the general rule is invite one kid for each year of the birthday, and that would have meant two kids for his second. We were kind of feeling a little guilty about it, but there aren't that many kids Isaac's age he is close to, other than at the day home whom he sees all the time anyway.

In retrospect, however, our "Allen only" birthday was a good decision.

For one, the potty training he had so carefully (nearly) mastered over the previous week and two days, went, well, went totally out the window. At one point while opening presents, he just stopped announcing that he needed to pee at all, so that his annoying parental units would not swoop him away from his mounds of loot, and stick him on the potty.

Far easier, he thought, to continue opening the presents, and just let the chips (or drops, as it were) fall where they may. So rubber boots may have been a better choice then slippers on Sunday, and we went through every pair of pants and underwear he owns (9 pairs and counting).

Eclipsing his Hoover Dam impression though, was the fun he had opening his presents. We really didn't go over the top, but I swear, at one point I felt guilty about all the stuff he got. He opened one or two things, and he would have been totally fine with that. In fact the first one he opened was a kids casette player, and all he wanted to do was play that. He would have been happy if that was all he had received.

But no, he had lots more stuff to open, and in the end, art supplies ruled the day. Including the easel (from Nana and Grandad), and a huge tub of Play Doh stuff.

The one toy that we got for Isaac that I think I enjoy more than he does, is the Little People Pirate Ship. Yes, a real pirate ship. It has sails, and a place for the pirates to sleep (it comes with two of them) a crow's nest, and a parrot on a perch, that when you press the parrot down, it plays pirate music, and ship's bells ringing, and simulates the sound of a cannon ball shooting. Yes, it has a cannon on the front that fires a little plastic ball.

That' right, ultra pacifist Jason - the erstwhile student of Ghandi and Tolstoy, managed to aquire the only Fisher Price Little People toy in the entire selection that includes a weapon. Sheesh. Although for the record, Noelle picked it out, cause it was on sale, at "Toys R Bedlam". So what can you do?

It's funny how all your noble ideas of child rearing (go back in time and ask me three years ago if my child would spend nearly an hour a day (or so) glued to Treehouse TV. I would have punched you) all go out the window when faced with the reality of an extremely bright little boy who bores very easily, and is prone to acts of petty vandalism, and displays of phenomenal tantrum when he doesn't get his way.

In fact today we wouldn't give him his juice before dinner (cause he drinks the whole cup in one gulp and then it spoils his dinner), and he proceeded to howl until he was pink in the face, and slap the table with his hands. It was quite the display. We have contacted the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences about a nomination form.

One more story.
We bought Isaac a "big boy bed" for his birthday (a record five words that start with b in one sentance. Look upon my works and despair!!), and he has slept in it a total of once since then. It was when Noelle went upstairs to put him down for his nap on his Birthday, and he started squirming around and giggling. Then he turns to Noelle and says "I have idea. Chase Mommy on bed?" Clear as day. To which Noelle responds "I have a better idea. Baby take nap." And that was that. Of course when I went to wake him up two hours later, he leaned back in the bed, fell back and conked his head on the wall.

He hasn't slept in it since.

What can you do?

Complications
I have decided that the process of having a family, is the process of your life (as parents) getting increasingly complicated.

First, you're single. You drink the milk from the carton, and wear your underwear around the house. When it's dirty, you take it off and leave it there.

Then you get married, and things get a little complicated. You need to use a glass or cup, and you discover the value of dressing gowns and laundry hampers.

Then some time may go by (i.e. 11 years), and you have a kid. Then things get complicated. First there's the pregnancy, and you have to decide names, decorating schemes, and all the million or so details that happen with your first baby.

Then the delivery comes, and you pray to God there are no complications, but it's complicated anyway.

So you take the baby home, he looks at you, you look at him, and somewhere in the dark recesses of your mind, a little voice says "Things are about to get complicated."

But it's not bad at first. The baby is hungry, you feed it. It's wet (or worse) you change it. And for the first 6 months or so, when you put it down, it generally stays there.

Then it learns how to crawl, and things get complicated.

You have to "babyproof", and take all the books off of the bottom two shelves (with 5 bookcases, that's an undertaking), so the baby doesn't injure the baby's self in a rain of hardcover Can Lit.

But then you get used to it, and it's ok.

Then the baby learns how to walk, and it starts to get really complicated.

Suddenly all your normal babyproofing is useless, and the climbing starts, and you have to anchor the aforementioned 5 bookcases to the wall, lest an unfortunate crushing incident occur.

Then, so help you God, the baby learns how to talk. If you thought things were complicated before, it's a whole new ballgame now. Not to mention that shortly after talking comes "talking back." Which for Isaac is just starting to get rolling. He now knows what he wants, and eating normal meals with his parents, performing certain bodily functions in a timely way, and a variety of other safety related things, are not it. Talking babies are complicated.

Then, all of a sudden, your brain shuts off, and you stop thinking about how complicated things are. You start thinking how wonderful it was when the complicator used to coo alot, or sleep on your chest, and you enter into the most complicating/complicated process yet. You have another.

That's when things start to get complicated. Beyond belief.

Despite all of this, however, it occurs to me that (and if you read my lottery post a few months ago, this will make more sense) that the level of joy a person experiences, is directly proportional to how much they had to overcome in order to get it.

For instance, if you are born in a family of millionaires, and you inherit a multi million dollar fortune, chances are, you're going to take it somewhat for granted. But if you come from the "hood", and fight and claw and scrape your way to your first Million, then you are going to savour every Pina Collada like it was Gold Juice.

That's why I think the joys of parenting are so intense. Because the struggles are like nothing you ever experienced when you were just a couple, to say nothing of how easy things were when you were single.

Don't even talk to me about calculating parental leave.

Trainer
So I'm a trainer. It's what I do. Specifically, I take people who may have never sold so much as a Chef's Special in their lives, and teach them how to sell a promotional product over the phone, to someone they are never going to meet face to face - 50 times a day, in the hopes that 2 of them will say yes.

That's my job.

I have taken people with literally no sales experience, and helped them to become pretty good salespeople. And I have taken people who used to think they were pretty good sales people (they weren't, they were good closers, and that's a whole different thing) and helped them take a step to an entirely new level.

So then why is it so bloody hard to train my two year old to say "Daddy, I need to use the potty now," vs. "Daddy, I'm peeing!"

At which point the inevitable headlong rush to the potty ensues, and if he gets there without peeing his pants, he gets a smartie. It's going to take a long time to finish the box.

I find myself wondering what good is all of my knowledge and training about, well, training - how to motivate, communicate and convince, if I can't convince a 2 year old that he is quite capable of running the 15 or so feet to the potty and sitting down and peeing.

We've made it easy for him. Half the time he's not even wearing pants. This has resulted in two distinct and somewhat disturbing phenomena. They are:

1. The Land Mine Puddle. At first we thought his sippy cup must have sprung a leak. No. It's not the cup. It's the boy. So we now have a box of kleenex in every room, and engage in more frequent hand washing than a MacDonalds health and safety inspector.

2. The somewhat bizarre phenomenon where he is watching TV in front of me, and chooses to bend over the Ottoman and sprawl out over it, resulting in what I have come to call "Moon over Dora the Explorer."

Now don't get me wrong, Dora is a very educational show. It teaches kids how to celebrate their victories, and that stopping a robbery in progress is as easy as shouting "No Swiping!" at the top of your lungs. And I know the writers have more developmental psychologists on board then the Durham District School Board, but let's face it, the show irritates me.

It's not so much her high pitched irritating voice. Or said voice in combination with the near hysterical tone she adopts for every single episode. Or the fact that every episode features a nearly identical quest. It's really a combination of all these things with the fact that Isaac loves it, so I'm exposed to it several times a week, most of which occur on Sunday Afternoon.

So I guess what I'm saying is that he should be mooning Dora the explorer. Not me.

But I digress.

So we are slowly but surely teaching him how to use the potty. It's actually going better than you might think. It's day 3 and already he is getting to the potty more often than not. A disturbing spanner in the works appeared this evening, however, when he ran over and peed by himself, and then wandered off back to play with his books. No request (demand) for a smartie at all. In fact the one I made a big show of handing him is still sitting on the bookshelf where he left it.

So smarties are passe, and now we are going to need a new bribe, unless of course Isaac has just decided that now he wants to use the potty every time and the smarties are therefore uneccessary.

Who knows, the kid's full of surprises.

"Imagine a one grape economy"
So when Noelle and I were first dating, I was pursuing a degree in Political Science (4.5 years of learning how to bullshit, has clearly stood me in good stead), and Noelle was studying a double major in Political Science and Economics. Several "cute" phrases survive from that time.

These include the famous "Love is a barter economy", and the "Imagine a one product economy." One day a friend of mine (who's name now totally escapes me) was complaining about the Intro to Economics course he was taking (cause he needed the credits), and the incredibly inane exercise the professor used to introduce some very basic topics in Economic Theory, i.e. Supply and Demand, basic curves, and so on. This exercise was "Imagine a one product economy."

It struck me as a spectacularly useless exercise, and I've been using it ever since to describe a variety of odd or futile situations.

So this evening, we began teaching Isaac the basics of Supply and Demand. Econ 101 if you will.

In our house, there is a rule. Each book only gets read three times in a row, before you have to choose a new book. This prevents both the books, and mommy and daddy's brains, from getting too tattered.

Isaac, however, has discovered a loophole. The rule only applies to one parent at a time. So he brings the book to Mommy, gets his three readings, and then careens across the floor (he's not a toddler, he's a careener) to Daddy, to get the next three. Or vice versa.

So this evening, he was just about out of readings of one of the most inane books he owns. It's called "Down at the farm." The story is blindingly dull..."Let's go look at Cow. Can you tell what colours she is?", and it's only redeeming feature, is that the images of the animals are in black and white, but when you slide the little tab, the image of the animal pulls out, and appears in colour. We bought it for him to survive a long car or plane journey somewhere, and every once in a while he latches on to it, and it becomes a favorite for a few days.

So as I said, he had exhausted three readings with Mommy, and another three with Daddy (who admittedly raced through the last one), and decided to 'give it a go' at getting another three. He goes back to Mommy and says "Read again", and Mommy says, "Bring me a grape." There was a bowl of grapes near me, so he careens back, grabs one, and careens over to Mommy and hands it to her. She eats it, and dutifully reads the book.

At this point, I imagine a one product economy. Where the only product is a service, namely reading of a book, and at this point supply is running out, but demand is still quite high. He has expended all his capital (namely goodwill and general cuteness), and now needs an influx of currency (concord grapes). Fortunately, one of his two vendors names their price, and he gets his increased supply in return for an increased cost.

So Noelle finishes reading the book and says "Bring me another grape?" It takes him a few seconds, but he figures it out, and goes and gets another one, and looks up with big blue eyes and says "Read again?" Noelle starts reading again, and then it dawns on Isaac. He has a huge pool of capital sitting on the Ottoman, and he needs to liquidate it fast. So he goes and gets the whole bowl, and plops it down beside Noelle...clearly expecting a whole bunch more readings of this literary classic.

So at the beginning of this post, I mentioned that one of the most enduring phrases of our courtship is "love is a barter economy," but it appears that this applies not only to me getting fishing weekends with Jeremy, or Noelle getting the latest Gourmet Magazine, but also extends to Isaac, and whatever he wants at the time.

I should mention that he is soon discovering that excessive whining can lead to sudden insolvency. But that's a story for another day.