Here’s a transcript of a midnight exchange between #1 son and myself from a couple of days ago.

DAD: ZZZZZZZZZZZ

ANDREW (from down the hall): AAAAAAAAAH!

(DAD wakes up and goes to ANDREW’s room)

D: Andrew, what’s wrong?

A: (Wailing) AAAAAAH!

D: Did you have a bad dream?

A: (Sobbing) I want my bagel!

D: Andrew, it’s the middle of the night! You can have a bagel for breakfast in a few hours.

A: WAAAAAAAAH! I’m still hungry!

This went on for about ten minutes until Andrew abruptly threw his head back down and resumed snoring. When I got back to bed, Elise told me that Andrew’s teacher threw away his partially-eaten lunch bagel, before he had a chance to finish it. Obviously this left its mark on his psyche.

In other news, Maggie – all 7 kilos of her, as of last week’s checkup – has started crawling. She’s now agile enough to get into whatever Andrew happens to be playing with, and has developed a particular taste for his Finding Nemo-themed Go Fish cards. Let the sibling rivalry begin!

Dad’s laughter therapy project has been in the news lately; it got a mention on NPR’s Day by Day last Friday. If you go on to read the USA Today story that Luke Burbank mentions, it’s pretty easy to figure out where the reporter found his sources. Also, for those of you who know Dad, some of Luke’s characterizations are pretty laughable. Patch Adams and George Patton would mix about as well as matter and antimatter, but it makes for good radio I suppose.
At first I dismissed Dad’s media prohibition (mentioned in the NPR story) as some PA officer with a limited imagination, but I changed my mind after reading the letters that USA Today received in response to their story. It’s all too easy to dismiss laughter therapy as yet another tool for public relations. With respect to the commenters and the challenges they face, it’s all to easy to draw the wrong conclusion from such a short story. This is not a Pentagon public relations tool, it’s just one program – and more like a labor of love for Dad – that the military has for family support. Nobody expects families to laugh off the situation, but the need for stress management should be evident to everybody.

The traditional Italian sweets that my mother and grandmother make are a big part of my Christmas past and present. A couple of years ago I ran across this page [2007 update: original page gone, switched to archive version] that describes most of what my family makes. Our mustazzuoli are S-shaped, rather than the rectangles shown or the other “forme tradizionale” mentioned in the recipe. Pitta ‘mpigliata is not in the family tradition, but we do have pizelle-like press cookies (known only as “French cookies” to me) to round out the selection. Interestingly, the French cookies might be something that came to my Italian family through Balkan immigrants who also settled in southeastern Kansas. See the Little Balkans recipes section on www.armakansas.org.
These things are more than just Christmas food for me, they’re ties to my not-so-distant immigrant roots. No matter where I go, these seemingly little things remind me of where I came from.

I thought today would be just another day; go to work (no bike commute today, due to my shocking lack of appropriate equipment for icy roads), come home, eat dinner, sleep. Birthdays have been ho-hum for some time. But I forgot that three-year-olds practically live for birthdays, their own or someone else’s. I came home only slightly later than usual, and the smell of frying meatballs nearly sent me flying backwards in space and time. Andrew insisted that I have a cake, and insisted that it have a picture of a bike on it. Elise tells me that it took a while to talk him out of the candles. He was more than happy to help open my presents and even barely avoided telling me what he bought for me.
Thanks, fam…that made my day.

Dude, where’s my blog? Not sure where that month went, but here’s what’s going on now:

We spent the last few days on vacation in Colorado, visiting E’s brother and my sister. I knew we had made it to Boulder when I had the following exchange with the middle-aged couple sitting next to us in a restaurant. We had just finished lunch and Andrew was resisting a face-wiping with every fiber of his body.

Me: “Thanks, folks, the next show starts in an hour.”

Woman: “I was just telling my partner how much happier we’d all be if we were free to express our emotions like that.”

Honestly I would have been less surprised if she had started tossing cats at us…until I remembered where we were.

Andrew’s favorite part of the trip: the “food” at the Cherry Creek Mall in Denver. The mall’s play area features oversized breakfast foods as play equipment, and whomever designed that stuff is an evil genius. We made three trips in four days. Perhaps the pictures will explain better than my words can.

Thanks to Uncle Brad, Aunt Sarah and Gammy and Pop Pop for hanging out with us!

The title sentence, spoken yesterday by Elise to Andrew in her best, caring-Mom voice, encapsulated just how much fun this week has been. HFMD, described in the previous post, turned Andrew into a wailing, snot-drenched knot of misery this week. Starting Monday, he couldn’t eat much and he didn’t sleep for more than 60 minutes at a time. Of course, neither did we.
In context, the directive makes sense. We use chocolate milk as the masking agent for Tylenol, and a milkshake was an expedient choice for getting som calories into him. He turned the corner today and was able to play a little bit with Grandma and Grandpa. As I write this he’s snoozing comfortably. Maggie has not exhibited any symptoms yet, and we desperately hope it stays that way.

Looks like we have been hit with the local hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD) epidemic that recently swept through his preschool. Andrew spiked a high fever yesterday and has been pretty miserable since, though he has yet to display the characteristic palm and sole rash. So far, Maggie is not showing symptoms and we hope it stays that way. High fevers in infants usually get the full-court press from the nearest ER, which is not an experience I’m eager to undergo.
By the way, this is not to be confused with foot and mouth, which is actually worse (if you’re a cow) despite affecting fewer types of extremities. On a somewhat more random note, HFMD also lacks HMD’s menacing German name, Maul- und Klauenseuche. HFMD translates as Hand-Mund-Fu