Canned Heat

Sam's latest hobby is getting us to put on Napoleon Dynamite so he can dance at the end with Napoleon. He will sometimes do this six times in a row. He's not even two yet, and he dances better than most adults that I know.

Woo-Hoo!

Last night Sam and I were watching the Simpsons, when he repeated the word “D’oh!” Plus, a couple of days ago, he repeated Nelson’s laugh. I’m guessing people would either find it hilariously adorable or would take it as grounds that I should not be allowed to have children. I’m betting there is no middle ground here.

Here's a picture of Sam that his grandpa took the other day. If you look in the background, there's a little picture of essentially the same thing from a year ago. I was glad to get a recent picture of him, because we haven't taken too many pictures lately.

Last night we went and fed the ducks on 1300 West. They came up and took the bread from our fingers. Sam thought that was pretty fun. We also discovered that they eat flour tortillas. And the people next to us were feeding them potato chips. I would have thought gluttony would make them a little bit picky.

Oh, the Pain!

As far as we can tell, Sam got stung by a wasp the other day. There were wasps flying around, so Katie got him away from them, but a few minutes later we saw what appeared to be a sting on his arm. The funny thing is that he didn't cry or even acknowledge that anything had happened. But he has been hitting his head on things lately to get attention, or so we thought. Maybe he's working on building up his pain tolerance. All I know is that his forhead is looking a little bit like he's a Klingon.

Alternator Ending

Yesterday at work a coworker and I were talking about cars, and he asked how our new car was doing. I told him it was running great. So, in obedience to some inscrutable cosmic force, the alternator died last night.
I'm always fascinated by the timing of such things.

And My Glare at the Red Rockets

I have been sort of dreading the Fourth of July since last year, when our neighbors kept us up until 1 a.m. with intermittent fireworks displays mostly consisting of illegal roman-candle type pieces. I wouldn’t really care about the fact that they’re illegal except that they are really loud and tend to keep anybody in the neighborhood from sleeping.

But we were pleasantly surprised when the pyrotechnics had pretty much died down by 11:30 or so. And we certainly needed a good night’s sleep. We went up Mill Creek Canyon with my family in the afternoon. My dad and I hiked up a trail to an overlook of the Salt Lake Valley while Sam played in the creek (with his mom’s supervision, of course).

Then last night Sam wanted to play with his toy called an Alphabet Pal, which is sort of a caterpillar-shaped thing that sings the ABC song and has a different letter on each foot that you can press to get the name of the letter. He just started pushing on those and then repeating the letter. It was really astonishing. I’m amazed at how fast he’s picking things up all of a sudden.

All in all, we had a pretty good day. Now if I can just survive the noise of the 24^th of July…

Let's Hear Some Chatter out There!

This is Sam.
Most of the time I'm at home is spent wrangling him. He'll be two in October and already has the attitude and energy. He loves balls, especially basketballs, and points out any basketball hoop he sees. Those of you who know me may wonder how we could be related.

Last weekend we went down to southern Utah for a family reunion and stayed with Katie's family. Sam's cousin Aiden, who is two years older than Sam, was there, so Sam got a chance to spend several days with another young child. I think this helped his motivation to speak. While we were there, he started to repeat a number of words. Thus far his volcabulary consists of such words as "hi," "no," "car keys," "daddy," "happy," and "ball."

I can't wait until he's really able to mouth off.

Two Blogs Are Better Than One

It seems silly for me to have two blogs, but I'd like to be able to keep personal entries separate from more general topics. So this blog is only likely to interest those who know me and actually have a desire to know what is going on in my life. Since little changes for me from day to day, the entries will likely be relatively infrequent, but they'll be more interesting that way.