Yeah, it really is about the kids.

This one isn't for the squeamish. I'm serious here.  Off colour humour follows. You've been warned. I'll even insert a break here, so I don't feel guilty about what's to come.

We were over at CHEO today.  Just a regular visit with Nancy, the OT that sees James, to assess how he's doing with his arm.  He, of course, refuses to wear it any time we ask him to and he only infrequently puts it on himself.  On the other hand, as soon as he's in Nancy's room he's perfectly happy to put it on and do stuff with it.  Nancy tells me that's pretty common and that we shouldn't try to force him to wear it if he doesn't want to, but she had a lot of good suggestions on ways to encourage him to want to wear it. Anyway, we were there an hour and he still didn't seem to be getting tired of it yet, so we kept it on.  Then I suggested we play in this playground for a little bit rather than get in the car and go for lunch right away. He thought it was a pretty keen idea.  About ten minutes after he started telling me all about the play structure and interspersing the info-dump with "Nancy fun!" I thought to myself "I should be ...

Another couple of stories about James. I remarked about the predominance of James stories here to Christine the other day.  There's two main reasons for that.  First, I just necessarily hang out with him more than Daniel right now.  It's the nature of being three months old that you don't go very far from mama.  Second, even the times I spend with Daniel are great, but they're of the variety where I do something like blow a raspberry and he squeals and waves his hands or kicks.  He's not in the habit of surprising me or tricking me yet. source:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/etradersplace/5961199800/ That'll come; sooner than I think. Anyway, so James and I were out this morning -- it's Saturday after all -- and one of our stops was the grocery store.  He was sitting in the seat on the upper level of one of those dual-layer shopping carts, kind of like that one over on the right. During part of the expedition I was standing in the bread aisl...

Actually, when I got in to the office on Tuesday morning, about 10:30am, that was almost  the phrase I used to describe to my co-worker Mark what had been going on so far that day.  If you know me reasonably well, you probably know the phrase I actually used. That is precisely how it felt, though.  I had an overwhelming sense of "wow, that could've been so  much worse!" after a completely unexpected start to the day. And it all started with James teaching me (again) that he knows more than I think he does and is better able to communicate than I think he is.  (And again, if you know me reasonably well, you know  what I think of his ability to communicate and his ability to surprise me.) "Good morning, James!  Did you sleep okay?"  "Daddy?" "Yes James?"  "Foot broken." Thinks I:    What?  Did I just hear that?  Of course not.  One, his foot isn't broken.  Two, if it was, how would he know to describe...