Ethan decided he wanted to make some beautiful paintings to send to his grandparents as Christmas gifts. We thought it would be fun to share a video of the artist at work. I imagine the video of Ethan creating his masterpiece will eventually help us deflect scrutiny from 60 minutes.

My dad used to tell my brother and me that once the infrared wireless television remote control became affordable for the masses, there wasn’t any good reason to have kids around. Actually, Dad probably never really said that. But I bet he thought it.

In the twenty-first century global economy, today’s toddler has to be versatile. Waddling over to the Zenith console to turn the giant rotary dial just isn’t enough to remain competitive anymore.

Ethan talks about the moon more than anything. By a pretty wide margin, actually. His mother is waxing concern (see what I did there?) over Ethan’s latest fixation, but I’m confident he’ll grow out of it in eventually. He’s probably going through a phase. (Pause for laughter.) In the meantime, we get hourly requests to go outside to observe the moon, and story book time often consists of skimming through illustrations to point out ones in which the moon is depicted.

The last few weeks have been tough because the moon was in a phase that made it very difficult to observe, rising in the early morning hours and setting some time in the afternoon. But Ethan was in for a treat Monday night. The moon was setting over our backyard and it had some very special company. The silver crescent was paired with the planetary conjunction of Jupiter and Venus. I did my best to photograph the celestial meet-up…

Jupiter is the smaller bright dot at the top left of the frame, with Venus outshining it just below.

Here’s a photo of the conjunction taken by the pros at the Mt. Wilson Observatory down in Los Angeles, courtesy of NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day.

And here are some more photos of the conjunction, taken from around the world.

The old people got the worst of the impact, but thankfully everyone recovered fully. I got scraped up and bruised, but I wasn’t injured. The ER doctor made me get a tetanus shot, which ultimately caused me more pain and discomfort than being in the wreck.

We had been on our way to morning church services in Cheswold, and we often joked that this was God’s way of telling us, “don’t bother.” And I haven’t.

Despite being 21 months old, Ethan already has his first story about going to the emergency room on a major holiday. On Thanksgiving morning I was trying to keep Ethan busy while Danielle frantically prepared for the trip to her mother’s in the Bay Area…

“Fraw. Fraw. Fraw. Fraw. Fraw. Fraw. Fraw.”

It’s funny how Ethan has a secret language that only his mother and I can comprehend (when we’re lucky). This familiar refrain translates to “Father, I would like to play Frogger on the arcade machine now.” Frogger is his most recent obsession. Being far too short to reach the controls on the machine, he just sits right on middle of the control panel. He understands how to add credits and initiate a game. After that, his style of play is somewhat non-conformist. He has little interest in controlling the frog with the joystick. But he is endlessly fascinated by the pause button. From his perspective, having the power to move a little frog is insignificant next to the power to stop a raging torrent and a busy freeway with a single button push. So he’ll stop traffic and exclaim, “Oh no!” before un-pausing the machine a moment later and watching the cars zip by and the turtles and logs float about. This appears to give the boy great satisfaction.

Aside: When I was a wee boy we had Frogger for the Atari 2600. Even then, the game puzzled me deeply. The car part makes sense. But the top half of the game is bizarre. You’re a frog, yet water is a hazard. Growing up knowing many a frog, I can tell you that they would much rather land in the water than on a turtle. But I digress…

Dreams of a modeling career: Shattered

Normally my office is off limits to toddlers. It’s a hazardous room. There’s often equipment strewn across the floor in different stages of being built or rebuilt, and the tiny screws and parts can easily find their way into tiny mouths. But the arcade machine lives there, and Ethan demands access to it. I have no problem with this. I want Ethan to understand and appreciate the roots of video game culture. Introducing him to the classics emulated perfectly on a replica cabinet is a joy for both of us. But indulging our mutual obsession is risky. Not two seconds before he was off the arcade machine did he trip over his own feet and plant his forehead into the threaded side of a bolt protruding from my piano bench.

He was left with a bleeding, semi-circular gash just above his left eye. I would have been happy just slapping a band-aid on it and continuing with my day, but Danielle was rightly more cautious. We trotted him into town and got opinions from a gaggle of caring physicians. They agreed that gluing the wound shut may minimize the scarring, but doing so would increase the risk for infection. So, after hours of waiting and filling out forms and prodding and fussing, they slapped a band-aid on it and we continued with our day.

A fifty-dollar bandage, but at least it’s got Snoopy.

We joke that Ethan’s modeling career will be curtailed before it’s even begun. Truthfully, we’ve had more than a few folks tell us we should exploit his good looks for financial gain, and as a proud parent it’s all too easy to believe that he’s handsome enough to earn untold riches for his homely parents. But we never seriously considered doing that.

In the end, I doubt the scar will be noticeable or ugly, but we’ll have to wait and see how it heals. And if it is, I just hope it makes him look dangerous when he’s a teen. Girls like that sort of thing, right? At least I assume they do, because when I was a teen, there wasn’t anything remotely dangerous about my look and most girls I knew were quite disinterested indeed.