So, Christmas.

Yes, Christmas with a 10-month old is fun.  I'm still not sure why we spent so much money on presents for him, as he spent more time playing with the paper they were wrapped in than playing with the actual toys.  There is one gift in particular, though, that he did seem to quite enjoy.  His grandparents bought him a walker.  No, this isn't one of those you see gobs of when visiting a nursing home, it's a 4 wheeled device that has handle bars for him to hold on to.  It's got a cartoon-ized dinosaur head that sings and roars while my son is walking with it. It only took a few minutes to assemble the thing and replace the dead batteries that it came with (I'm sure we paid a premium on the product for it to include batteries), and then the thing was ready to go.  We stood the boy up just behind the dinosaur's head, put his hands on the handle bars and pointed him towards the larger, emptier end of the living room, and off he went.  I think we gave him a new sense of empowerment.  The look on his face told it all: a grin as big as anything, eyes shining and full of possibilities.

Then he ran into the entertainment center.

It took us a minute to get him gathered back up, turn his dino around and get him re-situated behind it, then off he went again.  This time, though, he managed to let the thing get ahead of him.  Bless his little heart, he tried to hang on and catch up, but all he managed to do was hold on to the handle bars while he fell from feet to knees then face.

Through a bit of trial and error, he got the hang of it pretty well.  He would rumble all over the living room, running over the aftermath of the traditional Christmas gift-unwrapping frenzy and the occasional toe or dog, all the while making his own baby engine noises.

Thank the Lord we've got some years before the boy gets in control of anything with any real power.

All in all, Christmas was a lot of fun.  We got new board games, the boy got tons of new toys that may or may not hold his attention more than 2 and a half minutes at a time, the wife got the coat she's been dreaming of for months, and I got a monumental pile of stuff to figure out storage for.  It's been on the horizon for a while now, but I think that the baby-invasion of my man room is imminent.

Anybody (or their husband) need a new dirty-gross-dog-hair-covered-man-room-couch to take up space in their garage/man room/basement/game-room/shed/back yard?

Another kind of Starting Out

I know that I already posted a blog about starting out, but this is a different kind of starting out.  As some of you may or may not know, I recently accepted a job offer with Catholic Health Initiatives as a Technical Service Analyst (pronounced "computer guy") at St. Vincent hospital in Little Rock.  Today was my first day.  Orientation started at 8 am, after a brief stint with the HR clinic, where I was cheerfully provided with a Tuberculosis Skin Test, a MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) update, and a flu vaccine.  I also got my picture taken for my security badge (so much worse than a driver's license photo, almost a mugshot).  Orientation was just slightly less useful than utterly useless for me, considering that 99.34% of the material covered during the orientation session was aimed at the patient care employees.  FYI, the 0.66% of material that was useful to me pertained to parking--where I can and cannot park and what happens when I park somewhere I'm not supposed to.  The most interesting part of the whole thing was how I managed to stay awake the entire time.  There wasn't even a "get-to-know-your-way-around-a-confusing-hospital" tour, and no maps provided!

Here's hoping the second day is more useful than the first.  At least there won't be any more Orientation.

I'm going to get so lost...

Starting Out

It seems like everyone is into blogging now.  My wife is blogging, my father-in-law is (was) blogging, most of the people I know from church are blogging--heck, I bet my not-quite-10-month-old son would blog if we'd let him pound and/or drool on the keyboard as much as he seems to want to.  So, in the spirit of jumping on the bandwagon, I've decided that I'll start my own little blog project.  I have a few goals in mind when I label this as a project:  I've been wanting to write more, so now I have an excuse to, I really want to see just how long I can keep up with it, and I found a website that will send me free books to post reviews on my personal blog.

I'm not saying--nor do I personally believe--that this will be the most interesting little spot in the blogosphere, but maybe I'll be able to use it to develop myself and my writing.  Oh, and for all of you who actually read it (anybody?  hello?), you might just get to learn a little more about what goes on in this ruggedly good looking head of mine.

Also, like I said, I'd like to see how long I can keep up with a blog--I've been terrible at it in the past.  With 2 LiveJournal (anybody remember that?) accounts, a MySpace page that hasn't been updated in about 4 years (I don't even remember the password to log in), and a curiously quiet Facebook account, it's not looking so good.

Wish me luck or pray for my eternal soul; mostly I ask that you enjoy!