Good Morning

I feel like I have just awakened from a long winter's nap. The holidays - a full three weeks for us - were wonderful and rich with family & friends, traditions old and new, and much love and consumption of chocolate and egg nog. I was also overtired, overstimulated, overly sick, all of which hampered my abilities to fully embrace it all. The Thanksgiving cold will go down in infamy for us. The whole family got it, and we are all still getting over it.

I have been too (pick an adjective - any adjective) to blog. Over the past few days, though, the ideas and inspirations for posts have returned. I'll be back in full swing shortly.

In the meantime, I'll leave you with a story from the holidays. It is copied from an email my dad sent out - sorry for the copyright infringement, Pops. In the picture you can see the gift I gave him - a t-shirt with the Pint symbol on it, and little t-shirts with the half-pint symbol for each of the three grandbabies to wear. It was a hit.

From Grandpa:

We had an event that will enter into family folklore started by young Monito. For 40 years, I’ve been throwing young babies around and their mothers (and grandmothers) have sternly admonished me that the baby would spit up. I’ve always laughed it off and rarely had any spit up on me. People seem to recall that when I hand the baby back, it promptly spits up on the mother, although I usually hold them and play for many minutes so I’m thinking this is random.

However yesterday, Monito, at six months, was gleefully jumping on my lap – having just started to really use his legs – when he spit up his occasional 4-6 ounces of partially digested milk. [Editor's note: that would be the equivalent of a full bottle. Perhaps it was closer to a couple of ounces, max. I'm sure, coming at him in 3-D, it seemed like 6 ounces to Grandpa.] Caught me square in the face, I ingested some, got some down my neck inside my shirt, and soaked up some in my lap. He was grinning all through this and the mothers and grandmothers were hooting and laughing. I gasped out for a couple of chocolate-covered liquor candies from my stocking and got the gag reflex suppressed. At the end of the event, it was more like slightly sour yogurt. The washer/dryer solved the clothing problem and a couple new shirts and sweaters were immediately pressed into service. Monito went on smiling at everyone and I got my appetite back after a few minutes.