We had the Christmas gathering for my dad’s side of the family yesterday. There are eight cousins five years old and younger now on that side of the family with two more on the way – the basement turned into a sort of toddler mosh pit:

One of the funnier things that happened yesterday was that my nephew Gavin was wrestling with my niece Megan, who suddenly closed her eyes and went limp. I asked “Megan, are you ok?” and Gavin replied “She’s ok. She’s not really dead.”

My grandma Anna was an excellent cook and whether through her example or her genes this side of the family always rocks for Christmas dinner. All my female cousins except the youngest one have kids now, and one by one we each trickled into the kitchen and sat down around the kitchen table. When we noticed we were a complete set we started to plot – “Ok, let’s not break ranks. They have their dads, they have their grandparents, the numbers are in our favor here…”

Finally, because how could I not include this, here’s a picture Julian took of my cousin Bianti with a hula-hoop:

Gizmism
Candy: Do fish swim in the air?
Griffin: No, in water!
Candy: Does Griffin swim in the air?
Griffin: No, in water!
Candy: Does Griffin swim like a fish?
Griffin: Noooooo, like a mermaid!

I love the age Griffin is at right now. Once he could mostly talk I thought “Ok, we’ve arrived” and it sort of surprises me that he still keeps changing and learning and growing.

Just recently he’s started to do a lot more pretend play. He sometimes watches The Upside Down Show and he’s invented two different games that are inspired by it. We have the “remote” game where he points a pretend remote control at himself or at us and announces an activity, like “Jump button!” “Stop button!” “Run button!” “Spin button!” He also has the “room” game where he’ll go into a room and announce “Sticky room!” and then pretend to be stuck to the floor, the wall, the door, and expend a great amount of energy to get himself unstuck. He’ll also announce “foggy room”. I’ve been trying to add more rooms to the game but whenever I make a suggestion he says “Nooooo” in the “That’s so silly!” voice.

He’s also developed a sense of humor. He’ll be singing a song and then replace a word like “Twinkle, twinkle little …. kitty!” And then he’ll laugh like that’s the funniest thing ever. He’s also big on tickling us and being tickled, he requests a game of “tickle monster” at least once a day.

Yesterday I took the Red Cross Community CPR and first aid course. This has been on my to-do list since Griffin was born, but never made it far enough up the list to spend an entire Saturday on it. A few months ago a friend had a serious choking scare with her daughter which prompted me to finally sign up. To my friend who I’m pretty sure reads this blog – thank you for sharing that story. I know I’m not the only one who signed up for a CPR class immediately after hearing it.

I was talking with Griffin’s babysitter on Friday about the class and she asked if it would be scary to think about all the different things that could happen. As I was explaining to her why it wouldn’t be scary I realized some parts of my childhood I had taken for granted probably aren’t that common.

For as long as I can remember my parents have been Emergency Medical Technicians. In rural areas it takes a long time for an ambulance to arrive, so local people often form volunteer “First Response” teams to get to a scene where someone is hurt or sick and start providing care as soon as possible. When we were growing up the plectron at our house would go off every night at 6:00 for a test. At least weekly the plectron would go off for real and my parents would go rushing out of the house to try to save somebody.

Another feature of our childhood was “mock runs” where the EMS team would stage a disaster and then practise responding to it. We’d be painted up with fake blood and told what symptoms we were supposed to be acting out. I remember the “school bus crash” and the “gas leak” mock runs in particular.

On a regular basis my parents dealt with things like whether it’s ethical to try to revive someone who has died in the last stages of cancer. It would also sometimes happen that somebody would get hurt and then call our house instead of calling 911, I remember this happening one time with a farmer who had cut through an artery in his leg.

You’d think being around this I would have learned a lot about first aid, but really, no. I had complete confidence that my parents could handle anything that could possibly come up. It rubbed off most on my youngest sister, she became trained as an EMT when she was 16 years old and is now a nurse.

I think I’ve mentioned this before here, but my parents have an insane amount of energy and they volunteer a lot of it. In addition to being a volunteer EMT at one point in time my dad was also the volunteer mayor and the volunteer fire chief. We hosted Thanksgiving dinner at our house this year and my parents arrived slightly late because my dad had been out the whole night before fighting a house fire. My mom organizes the “Santa’s Elves” program every year to get food and gifts to people in the community that are having a hard time. And I’m sure they do more, and they’ve been doing all of this for so long I just take it for granted. It’s like having superheroes for parents.

“A tiny glimpse” is a nifty little slideshow about a nifty big universe.

Candy asked Griffin yesterday if he knew how he hurt his cheek. He responded “Yeah, bedroom”. When asked what he was doing, he said “Tickle monster”. I was surprised that he’s so aware of the fine details of traumatic events days prior.

One of the downsides, aside from injury potential, of playing tickle monster amongst the bed covers is that when it’s time for bed, well… isn’t it also time for tickle monster? Tonight he pointed at my hand and asked, “tickle monster?”. “No, that’s my hand”. He found the other hand, “tickle monster?”. How can I say no?

Later, Griffin was standing up, towering over his parents with bah (pacifier) in hand. He threw down the gauntlet (bah), looked at one hand and counted, “One.”, then his 2nd hand, “Two.”, and suddenly dropped to his knees tickling me profusely (and effectively). This had us both rolling in laughter, as I feebly attempted to defend myself (I’m extremely ticklish, and not at all keen that Griffin’s turned the tables). Having finished me off, he moved on to Candy, tickling away madly.

During our wanderings last weekend I left my cell phone in a little restaurant in Mineral Point. The people at the restaurant were nice enough to track down a charger for it, charge it up, and then call the number programmed into “Home” to let me know where it was. So, this past weekend we planned another trip to Mineral Point to pick it up.

Mineral Point is a little town not far from where I grew up. There was a lead mining boom in the 1830s and miners from Cornwall settled in the the area and built some really beautiful timber and stone houses. Since we’d be in the area anyway I thought it would be fun to pay a visit to Pendarvis, which is a restored group of these houses. I looked up the web site to see what the hours were and started reading about the history of the houses.

In the 1930s most of the houses were in disrepair and people had begun to tear them down for materials. Then a man named Robert Neal and another man named Edgar Hellum restored one house, and then another. To fund their work they started a restaurant, and they continued restoring houses for 35 years. As I was reading this story it slowly dawned on me so I did another search and yes, Robert Neal and Edgar Hellum are featured in a book called A Passion to Preserve – Gay Men as Keepers of Culture. Now, imagine you’re a gay man in rural Wisconsin. In the 1930s. There’s no way that could have been easy. And what did they do? They saved an entire town.

I’m upset that this isn’t mentioned anywhere on the official history site. It’s so screwed up that in the last election in Wisconsin we voted to re-elect our awesome lesbian Congresswoman at the same time we voted to ban gay marriage. Where is our sense of fairness and gratitude?

I walked past my old elementary school, which had become the nouveau site for socio-political expression. Last week’s rally saw women of color raising awareness of racial issues. This time around were two gay Muslim-Arabic men attracting a crowd as they eloquently ranted against the evils of the west, though in doing so they were actually protesting against the intolerance of Islam towards homosexuals. Further up the road, the asphalt in the street was buckling. I could see underneath a colorful dance of blue flames and orange glowing tar. Should I alert the neighbors to commotion brewing below? No, I pressed onwards and began to ascend the mountainside. Climbing ever higher along the cliffs towards the peaks, I noticed a geological band below, running horizontally along the mountain range. It was a layer of moisture rich sediment, and was now hissing steam out along the entire band. The realization sunk in- the entire place was about to go up in an epic volcanic eruption. And now I was likely trapped above the blast line. I popped into an observation tower to warn the lab workers of the impending chaos, but they shrugged it off as lunacy. So I went back to ponder my escape. It was too late to press forward across the peaks, as the hissing band of sediment extended as far along the range as I could see. The ground shook violently as I tried to zig-zag my way down through crumbling rock and blasting boulders. Even if I succeeded in getting off the mountain before it finally blew its top, would I be able to outrun the resulting blast?

Then I woke up.

Sometimes when I fall into a snore at night, Candy will tap my shoulder or try and roll me over a bit. Griffin takes a more direct approach. He pokes his fingers in my mouth to plug the noisy gap.

Last night me ‘n’ Griffin were playing a hearty game of tickle monster in and out of the covers and piles of pillows on the bed. It ended when a leap onto the bed went slightly astray and he instead dove diagonally into the wall. His cheek raized against the rough spackling and left a faint bloody patch larger than a quarter. It’s a very shallow abrasion, but might scab up, just in time for holiday pictures on Wednesday.

The experiment to phase out the pacifier only lasted a few days. What seemed like a good idea and incremental progression quickly turned into a disaster and monumental regression in all the sleep progress we’ve made. Perhaps later we can try plucking out the pacifier once he’s sleeping, to try and train his body to sleep without it and reduce the overall time spent rearranging his teeth.

Friday was our 1st big snow fall of the year. We both worked from home. After work we all went out to play in the snow. Griffin took to it in style, flinging himself into the air for the cameras. This progressed to advanced twirling dives for dramatic flair.

Saturday we hit up a cookie decorating party in town, followed by a trial run with a new babysitter so we could catch Casino Royale. Candy quite liked it, while a certain plot twist along the way seemed completely out of place, out of character, and left me befuddled to the point I’d only give the movie a so-so rating. Sadly, Griffin got quite scared while we were out, and my phone didn’t vibrate 15 minutes into the movie when the sitter called. He was pretty traumatized by the time we got back.

Today we returned to Mineral Point to retrieve a lost cell phone from last week. Mineral Spirts actually scoped out a charger, powered up the phone and called us to let us know it was safe until we could rescue it. We tried to tour the town, but it was basically shut down for the day. We did poke into Foundry Books to get a nice history book on the town, and a Peter Pan book for Griffin.

On the subject of cell phones, last year we switched to Virgin’s prepaid service. You can pick up a phone essentially for free, feed it $90 to keep it active a year, and then burn through that balance at $0.18/minute. For how little we use the phone, it dropped our cost to under $10/month.