A Parent's Pilgrimage

Anderson sitting in a chair where over 934 children have deposited either vomit, urine or feces. There's a sign, kinda like McDonald's.

Today we made the plunge. Nothing, in my mind, was more pathetic than when I was growing up then watching droves of parents driving their family on the weekend pilgrimage. I always looked at them with a bit of sorrow, but ultimately averted my eyes when they got close ... much like many look at people begging for food on the side of an on-ramp. And now I've become one of them.

We've taken Anderson to Chuck E Cheese.
We have been reduced to this.
Ugh.

For those not aware of Chuck E Cheese, this is a "restaurant" that serves pizza, sandwiches and swill that allows parents terrified to take their kids to a real restaurant the opportunity to get out of the house. The food tastes terrible and you're subjected to videos of the latest children's television hits. Worse yet, some musician you've never heard is on the video monitor "reinterpreting" hit songs for kids, forever ruining the song. Oh ... and some idiot - likely on some work release from prison - dressed as a hideous rodent runs around and scares your kids. But nobody else wants you and your kid in their restaurant, so you go there.

But we were there and here's a picture which shows Anderson with the large ugly rodent.

The three of us with some dude who has lost all self respect.

To make up for this scarring experience, we bought Anderson a kid's pool. I didn't warm up the water (bad parent) before plopping him into the pool, which Natalie quickly corrected. It's a tough world out there, Buddy. Here are some more happy pictures ...

Anderson in his cool "Matrix" wrap-around shades.

Did Annie Leibovitz do any better with "Hannah Montana"?

First swim lesson. He panicked, drank some water and felt ill. Not any worse than how we felt after eating at Chuck E Cheese.

*** Disclaimer: For those Chuck E Cheese executives who regularly visit my blog (I know you're out there) the above embellished recollections are fanciful works of art used for humorous purposes that have a long history of falling within first amendment rights. While we may not trust Justices Scalia and Thomas on anything else, they usually let people like me make fun of you like this. And please don't try to get back my business with free coupons.

That's great! Uh ... maybe not.

Watching a child's development brings mixed feelings. As Anderson first started making sounds of "Da Da" (which he says to me, Natalie and the cats ... I feel special.) I was initially pretty excited. Then I realized that with talking comes the inevitable "Why?" questions to everything and eventually, "Dad I hate you!"

Mixed blessings.

Yesterday gave another such realization. Here's the evidence.

Striving to read the latest edition of MIT's magazine

Getting closer. He "reads" these daily ... one could say that likes reading so much that he eats up all of the literature he can get his hands on.

Success!

So as you can see, Anderson's now crawling. He's pretty terrible at it and tends to run into things, but he's made that monumental developmental step. I realized this as I set down the phone - which was on speaker phone for about 20 minutes because there don't appear to be people that actually work at Air France - and Anderson started crawling toward it. I suspect he wanted to give them a piece of his mind for taking away the assigned seat he had from Paris to Prague. A long process, but he eventually made it to the phone and started eating it. Natalie was at work when this happened so I excitedly called her. The conversation went something like this:

"Honey! Are you sitting down? Ready? Anderson is crawling! He's moving all over the place! He's in his room all by himself scooting all over the place! Uh ... all by himself ... uh ... honey, let me call you back!"

So I ran back and made sure he hadn't gotten caught his neck in a cord, placed a plastic bag over his head, stuck a fork in an outlet or gotten hit by a plane. He was okay, but with mobility comes additional worry. Still, exciting nonetheless.

All is well for us here otherwise. I'm going to be buying a new car soon (A Prius to save on gas prices and because it has effective air conditioning, which my 9 year old Chevrolet Prism does not have.) We're also making decisions on how to improve our house, which has a carport without a garage and desperately needs a sunroom.

Here are some additional shots of our trip to Europe ...

Anderson with his Great Grandmother.

Anderson and me with his Natalie's uncle. Note the goats in the background. We forgot to mention when going through customs that we had been near livestock. Oops.
I think every zoo has something like this. If there were another spot, I wanted to be the bear that was chewing on a chunk of plastic.
Inside of the gardens of the Museum Rodin ... my favorite place to go in Paris. 2 euro (about $745 US dollars) gets you into the garden, where you can bring a 5 euro (about $1856) bottle of wine and 3 euros (about $1163) of cheese and have a picnic on the lawn.
Anderson at "The Gates of Hell", which was clearly sculpted before the Newark Airport was constructed. Anderson is thrilled.
"The Thinker" ... Rodin's most famous work. Anderson ponders this while I try to keep him from plummeting to the ground.

Return from the Land of Klingons

Before anything else, can anyone tell me why contact solution is so expensive? What a rip off. As I just got three 16 ounce bottles at Costco for a little more than $7, why the heck is a single 16 oz. bottle of "Renu" 8 dollars at the local supermarket. Complete ripoff. Probably owned by Exxon.

Hello again ... Jason here. Sorry it's been such a long time since my last post, but we've been busy and I've been slightly burned out on the blog. We recently took a trip to Slovakia, The Czech Republic and Paris with Anderson so he could meet his extended family. It's Anderson's first trip overseas and his first encounter with the Klingons. Klingons are Slovaks and Czechs, given that name by a friend of ours who went to our wedding in Slovakia. The harsh language that disdains vowels (neck is "krk", pronounced ironically similar to Ricardo Montalban's "Kirk ..." in Star Trek's Wrath of Khan) makes it sound like the guttural sounds that Klingon's made on Star Trek.

Montalban as Khan ... pretty ripped for an old dude from Fantasy Island.

It's pathetic when you know enough about Star Trek to explain a reference to it.

Still, we went on a trip and didn't get deported to Guantanamo Bay on the way home, so it was success. Anderson did well and got to meet a lot of his Klingo ... er, Slovak relatives. We had great weather and realized that American money has the value of toilet paper in Europe. Good times.

Here are some pictures with some explanations (changed from Natalie's blog, which is monitored by Klingons ...)

First Night in Prague before an 11 hour drive to Stara Lubovna (translation: small Klingon village) for Natalie's cousin Veronica's wedding. Natalie's faking a smile, as she is exhausted from Continental Airlines wonderful flight. Funny, from Houston to Paris (9 hours of fun in the skies) we received a meal that was the quality of mid-level dog food. We took a 90 minute flight from Paris to Prague and we got served a great meal. Lesson learned. We will fly Air France whenever possible ...

Natalie and Anderson inside a castle outside of Stara Lubovna, near the High Tatra mountains in Eastern Slovakia. This is a defensive outpost against the Romulans, I believe.

Natalie, Anderson and the happy couple, dressed in disguise to cloak their Klingon weapons. Thankfully we left before they could recruit Anderson into the Klingon army.

Natalie, Anderson and his great grandmother! (I was going to put "The high priestess of the Klingon empire, but somehow that didn't seem right. Damn ... I hate when I start developing a conscience.)

Anderson and his great grandmother ... (Mmmpfh ... Control, Jason. Control.)

He loves his relatives, but he knows who feeds him. This was taken at Natalie's grandmother's home. Great family and I actually like everyone, but if I let Natalie know that we'd have stayed forever and not gone to the zoo.

The 3 of us in front of Bojnice Castle in Slovakia, where Natalie and I were married ... (sort of.) Still have some friends who are ticked off about that one. Regardless, this is a shot from the Bojnice Zoo, which is a surprisingly large zoo for such a small town. Not like an American zoo, you see different habitat techniques. For instance, until I went to the Bojnice Zoo I had no idea that typical bear behavior involves gnawing on large chunks of plastic. I also didn't know that monkeys like to read magazines. You learn something every day.

Anderson and I check out the plaza in Prague, where we went after leaving Slovakia. This was about 800 meters from our hotel, which had 3 adult video/book shops near it. Somehow Natalie didn't want Anderson and I to take a field trip.

In front of the National Museum in Prague. 6 attempts to have Anderson look at the camera instead of the water fountain. All attempts failed. This is as close as we got. In retrospect, there may have been an adult bookstore to Anderson's right.

Anderson and I in the main castle in Prague. Anderson is happy because he didn't have to cart himself up the hundreds of steps leading to the castle. While you can't appreciate it, I'm drenched in sweat. This was right after Natalie and I changed his diaper in an archway after a monumental blowout in Prague's old town. Natalie was yelled at by an old Klingon woman for trying to dispose of his diaper in a pay restroom. I guess Klingons don't make waste products. He's about to meet a Klingon guard ...

The guard, obviously not appreciating Anderson's attention. He shouldn't wear shiny things on his shoulder if he doesn't want them to be touched ...

And a close up ... too good of a picture not to post. While Anderson seems very photogenic, keep in mind that we took over 400 pictures during this trip. Law of averages, but he is a cute kid.

Anderson and Natalie in the park overlooking Prague ... no heavy odor of cigarettes there (just horrible in the city ... the air is heavy with smoke even outdoors.) This was my favorite part of Prague because it was actually pretty quiet.

Paris and the Eiffel Tower. We took over 50 pictures here to get a perfect shot. While these aren't perfect, they're pretty good. We walked for an hour to get to the Eiffel Tower as our hotel was overbooked and bumped us to a hotel in the middle of nowhere. Something about a large foreign delegation deciding to stay longer, which the hotel "could not refuse". Our compensation? So far, breakfast. I'm still working on getting free lodging for our next trip.

Anderson grabs anything with writing on it ... including any map I tried to read. We're walking through streets near Notre Dame just before stopping to eat sushi. Anderson, shortly after this picture, fell asleep throughout our meal. The horror of the waiters at seeing him is only slightly less than that of the people sitting next to him on the plane. Nothing like a 9 hour flight next to an infant.
Currently the best way to get him to quit crying is to give him pamphlets. Hours of entertainment. He opens them, closes them and chews on them. And it's a lot cheaper than Baby Einstein.

I'll post again in the next few days with more stuff.