we're going to have to rename the blog

IMG_0991

New photos of Liam Hadid Hyatt, born June 10th, 2008 are here.

keeping regular

muffin, originally uploaded by Nabeel H.

When you find a balance between structure and choice with a kid, it can be a wonderful thing. For us, on Saturday's we wake up, he happily says goodbye to mama and we rush up the street to get to the bus "before it runs away."

As the bus comes into view he screams, "it's 72 dada, 72!" The #72 MBTA bus stops, he jumps on board, sprints to the back of the bus and hurries me to sit down to hold his hand before the bus starts going.

As an aside, the public bus system is absolutely responsible for my son's mastery of numbers above 20. Has anyone else noticed that no kids books go above 20? Isn't the whole point of inventing zero that it makes large number sets as easy to understand as small number sets? Did no one explain this to childens book authors?

Anyway, I digress. We were enjoying a happy Sunday morning in Cambridge.

When we get to Harvard Square and he climbs off the bus I always look at him and say, "you want to take the escalator up or the elevator?"

I think one of the things he really loves about these trips is that it is incredibly structured with a good set of discrete choices. It reminds me a lot of when a start-up feels right and when it feels wrong. If it is total chaos and no structure you're never sure if you are in rhythm, but once all the questions have been answered and you are smooth sailing, then it gets pretty boring.

"Elevator or Escalator?" "Muffin first or Curious George bookstore?" "Which muffin do you want?" "Which book do you want to read?" Our trips to Harvard Sq are the same basic rhythm, with a bunch of choices that he gets along the way. And it's our own private ritual for dad and son.

And then there were three

Kaden turned three not long ago, and we've just gotten the photos up on Flickr. My parents visited and got a chance to see his outgoing nature in action. He took control of the birthday party, getting games of chasing, hiding, and attack of the birthday blowouts.

"Trick or Treat Time"

Here on Standish St we are blessed with a capacity crowd on Halloween every year. It is quite a sight to see, so much so that one family I spoke to had driven 30 mins to come trick or treating on our street. So after Kaden was done with his short trip around the block collecting candy, I set him up on our front stoop to hand out the goodies to everyone.

Kaden took this responsibility very seriously, greeting nearly everyone with "Trick or Treat Time" and dutifully handed each kid their allotment. When there was no one around he would pull the hood of his bear costume up and practice his "GRRR." But make no mistake, as soon as anyone got close he would pull his hood off quickly to show that he meant serious candy-giving business.

We've got a little video and photos below. Happy Halloween everyone.



Click on the photos for a the Flickr photoset:

kaden turns two

his favorite birthday present was the bubbles.




photos here. more to come.

Today I was faced with this essay question:

We are committed to building and sustaining a diverse population. How would your family contribute to this goal?

I was not faced with answering this question because I am applying to financial aid at Harvard, or for my one child permit in China, this was the application at the local day care. They even were kind enough to suggest, "attach additional pages if necessary." Additional pages!?

I've heard a hundred times that it is tough to get kids into day care nowadays, but this is an application for Sept of 2007. This is like a college admissions test or something, are you kidding me? And personally I think asking for the IQ test at two years is stepping over the line (just kidding -- I think).

We also have a scheduled "tour" of the facility (read: secret test of the parents). What's a good question to ask a friggin' day care facility? "Umm - looks like your doing a great job keeping the snot off the walls. We were looking for a less-snotted facility, and this might be it."

And of course I'm sure at some point they'll have him come by and play with the other children so they can OBSERVE him (man that sounds ominous). It will take all of 30 seconds before they find what I consider his adorable trait of trying to conduct classes (e.g. when the teacher says its time to put the blanket back in the bag he sprints to the bag and yells "BAGBAGBAGBAG" at everyone until the blanket is properly put away).

While I see this as a nice sign of leadership abilities, this will no doubt be viewed as a dictatorial trend unbecoming of their free-loving commune of a Cambridge day-care facility.

I know you say they probably don't care that much.. but I'm telling you, these kids get tagged quick. This morning at a two-year olds birthday party we overhead chatter about another family that went like this. "We like his parents, but we didn't want to invite the biter because it would have ruined the whole party." Does his mom know he's called that? I also heard about the pincher and the pusher today. What is this, Dick Tracy mafia-tots?

Perhaps I could opt out of this whole high stakes game of day care, you say? Buck the trend and all, what could happen?

Simple, we don't get the convenient day care up the street. Instead, we get some ridiculous out of the way daycare in Boondocks, MA so that Start-up Mom gets totally stressed fighting traffic on her five hour commute to day care every morning. She's stressed out, so Kaden gets stressed, which causes him to lose his unbelievably amazing trait of quietly going to sleep (sometimes ASKING to go to sleep) at night.

Instead all this horrid bad-daycare induced stress will cause him to scream and cry incessantly at night, and so his parents will be too tired to be good parents and he will never get into the grad school of his choice and therefore will turn into a supervillain bent on the destruction of the universe (there's a dictatorial trait for you).

Anyway, as you could imagine when faced with this prospect, I wrote one hell of a tear-jerker about my family's emigration from Palestine and a roaring tribute to the benefits of exposure to international basketball students.

Welcome to the world Mr. Fawcett

Upon announcing to my wife that our friends and fellow bloggers Allen & Elaine had their baby, both she and Kaden cheered. I can't honestly expect Kaden to have understood, but at this point he is understanding so much that I half expect him to guess the name.

Today at 2:30p 2:50pm, Owen Grady Fawcett, was born.



Congrats to the parents, and to a very lucky kid. We hope to see Owen very soon, and I'm sure Kaden looks forward to playing big brother and showing him the ways of the 1.5 years older world.

This birth puts the Fawcett's clearly in the breeders category, and we are happy to have them with us. Welcome to the rollercoaster of incredible highs and sleep-deprived lows that is kid-rearing.

It is times like these that remind me of the feeling I had just after we had our kid. First, it was that unbelievably overwhelming emotion of being forever linked to this new being. Then, soon after, it is something like - "we've been tricked! the breeders made it sound all nice a cuddly, and all this thing does is crap."

I jumped any parent I could, demanding to know how they conspired to withhold information from pre-breeders about the difficulty of infants. These interchanges would always end with them saying something like "it will pass soon" and me angrily grumbling something about "the party line" and swearing never to obfuscate the horrors and joys of being a parent.

Well, I can safely say that starting this blog pretty much solved solved my non-disclosure worry, so let me also add to the happy new parents that this whole kid thing is totally rockin. We scampered around the Children's Museum today and he was a barrel of fun. My favorite moment was when, after about five minutes of working diligently, he successfully diverted the water fountain toy to spurt water all over himself, all the nearby children, the floor, and some unsuspecting parents.

But the Fawcetts are a bit of a ways from that, so in the meantime Megan and I racked our brain for the things that we found we could not do without and sent them a little care package:

- Swaddling blankets: of all the early voodoo advice we got about babies (eg do fat babies sleep better?), this one I totally bought into and have first hand knowledge of working

- Stack Up Cups (The First Years): from just watching it at an early age, to counting as he stacks them now, endless fun with tower building and destroying

- Take and Toss Learner Cups (The First Years): Kaden pretty much rejected bottles, so we started sippy cups very early and this was by far his favorite of the many many many we tried.

- Giraffe Blankie (funbath), this makes him feel less attached to us, right?

- Flipper Gripper Baby (Sassy), we ended up with a lot of Sassy products, but this one easily has the most hours on it. There were days on end where this little spinning rattle was the only thing stopping Kaden from completely losing it in his car seat.

One additional thing worth mentioning here that we left off the list but continue to use like crazy.. a humidifier. Not for it's intended use, mind you. It's not like Kaden is in danger of petrigying himself from lack of milk intake, he's thankfully gotten over that.

No, it's that a good *cheap* humidifier makes a lot of noise that provides a great cover for the fact that we do, in fact, stay up later than our kid and are not allowed to put him in a sound proofed outhouse. Huge loud fan = cavorting parents not worried about an errant laugh leading to twenty minutes of rocking a four month old back to sleep.

PS - since I know how music-focused the Fawcett's are, it is serendipitous that I just read yesterday via BoingBoing about the lullaby cover songs of such alt.rock standards as Radiohead and Nirvana.

PPS - Allen's firsthand account is now online here