Parenting

I’d just like to start out by saying that I’m really actually a good father. I just do dumb things sometimes.

Just this past weekend I got up early with my son and let Kami sleep in a bit. Zivio’s morning routine involves having a waffle with syrup and peanut butter on it. He sleeps hard and is hungry upon waking up. Unfortunately Dad wasn’t as fully awake as Zivio was hungry on this morning.

I made Zivio his waffle with syrup and peanut butter and he dove right in. We buy our syrup bulk at Costco (yep, you can get a gallon of maple syrup there too) and so I use a plastic squeeze bottle that you might see used for mustard or ketchup to hold smaller portions of the syrup. This allows me to heat it up in the microwave (I swear he’s not that finicky but its how I’d like to have my syrup). So there he sits at the kitchen table, chowin’ down happy as can be. He looks over and says “More syrup?” to me. “What the heck” I think “its Saturday” so I walk over and pour some more syrup on his waffle and he starts bobbing back and forth with a big grin on his face. Wow. I’m an awesome Dad.

I quickly turn into hungry Dad. And man, that waffle is looking good. I think I’ll have me some of that! So I whip up two waffles for myself (sans peanut butter), pour on the syrup and then dive in. But then something goes wrong.

You see, I’m a big lover of ribs. I had an old friend from High School (Dave Markel) give me a recipe for Hawaiian-style short ribs. The recipe is basically a bunch of soy sauce with sugar, honey and some other sweet stuff. Its quite good. Its so good, in fact, that I keep an extra bottle in the fridge for special occasions. Well, I keep it in one of those plastic squeeze bottle you might use for mustard or ketchup. Yep, that’s right. I just ate some soy sauce waffles for breakfast.

I look up, only to see my son polishing off the rest of his (soy sauce covered) waffle and saying “More?”

Kami and I are proud to annouce the birth of our daughter Anežka Ann Kveton who was born today at 11:54 AM PST here in lovely Corvallis. She weighed in at 8 lbs 12 oz and 21 inches. Mother and baby are doing wonderfully well.

It’s pretty amazing really. My son, now at the ripe old age of 14 months (as an aside, how long do I have to keep referring to his age in months?!), has this inate ability to wake up every single morning right at 6am. Now this isn’t give or take a few minutes. With eerie atomic-clock-like-accuracy this kid starts stirring when my nightstand clock blinks “6:00″ at me. So I’ve got that going for me. Which is nice.

So it’s Mother’s day today and while Kami was taking a little break today, I was taking care of Živio this afternoon when I thought it would be a great idea to let him “play” with my cell phone. Harmful radiation aside, a cell phone is perfect for a kid. They are (relatively) indestructible, they have purdy lights and lots of buttons for a kid to punch on.

Well, I have an LG VX6000 phone and I really like it. Not my favorite phone but still really good. Afterall, do I really need a camera on my phone? In any case, I digress.

So Živio is tooling around on my phone and in a matter of seconds adds a new “event” in my calendar (I didn’t know I have a calendar let alone the ability to store events in it) as well as actually call his mother’s phone. It took me a day to figure out how to take a picture.

Makes a father proud.