Back in the saddle.

From Lucas

So, it's been almost a month since my last update and I've had several people (Roger, Karim, Barb, Mom) nagging at me to update finally. And you know what? They're right. Yes, I've been a busy little sleep-deprived beaver, but that's not a good enough reason to ignore the blog completely.

From Lucas

So, to make up for this, I'm (tentatively) committing myself to updating this blog every day from today (Tuesday) until Saturday. Then I've put my blogging commitments every Sunday in my Google Calendar (which I am also tentatively committing to keep up to date) so that you know without having to nag what's up.

From Lucas

OK. So this is going to be another Lucas post. After a partial application of the treatment (we pulled him early because of a bad respiratory illness contracted while in the hospital), Lucas has had a near-miraculous improvement. He's now walking, verging on running, like a champ (presuming, of course, that champions routinely stumble and wind up just this side of falling flat on their faces only because their parents or grandmother has cat-like reflexes combined with a sixth sense for baby stupidity). When I squint right, I still see hints of the problem that he has, but he's adapted really well once shown the way and, so far, we've seen no strong need to return him for a second round. (We may still do that, however, especially with the recent two-month-and-a-bit tripling of my salary which I'll get into in a later post.) On top of everything, Lucas has, since his treatment, been in general a whole lot more cheerful (and cheerfully destructive, which again will be highlighted in a later post).

From Lucas

And he's car-obsessed. Which again, you guessed it, will be highlighted upon in a later post.

So what will I be talking about in this post? Well, frankly, not much of anything. I thought I'd let my son talk for himself in the medium of being too damned cute for the camera.

Reboot

OK, so it's been a while. I've had a busy year with a son who's driving everybody in the family nuts. He should be VERY thankful that he's cute because there are time when this has been the only thing saving him....

How cute is he? Just follow the link and decide for yourselves. Here's a little clue, though: I really, really, really do not like babies. They're ugly. They're smelly. They're noisy. They're just all-round irritating. Except for Lucas. Lucas is none of those. Well, OK, smelly he is at times. Noisy he is most times when he's awake. He can be irritating at times. But he's not ugly!

This is a new year and with it comes a new resolution. I've been slacking off on the blog—this time for over nine months!—and this is not good. People who matter to me are finding it hard to keep up with my life because we're not online at the same time very often and when we are one or the other of us invariably has to leave soon. So I've decided to try and commit to a blog entry once per week, on a Sunday, barring major dysfunction in my life.

There is something that would help with this, of course, and that is this weird concept called feedback. Part of what has been demotivating me in blogging is getting no feedback unless I practically beg for it on my hands and knees. Please! I know some of you have subscribed by email or by RSS. And those of you reading the web page, just look down at the part below that mentions comments. Give me feedback! If I knew for certain that my posts were being read and appreciated, I'd have far more motivation to keep things up to date.

As an afterthought, it would also be nice to know what kinds of things you find interesting. After seven and a half years in China, what's around me is my life. It's normal to me. I've lost the ability to tell when things are weird or interesting because weird and interesting are so subjective that there's no way for me to know which is which. My 老外 (foreigner) eyes are almost gone. So I'll need some guidance here for what you want to know about.

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That being said, here's a proper update. Today was not an auspicious beginning for my re-found desire to blog. Lucas was a pain all night—constantly waking up and fussing—and by morning he had become intolerable. I was beginning to understand what parents whose babies have colic go through. Constant crying, no respite for any reason. That was my Lucas.

It turns out he was constipated. (You emphatically do not want to know how this was figured out. Just trust me on this.)

After the problem with his constipation was settled, Lucas was his usual, cheerful, giggling, overactive, extroverted self again. You know, the boy that made me realize that having a son wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. (Joan and I both wanted a daughter, you see, but the universe mocked us both and gave the introverted parents an overactive, extroverted boy.) Sure he drives his mother and his grandmother to distraction at times. (Both of them have a tendency to try and control him. This does not work. I just ride things out with him and gently direct him away from whatever he's doing and as a result get along with my sanity mostly intact.) Sure he's noisy. Sure he's disrupted every aspect of everybody's life. But he's so damned cute about it! How could I not love him?

Speaking of Lucas (like that's going to be rare now!), his birthday is five days away. We bought him his presents already and I'll have some pictures of his birthday party. In contravention of Chinese tradition we're not going to have a big do with the family for reasons which are complicated to explain but basically boil down to not wanting to get into the game of escalating gift-giving. The pictures will show a modest celebration and a birthday boy who will have his first exposure to birthday cake.

That's it for this update. Next week, when my vacation is finally in full swing (I still have to calculate and turn in marks tomorrow), I'll update you on my work situation.

And another blogger in the family

Joan has a blog because I forced her to start one at gunpoint (or so she'll claim if asked). Pop on over and have a look. You'll have to have a font that displays Chinese to read the stuff that Joan didn't write herself, I'm afraid to report.

Announcing the family's newest blogger!

I said I would announce the family's newest blogger and I'm a man of my word. Without further ado (or adon't, for that matter), here is...

My mother's blog.

Yeah, I know. Not the announcement that was expected after the last blog entry, but Joan still hasn't come around to the idea of blogging yet. Now that my mother has one, though, she's going to make one of her own.