Friday was something of a rare day for February in Kansas. Starting at about 2AM, the wind picked up, blowing so hard that our windows rattled. That part isn’t so rare. Then the cold rain started, dropping almost 2.5″ throughout the day.

As I worked, I had the blinds on the windows open, but they didn’t let in very much light. Still, the wind had calmed down, so the intermittent rain outside was peaceful. Jacob went out to play for a little while, so every so often I saw a warmly-dressed and excited-looking 5-year-old run past my window. A little while after he came in, I told Jacob, “I saw you playing outside.” His response: “Oh good! I got wet!” Which, despite the fact that it was about 50 degrees, seemed to excite him.

After the blustery start, the calm, slow, and peaceful rain was a pleasant thing to see throughout the day.

Funeral

My great aunt Alice Goerzen passed away last Sunday. So today, for the third time in a little over a year, I was at the funeral of a Goerzen relative and neighbor. Alice’s husband, Milt, passed away in late 2010, and it was while I was at his funeral that Jacob got run over by a tractor. That memory certainly came back to me today.

But I think I should set the stage and explain what funerals are like in this small, rural Kansas community.

At the church, while people file in, family and close friends — generally defined as loosely as desired — meet in some other room before the funeral. Memories may be shared, or songs sung, or maybe just a brief meditation or prayer.

Then the man from the funeral home — there’s only one in town — will step in. Ivan Miller owned the business for decades, and although he’s now retired, his replacement seems pretty similar. Kindly, respectful, and pretty much unchanging. This group then files into the church sanctuary to sit up front, while the rest of the congregation is standing and music is played.

We typically sing some hymns, hear memories from the family, a message from a pastor, and then do downstairs for faspa: an light meal with coffee, zwieback, “funeral cheese”, and some relishes and dessert. You can, by the way, go to the local grocery store and find a product labeled “funeral cheese”. It’s a sharp cheddar, sliced thick and cut into pie piece-shaped wedges.

After everyone has picked up their food, microphones are passed around, and anybody that wants to can share memories and stories. These are often hilarious, or touching, and can be more random than anyone could expect.

Today we heard a lot about how Aunt Alice loved her flowers and garden. We even saw a video of her giving a tour of her garden, with Milt’s mower in the background occasionally accidentally causing a distraction (or maybe it wasn’t so accidental; he’d never miss an opportunity to cause some mischief…)

I tend to think of attending funerals around here as a good time. Sadness is inevitable, but there are so many amazing stories that it is hard to leave feeling sad.

Excitement

This afternoon, Jacob found me in the office and as he often does, said, “Dad, I want to do something with you.” Usually I ask him what he’d like to do, but his first instinct is usually to ask for watching train videos on Youtube. So sometimes I make other suggestions. Today we played “hide and seek with radios,” in which the person that is counting is supposed to radio to the other person when they are done. Today was the first time that Jacob came up with the trick of talking into the radio while I was hiding so he could hear where I was. I was sort of proud of him, and he failed to completely hide his smile when I told him I had to turn off my radio or else he’d find me too fast.

Then later, we played with Jacob’s computer, a Linux-based command-line-only machine. I have set up a few shell scripts and aliases for him. Since it doesn’t play videos, he doesn’t use it as much as he does mine, but it is really fun to watch how his interaction with it changes as he gets older.

He can now read amazingly well for a 5-year-old, and is starting to learn how to spell. He loves word games, writing, and typing. I thought I would install an ASCII art program for him. I told Jacob I had some ideas for a new game, and he was irresistibly intrigued. I offered him a choice between figlet and toilet. And, as is probably no surprise to anyone with a 5-year-old, he chose toilet based on its name, Jacob and Oliver both loved typing things and seeing them displayed bigger. I showed Jacob how I could make a freight train by typing ,<@-[]-(*)-@> (that’s the comma-shaped snowplow, engine, boxcar [], tank car (*), and caboose @>). Then toilet drew them big, and though abstract, caused great excitement.

I hooked up one of the speech synthesizers in Debian to a simple shell script named “talk”, which is a huge hit with the boys. They enjoy typing in nonsense and hearing the funny result, or in typing in real words and hearing how the computer says them right (or doesn’t). All told, we had a good hour’s worth of excitement up there.

We recently changed the arrangements for the boys. Instead of them each having their own room in which they sleep and sometimes play, we purchased a bunk bed. Oliver graduated from his crib to the lower bunk, and Jacob has the higher bunk. This has, predictably, created a few opportunities for behavior issues. Overall, it’s going well, and they appreciate their new, more open, “play room.”

Both boys sleep with their stuffed animals. Jacob calls his “my friends”. He still likes his butterfly, which he has had since he was an infant. He sometimes talks about how much he loves his friends, and how they like to get hugs, and how they are happy.

Jacob continues to enjoy reading. He has a toy low-res camera and he even recorded a video of himself reading Brown Bear, Brown Bear.

Oliver’s vocabulary is coming alive and is fun to watch. Jacob has taken to trying to teach Oliver how to say things. One day, Jacob saw a number like 451 on the side of a train, producing a conversation like this: “Oliver, can you say four hundred and fifty-one?” “Four dred iffy on!” “You got it!!!” “YAY!”

Today as I was walking past Oliver’s train track on the floor, he grabbed me by the hand, had me sit down, and kept holding on to make sure I’d stay right where he wanted me as he pointed and talked all about his trains. Aww.

One cold and windy Saturday morning, the boys were getting restless. What to do, we thought? I decided to bring out one of the manual typewriters from my collection. Oliver loved watching it do things as he pressed buttons. Jacob enjoyed spelling “mom”. New problem: boys fighting over how long each one’s turn at the typewriter is. This has gone on for a month now.

Ahh, winter.

A few weeks ago, Jacob informed us that he built an antenna out of blocks. He was REALLY proud of it, and even, incredibly, insisted I take his picture with it!

I’m pleased to have a 5-year-old that calls this structure an antenna instead of a skyscraper or tower or some such thing ;-)

We took a train trip to Portland, OR, recently. That’s about 2.5 days on the train each way. It went pretty well — we had quite a bit of excitement though it got a little long for the boys at times. One evening, Jacob excitedly noted that the sky was “almost really dark blue, just like my song!” Wow. That was a song he made up in New York in summer 2010.

Jacob enjoyed collecting leaves as we walked around in Portland. He would then stash his pile of leaves outside the door of whatever building we’d enter, then hope to find them still there when we got back out. It usually worked out OK for him.

“Dad, will you and mom stay up all night decorating the house for me?”

That was Jacob’s question to me at bedtime the evening before his fifth birthday. Jacob had already had his birthday party a few weeks ago. When scheduling means that parties happen that far away from the boys’ real birthdays, they get a smaller celebration with just Terah and me where we open their presents from us. A low-key thing, so we weren’t planning to decorate the house. I said, “Well, I don’t think we’ll be doing all that since you already had your birthday party.” And the look of eager anticipation on his face turned to a very sad and disappointed look, and made me feel really bad. Uhoh.

So while Jacob was sleeping, I mentioned it to Terah. We decided we should improvise something simple, so she found some old streamers and we taped them up, running them through several rooms in the house and across his door. It took a few minutes using supplies we already had, but the joy the next morning was priceless.

“Oh dad, you said you wouldn’t stay up all night, BUT YOU DID! Oh I am SO HAPPY! YAY YAY YAY!” And he ran through the house to discover what else was set up. Then he ran to find Oliver and gave him a tour of everything.

Then we sat down to open his presents. Here he is, holding a present from Terah and me:

That’s a copy of The Lorax. My friend Jonathan had brought a copy along during our road trip in Mexico, and Jacob was really excited about it. And didn’t really want to give it up, because “You can only get The Lorax in Mexico.” He (and Oliver) really enjoyed all his presents — he also got a train book from us (which he said, “Oh, yay, it’s the book they have at preschool!”), and a game and some other presents from the distant relatives.

But the highlight was something of an impulse buy. I was at the RadioShack in Derby — a place I’ve written about before, It is what a RadioShack should (and used to) be. It has a large amateur radio section, sells all sorts of coax by the foot, and provides astonishingly good post-sale service. Well, I was there with a radio question, and Mark (the owner) — who is an excellent salesman in a positive way — pointed me to a display of snap kits. I noticed their Electronics 101 Snap-Kit (a rebranded Snap Circuits Jr. SC-100). A ham in Pennsylvania had suggested them to me once, and as Jacob’s birthday was coming up, I gave it some thought. The kit said ages 8 and up. I asked Mark what he thought about a boy just turning 5. He said, “Well, probably not normally. But knowing you, if you’re there to work on them with him, I think he’d enjoy it. But I wouldn’t have him work on it by himself.” I agreed and we bought it.

I pondered how to explain the concept of this thing to Jacob. Eventually I decided I would call it a “toy-building kit.” He understood that.

Jacob and I spent hours together working with it. He would flip through the book, either picking circuits that looked interesting or telling me what kind of circuit he wanted to build. Then I would tell him what to put where, and he’d snap them together and play with them. He only played with each finished product a few minutes before he was ready to try another. Once I got him very excited with my offer to show him how to hook up two switches in parallel for the fan he built (and later introduced the parallel vs. series concept by hooking them up in series instead.) Here we are working on it together.

Jacob repeatedly called Terah over to look at the things he built. He was very excited that he assembled it himself. Eventually, Oliver (age 2) came over wanting to help. So he sat on my lap, and handed parts to Jacob, then Jacob put them on the grid. Oliver really enjoyed being involved in this way, even though I had to keep him from doing things like ripping the capacitor off its mount.

We tend to be modest in terms of the number of things we give the boys and their cost, reasoning that we, like many, already have too many toys in our house, and that greater cost doesn’t necessarily equate with a better experience for the boys. I particularly look for things with lasting value and unique experiences for them, and I think we succeeded this year.

But I realized quickly that the greatest value of this kit wasn’t electronics. It was having a great way for me to spend a lot of time doing things with the boys which all of us enjoyed. Those hours building things together were as much a present for me as for Jacob, I’m quite sure.

Jacob’s “real” party was a few weeks ago at the Great Plains Transportation Museum in Wichita. They let people rent a historic caboose to use for a birthday party for children. So we did that for Jacob this year.

That was a huge hit for the boys. Jacob got to help his grandpa make some pie (instead of cake) for the party. He enjoyed eating it, of course.

He enjoyed opening his presents high up on the observation chair in the caboose. And the boys got to play on all the other equipment in the museum. Jacob enjoyed playing tour guide for family since most of them hadn’t been there. He also enjoyed watching freight trains pass on the other side of the fence from the museum — preferably while sitting in one of the museum’s engines.

Oliver certainly didn’t get left out. Train-watching is serious business, after all.

Jacob has long talked about going to the “train museum” and the “airplane museum” (Kansas Aviation Museum) on the same day, so one of his birthday surprises was that we went to the airplane museum after his party. His favorite item there is a retired FedEx 727. Here he is walking down the rear of the plane.

And, of course, they played captain and co-pilot in several different planes.

It’s been about two weeks now since we got back home. Every few days, our boys still talk about Mexico. Jacob talks about what he will want to do “when we go back” and how he’d like to see Jonathan over there again. Jacob, Oliver, and I look at photos from our trip a few times a week. This is all a sure sign that our boys loved the trip. And I keep trying to find Mexican food that tastes as good as the real thing (and, so far, failing). Another sign of a good trip!

I think it is possible to have fun, relax, and enjoy new experiences all at the same time. We did that in Mexico. We had a lazy afternoon or two with the boys taking naps or playing with other children at the house we stayed at. And we stayed in a beautiful hotel without air conditioning, explored old downtown areas and ancient ruins, and bought things from crowded markets and people selling things from a table along a road.

To anyone thinking about visiting: Go. Enjoy it, bring back memories, and live a little more serendipitously than usual. That’s what I hope to do when we visit Greece before too long.

Finally, here’s a photo of the painting I bought from a roadside vendor for $17. Make sure to view it full screen. I think it says more about Mexico than 6 blog posts do.

Today I’ll write about the places we stayed. We spent most of the time in a room we rented in a private home in Guadalajara. My friend Jonathan had found it for us, and it was not too far from his home.

The owner was a grandmother, and across the courtyard was more family, including a granddaughter close in age to our boys. They enjoyed playing together.

It was really a perfect arrangement for us. There’s no better way to be a part of local life when traveling than to stay in someone’s house.

Here’s our bedroom:

Notice the glass slats in the window — it’s a nifty, though not airtight, alternative to our regular windows. More on that later. More of the inside:

We had a bit of a language barrier while in Mexico, though never anything significant. My Spanish vocabulary started with almost nothing and I reached maybe a few dozen words by the time we left. Terah knew some Spanish from high school and college, and my friend was fluent. Our hostess also knew a little English. But we all communicated well enough. Terah or Jonathan would help translate when needed.

As I’d seen before, the children would say things to each other, but never seemed to be bothered that their playmates didn’t understand what was being said. They just had a great time anyhow.

On Sunday afternoon, when we came back from our activities, there was a buzz of activity. Children everywhere outside, running and playing. Adults too, chatting. We didn’t know exactly what was happening, but sent Jacob and Oliver out to play anyhow (which they were eager to do). The yard was enclosed by a wall, so children could pretty much run around without lots of supervision.

Eventually they were invited to have some birthday cake (ah ha!) — it was one of the children’s birthday. Jacob and Oliver actually were served the first two pieces of cake (as the “amigos”). Everyone seemed so friendly, warm, and welcoming.

Each morning started with breakfast at the house, followed by a scene like this:

That’s Jacob and Oliver, looking to see if Jonathan had arrived for the day yet.

I often noticed in Mexico that I was unsure if I was inside or outside. Here in Kansas, we can have a string of summer days that each exceed 110F (44C) — or a few weeks in winter that never get above 15F (-9C), even in daytime. And then we have some pleasant days like right now, too — or rain blowing sideways at 60MPH. In general, we spend a lot of effort keeping the outside, well, out.

It is quite clear that this isn’t a problem in the Guadalajara area. Some restaurants could have been described as buildings with large, open windows so you feel a lot of breeze while inside. Or perhaps as a simple shade roof with a few supports on the edges, so you’re never really “inside” at all (sort of like going under a small shade tent outdoors). To the extent that windows could close, many of them couldn’t be made airtight. It was clear that in that area, people spend more energy finding ways to invite the outdoors in rather than to keep it out, thanks to the year-round moderate climate.

Perhaps the best example of this surprised me one evening. We were arriving in Guanajuato, an old silver mining town in the mountains, and were going to spend the night at Hotel Socavón, which had been recommended to us by a local friend of Jonathan’s. From the street, the hotel looked tiny. But walk in, and you get in this old-looking (and feeling) entry tunnel:

That’s the front desk, apparently cut out of it there on the right.

We asked to see some of the rooms before buying — apparently a normal request around there. The innkeeper agreed, and gave us keys and directions to find them on the third floor. It included going up 2 flights of stairs, passing through a courtyard, and going up another flight.

It was after dark, and the hotel was dimly lit — something I was fine with. I thought we were stepping out into a beautiful atrium with some potted plants in the center of the building — something fairly common in some nicer hotels. Until I felt rain on my head. Then I realized that the courtyard, which began two floors up from the street, was open to the sky. Beautiful!

Here was the view from out room door:

And down the “hall”:

After getting home, a Google happened to turn up some reviews of this hotel. I was so annoyed at what some people wrote! One person gave them only 3 stars because they didn’t have air conditioning, had poor water pressure, and “lots of steps”. Someone else complained of the dark entry tunnel — something I couldn’t help but smiling about the moment I entered.

My review, which should hopefully get posted soon, is certainly different. I gave them 5 stars, because if I wanted a Super 8 with generic fluorescent lighting and the same layout as thousands of other hotels, I would have gone to Nebraska instead of Mexico. Most homes and local hotels in the region don’t have air conditioning because they don’t need it, and that’s just how water pressure is in Mexico (due to needing to pump it from municipal supplies to private storage tanks overhead). And who doesn’t appreciate entering a hotel through a brick tunnel? Ah, sigh…

This should give you some idea of the kind of travel we like: part of the point of traveling is enjoying the differences from home, and I think it is a huge mistake to be annoyed at everything that is different. Enjoy the differences!

Finally, here’s a photo of the staircase in the home we stayed in, which I thought was fascinating:

I’ll be writing about all the fun stuff in the posts to come, so you’ll have to bear with me on this one as I describe why we did something that appears to horrify a segment of Americans.

About a year ago, I wrote a review of Travel as a Political Act by Rick Steves. Rick’s point wasn’t actually directly political in the conventional sense, but summed up as:

I’ve taught people how to travel. I focus mostly on the logistics: finding the right hotel, avoiding long lines… But that’s not why we travel. We travel to have enlightening experiences, to meet inspirational people, to be stimulated, to learn, and to grow. Travel has taught me the fun in having my cultural furniture rearranged and my ethnocentric self-assuredness walloped.

He speaks of giving onesself permission to have a conversation with someone that doesn’t speak a language you know, for instance.

I got an email this spring from my longtime friend Jonathan Hall, who had moved to Mexico a couple of years ago. He invited my family and me to go to Mexico, generously offered to host us and show us around, and specifically mentioned my review of Rick Steves as a reason to do so, this was immediately intriguing. Due to his other plans, it was also something of a limited-time offer.

Those of you that don’t live in the USA may not know what sort of stories we get about Mexico over here. Most of them involve either illegal immigration to the USA or the Mexican drug war. Occasionally there is some sort of drug-related violence on the US side of the border as well, which always makes the news. There are a lot of people that have the perception that Mexico is a dangerous place to be. Terah even knows some people that grew up in Mexico and are too afraid to return.

So we did some research, asked some questions, and it became pretty clear that yes, some parts of Mexico are dangerous, but many parts are really quite safe, and Jonathan had invited us to one of those.

The reactions we got from Americans when we told them of our plan ranged from excitement that we would get to visit a beautiful country to concern and worry about our safety. Besides that, I knew almost no Spanish and Terah had a few high school and college classes years ago to go on. And, we knew that Mexico would, in many ways, be more different from the USA than Germany was.

We concluded that this would get us out of our comfort zone in a significant way, have lots of great things to do, be a good experience for the boys, and something that we wouldn’t do without Jonathan. So we bought the tickets for it!

As you might notice, I’m quite glad we did. I’ll follow up with the details in the next stories, but for today I’ll end with the story of getting there. It involves two cute boys, so of course it’ll be interesting. Jacob is almost 5 and Oliver is 2, and neither one of them had flown for over a year. Despite leaving home at 5AM to drive to the airport (about an hour away), they were both awake and alert. Jacob was jabbering away the whole way there. He enjoyed the security process and found it interesting — I had to explain that they were checking to make sure everyone was following the airplane rules.

Then as we walked to our gate, he pressed his face against every window, looking at the parked airplanes in the dark. Oliver would see him doing this and run over to join him. With a bit of help, he noticed some airplanes had “United Express” painted on them, and others had “American” with an “AA” on them. He would talk about “American AA” and United Express airplanes for the rest of the week whenever he heard one in the sky.

I sat between the boys on our flight to Dallas, and Terah was in the row ahead of us. This is how Jacob spent most of the flight.

And Oliver, who had the aisle seat, enjoyed paging through the inflight magazines, safety brochure, wifi instruction card, and airsickness bag.

The real highlight came at the Dallas/Ft. Worth (DFW) airport, where we had a connection. And the reason: we needed to take a train to get to our connecting gate. The DFW Skylink system really works very well — but the boys cared most that it’s a TRAIN. It was difficult to get them both away from it when we got off. They wanted to see it leave, stay and watch the next one come, etc. Jacob was only happy when he realized he could see the Skylink trains running high above the window at our departure gate for Guadalajara.

The 2.5-hour flight to Guadalajara got a little long for them, but they managed OK. We struck up several conversations with friendly people that knew English as we waited in various lines. It seems to be something of a rarity for American families with young children and no Mexican heritage to visit Mexico. People went out of their way to be friendly and welcoming — even the customs officials. It felt like a great start to the visit. One Mexican man who was chatting with me encouraged me to learn some Spanish. I said my wife knows some, and that I had tried to learn some German back when I took foreign language classes. Laughing, he said, “Why would you do that?” Not as an insult; it just genuinely didn’t seem useful to him. I think they were happy and proud that someone wanted to visit Mexico and was excited about it!

More to come.

But his PC was mute. We opened it up and discovered it didn’t have a console speaker. So we traipsed downstairs, dug out an external speaker, and I figured out how to enable the on-board audio chipset in the BIOS. So now the cw command worked, but also there were a lot of other possibilities. We also brought up a microphone.

While Jacob was busy with other things, I set to work getting things hooked up, volume levels adjusted, and wrote some shell scripts for him. I also printed out this reference sheet for Jacob:

He is good at reading but not so good at spelling. I intentionally didn’t write down what the commands do, hoping that this would provide some avenue for exploration for him. He already is generally familiar with the ones under the quiet category.

I wrote a shell script called “record”. It simply records from the microphone and drops a timestamped WAV file in a holding directory. He can then type “play” to simply play back whatever he recorded most recently. Easy enough.

But what he really wanted was sound for his ASCII steam locomotive. So with the help of a Google search for “steam train mp3″, I wrote a script “ssl” (sound steam locomotive) that starts playing the sound in the background if it isn’t already going, and then runs sl to show the animation. This was a big hit.

I also set it up so he can type “play train” to hear that audio, or “play song” to play our favorite train song (Always a Train in My Dreams by Steve Gillette). Jacob typed that in and sat still for the entire 3 minutes listening to it.

I had to hook up an Ethernet cable to his machine to do all this, and he was very interested that I was hooking his computer up to mine in some way. He thought all the stuff about cables in the walls was quite exciting.

The last thing I did was install flite, a speech synthesis program. I wrote a small shell script called “talk” which reads a line at a time from stdin and invokes flite for each one (to give more instant feedback rather than not starting playback until after having read a large block from stdin). He had some fun hearing it say his name and other favorite words, but predictably the most fun was when he typed gibberish at it, and heard it try to pronounce or spell nonsense words.

In all, he was so excited about this new world of computer sound opened up to him. I’m sure there will be lots of happy experimentation and discovery going on.

And in that $8 package is not a DVD, or a book, or a toy, but rather 12 rolls of adding machine tape (totaling 1/3 of a mile). Oh yes, our four-year-old can hardly contain his excitement over office supplies. Let me back up a bit to explain.

I am always on the lookout for a certain kind of toy. The sort of thing that you don’t find in the toy section of a store. The sort of thing that is interesting and engages the curiosity of our boys, that most people would consider would toss, and that usually costs less than $5. Along those lines, Jacob has an old manual typewriter he can use, he and I built a switchbox full of switches and light bulbs that the boys love to play with, we built him a command-line-only PC out of spare parts, the boys have some radios they can use, and one day I salvaged a decades-old adding machine that was going to be thrown out.

Jacob liked it — he enjoys number and letter games — and had some fun, but didn’t zealously engage with it until just a few days ago.

He sat down at his table and started making “cards”. He will print out a bunch of numbers, making a strip a couple of feet long, and then say, “Dad, I made another card for you!” We will then happily accept the card and he will continue making more. Here he is, holding up one of his cards:

Jacob had a ton of fun making them, and Oliver wanted in on the action too. Oliver was somewhat interested in the adding machine, but not as much as Jacob, and Jacob didn’t want to share. So somehow they decided that Oliver would run and get cards from Jacob and then take them to whatever parent Jacob said. Today Jacob said, “Dad, the Oliver delivery service will bring you a card!”

Saturday morning we had some time to hang around and play, so we played some adding machine tape games. I tucked some long “cards” under my waistband, and the boys happily chased me all over the house trying to get them back. We also decorated:

And here is what the room looked like — after some cleanup:

That orange bucket on the desk is my “card bucket” where I can put all the cards he gives me. He even helpfully empties it out into the recycle bin when there are too many “old cards” in it!

But then tragedy struck — it was out of paper! I ordered a 12-roll pack off Amazon, and boy was it a long couple of days until it arrived. Today before the UPS truck got here, I showed him how we could feed old paper through and print on the back side — an incredible innovation, it seemed!

Terah had a conversation with him earlier that went like this:

Terah: “Jacob, we need to clean up the house.”

Jacob: “Why?”

Terah: “Because some people are coming over.”

Jacob: “Who is… OH YES! The UPS delivery man! Yes, let’s clean!”

Terah: “Ah, well yes he will be here too, but your great uncle and aunt are coming.”

Jacob: “Oh yay! And the UPS man!”

It is hard to describe Jacob’s excitement when the package arrived. I quickly opened it up, and at his great uncle’s prompting, he counted to see if he really did get 12 rolls of paper. “IT IS TWELVE ROLLS! YAY!” And then we quickly installed it in the machine and off he went. At his great uncle’s prompting, he started writing a J on each “card”. This meant “Jacob”, or maybe he’d put two J’s, meaning “To John From Jacob”, or perhaps the two J’s meant “To Terah From Jacob” – he’d always have to clue us in.

Anyhow, for an $8 investment in paper this has brought hours of joy to our boys. Even though Jacob isn’t yet really using it to perform arithmetic, it is setting him up to enjoy that sort of thing — and encouraging his curiosity. Both good things.

Dad often had an old AM radio sitting around and would be listening to a baseball game while working. As it got darker, lights would come on, and the bugs would start flying near them. Sometimes dad would be working just inside the barn, and the bugs would start flying in there, while some light poured out the big front door. There’s something about that scratchy AM signal, the evening slowly getting darker, the slow pace of the baseball game, and just being around dad and a peripheral part of whatever he was doing that stirs a wonderfully fond recollection in me.

I don’t remember the specifics of any one of those times, nor do I really remember how often it happened, but it does stick with me.

We’ve had a routine in our house, starting early enough that neither of our boys know anything different, where right before bed, I read a book and sing a song to each of them individually.

Last November, I was looking for some books to challenge Jacob a little more than what we had been reading. I found The Complete Winnie the Pooh used for $4 on Amazon. This contains the original A. A. Milne stories, not the Disney series. It had a few line drawings, but there were many pages without any. It’s 352 pages and written in a rather dated form of British English. So for all these reasons, I wasn’t sure if Jacob would like it. But it was $4 so I bought it.

And Jacob was hooked. Each evening, we start bedtime with looking at the “map” of the 100-acre forest, just inside the cover. He gets to pick out 4 things for me to describe, and then we turn to our story. We usually read somewhere between 2 and 5 pages at bedtime, depending on how well he got ready without wasting time. And then we sing.

A. A. Milne has his Pooh character make up songs throughout the book. They are printed with words only, no tune, so I make up a tune for them as we go. Jacob has taken to requesting these songs for his bedtime song as well.

Jacob always gets to choose his bedtime story, and sometimes he chooses a different one — but about 75% of the time, it’s been Pooh.

A few weeks ago, he started noticing that we were almost to the end. He got very concerned, asking what we’d do next. I suggested a different book, which he didn’t like. Then I pointed out that we could restart the Pooh stories from the beginning, which was exciting for him.

Last night, we finished the book. The very last story was an interesting one, suggesting Christopher Robin growing up and no longer having imaginary adventures with the animals, but making Pooh promise to always be there for him. I don’t think Jacob caught onto that meaning, though. When we finished it, we had this conversation:

Jacob: “Dad, is that the end?”

Me: “Yes.”

Jacob, getting a big smile: “Yay! So can we start back at the beginning tomorrow?”

Me: “Sure!”

Jacob then gave a clap, shouted “Yay!” again, and was a very happy boy.

Sometimes I wonder what our boys will remember in 25 years of their fun times with me. I don’t know if Jacob will remember all the days reading about the animals in the 100-acre wood when he was 4, or maybe he’ll remember watching train and combine videos, or playing radio hide-and-seek, or maybe something entirely different.

But I have no doubt that I will remember sitting on the couch in his room, holding him on my lap, and reading a 350-page book to a loving 4-year-old. As Pooh aptly put it, “Sometimes, the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.”

I’ll start with church basements. Possibly a little chilly, but with a bunch of women getting together to make some quilts — along with some conversation, maybe some snacks.

Or perhaps about hundreds of kitchens throughout Kansas, warm with baking pies, cookies, breads, and all sorts of items. Then there are a bunch of wood shops, turning up sawdust, building things from toys to furniture. Or even a body shop donating its time and materials to put some finishing touches on a classic car.

I’ve also seen around 300 men getting together to practice for a men’s chorus concert. I know there was large crowd of people gathering to make verenike. People always wind up running 5km on a particular Saturday morning, rain or shine. Or ride 35 miles on a bicycle on a different Saturday. Or even help build a house using as much volunteer labor and donated materials as possible.

And then, of course, comes this week, where Mennonites from all over Kansas start to converge on Hutchinson, KS. I can imagine you might see some odd sights rolling down the road: a vehicle called the “borscht buggy” for preparing large quantities of the delicious soup. Several old tractors being hauled down the road on trailers. Semi loads of food. Vanloads of pie and cookies. Plants, trees, rugs, quilts, even a lawn mower. And then, yesterday and today, excited people ready to buy all of these things. Families with children excited to get a ride on the largest slide they’ve ever seen. And, of course, so many people wanting to eat the famous food that, despite the many parallel serving areas, lines still can extend for blocks.

It’s all because people are hungry.

Not these Kansans with pie-laden kitchens, though — it’s to help those in need.

It’s all part of the annual Kansas MCC Relief Sale. The idea is that people make, bake, build, sing, or give things to the sale. The items are then sold, and the proceeds go to Mennonite Central Committee, one of the world’s most efficient charities. MCC not only helps with directly bringing people out of hunger, but also supports sustainable projects, such as building hand-operated wells to give those in need a safe source of drinking water. Virtually all of the money you spend on those pies winds up helping someone in poverty.

Each year, the relief sale and related events raise around half a million dollars for charity.

It’s not unusual to see a quilt sell for thousands of dollars. Most of the things sell at more normal prices, but last year someone decided to add a loaf of bread to an auction — and it sold for $100.

And so it was this that we took the boys to today. We started with the “Feeding the Multitude” — a wonderful meal with some traditional Kansas Mennonite food. Here’s a photo:

That bread is zwieback, then there is cherry moos, bohne berrogi, verenike, and of course, sausage.

Here are Jacob and Oliver enjoying their food:

After that, we went over to the giant slide. I’m not sure how many stories tall it is, but it’s big enough that they have a strip of carpet there at the bottom to slow people down at the end. Here’s a photo of Jacob on my lap after going down the slide. If you zoom in, you can see the giant smile on his face.

After that, we hopped on the “mass transit” at the sale: a wagon being pulled by a tractor. We checked out the general auction, with Jacob wanting to be sure to peer under the hood of each car present. Then after a stop to buy some kettle corn for Jacob, we checked out the plants, quilt auction, and then on to buy cheese curds.

After another stop at the slide, it was time to head home.

And then tomorrow is a concert of the Kansas Mennonite Men’s Chorus (motto: We Sing That Others May Live). You get around 300 men on a stage signing together and wow — no recording can do it justice. It’s amazing to hear the power of the choir at the loud parts, but still more amazing to listen to 300 men signing as softly as they possibly can. I’ve been singing with that choir for 3 years, and we’ve been practicing for a few months now.

If you ever hear some Mennonites boasting about something, it’s probably going to be about how much money they’ve raised for charity. And on that note, I’ll nudge those Indiana folks reading this and point out that you have some catching up to do with the Kansas sale…

So here’s why that made me happy. Well for one, it was the first time Jacob had left stuff on my computer that I found later. And of course he left his name there.

But moreover, he’s learning a bit about the Unix shell. sl is a command that displays an animated steam locomotive. I taught him how to use the semicolon to combine commands. So he has realized that he can combine calls to sl with the semicolon to get a series of a LOT of steam trains all at once. And was very excited about this discovery.

Also he likes how error messages start with the word “bash”.

That’s my car. You might understand why I went home at 1PM Tuesday and worked from home the rest of the afternoon. The county didn’t get the roads opened until 5:30PM Wednesday, so we were stuck. Terah’s dad kindly opened the driveway for us though. Without that, we wouldn’t have even known where it was.

Jacob and Oliver loved playing in the snow. It was a HUGE hit for them. Both of them hated to go back inside when it was time. Oliver had trouble walking, or even standing up, but that didn’t stop him from begging for more every chance he got.

On Saturday, I took Jacob outside to play. We had in mind building a snow tunnel. We went to one of the big piles of snow left by the tractor after our driveway was cleared, and I dug out a space underneath it that Jacob could crawl through. He got a little scoop (he insisted on calling it “my shovel”) and helped dig too. He had a great time with it. He was very anxious to go inside, and it probably didn’t help his eagerness that the cats could freely walk through it long before he could. They were around and taking a great interest in the proceedings. One of then stretched out on my back while I was stretched out pulling snow out from the pile.

Finally Jacob got to go through. He had a little trouble because it wasn’t tall enough for him to crawl like he usually does (though still plenty big for him to get through with lots of room to spare), but he came out beaming. I then went and got the camera and got some photos of his second trip through.

You’d think that this might be the highlight of a 4-year-old’s snow excursion. And given his excitement, you might be very convinced of that. But you’d be wrong.

What Jacob really wanted was a snow train. So I drew some train track-sized lines in the snow with my shovel. Then I was supposed to draw a train engine. He had been planning this for hours before we even went outside, and I knew very well what was supposed to go on the engine: a snowball for a headlight. We then added passenger cars — and a coal car, because apparently that’s what you do with snow trains. And the result:

When we went inside, Terah asked Jacob about his snow experience. Jacob was very happy, until she asked him if his snow train was a real train or a drawing of a train. Then he became very sad when he said it was a drawing of a train, and decided it was not what he wanted AT ALL.

So today we went out again. This time I built a snow train that stands up, complete with snowballs for wheels. I asked him if it was right, and he kept saying, “No, I want a REAL train.” Finally I asked him what the difference between a real snow train and this one was. Apparently a real train would be on tracks, move around, make noise, and take us places. Fortunately he didn’t dwell too long when I explained I couldn’t build one of those.

And then today’s highlight was writing JACOB in the snow. He had started by drawing larger and larger J letters with his arm, and finally asked me to make one. I made footprints in the shape of a very large J, which he loved. He had me make another one, and then the rest of the letters in his name.

Friday night, Jacob was super excited. He was running around the house, talking about trains. I had him pack his own backpack with toys this time, which were — you guessed it — trains. Plus train track. His usual bedtime is around 7. He was still awake in his room at about 11, too excited to sleep.

The train was an hour late into Newton, so got up, got ready, and then went into Jacob’s room at 3:15AM. I put my arm around him and said his name softly. No response. I said, just a little louder, “Jacob, it’s time to wake up to go to the train station.” There was about a 2-second pause and then he sat bolt upright rubbing his eyes. A couple seconds later, in a very tired but clear voice, “OK dad, let’s go!” That is, I believe, a record for waking up speed for Jacob.

We went downstairs, got coats, mittens, hats, etc. on, made sure we had the stuffed butterfly he always sleeps with, and went out the door.

As usual, Jacob chattered happily during the entire 15-minute drive to the Amtrak station. One of these days I need to remember to record it because it’s unique. He described things to me ranging from the difference between freight and passenger trains, to what the dining car is all about, to tractors and how to ride them safely. Newton has some “winter lights”, and a few places still had Christmas lights, which were of course big hits.

We had to wait a few minutes at the Amtrak station, and Jacob hadn’t shown any signs of slowing down yet. He wanted to look at every Amtrak poster, picture, logo, or sign in the building. This generally meant me holding him up high while he leaned over to touch it and make out a few words. Then, of course, he would pick out minute details about the trains, such as how many coach cars he thought they had, and we’d visit about that for awhile.

We got on at about 4:20. We found our seats, and Jacob showed no signs of calming down, despite having had only 4 hours of sleep (instead of his usual 11) so far. We checked out the buttons for lights. And, of course, he excitedly yelled out, “Dad, the train is moving!”

He spent the next while mostly watching out his window, but also still exploring his space. Finally at about 5, I said, “Jacob, I am really tired. I am going to sleep now. Will you sleep too?” His response: “Oh sure dad, I will sleep with my eyes open!” As a result, no sleep was had for Jacob, and only a little for me.

The dining car opens for breakfast at 6:30, which is normally a rather foreign time for breakfast on the train for us. But we were both awake so I figured might as well go. So Jacob and I went to the dining car. We sat with a woman going from New Mexico to Lawrence for her grandpa’s funeral, though it was expected and she was having a good time on the train. Jacob turned completely shy, and refused to say a word, except maybe a few whispered into my ear.

He got his favorite railroad French toast, and had me “drizzle” some syrup on it. I used the word “drizzle” for syrup the first time he had French toast on the train, and if I fail to use that word in the dining car, I will hear about it in no uncertain terms from Jacob.

He loved his dining car breakfast, but we spent about an hour and a half there. He was really slow at eating because his face was pressed up against the window so much. But that was just fine; we had nowhere else to be, the person eating breakfast with us enjoyed visiting (and, apparently, scaring the dining car staff with tales of bears in the New Mexico mountains). This was what the train trip was all about, after all.

We played in the lounge car for awhile. The almost floor-to-ceiling wrap-around windows provided a great view for him, and more opportunities to press his face against a window. We talked about freight trains that he saw, noticed the snow on some of them. Then we found the back of the train and he got to look out the back window.

Back at our seat, he played with his toys for about 10 minutes, which was all he used them on the entire trip. There was just too much else to enjoy.

When we used the restroom on the train, he’d comment on how much he liked the Amtrak soap. “It smells SO very very good!” He wanted to wash his hands on the train. By late morning, he had decided: “Dad, I LOVE this Amtrak soap. It smells like peaches! Shall your hands smell like peaches too?” And, when we’d get back up to our seats, he’d put his hands in my face, saying, “Dad, smell that! My hands smell like peaches! It was from the AMTRAK SOAP!”

At some point, he discovered the airline-style safety brochures in the seat back pockets. These were filled with diagrams of the train car, a few photos, and lots of icons with descriptions. I don’t know how many times I read the thing to him, or really how many times he then recited it to me from memory. It was a lot. He spent hours with those brochures.

Jacob had already told me that he wanted pizza for lunch, so I got him the kid-sized pizza. It wasn’t all that big, and he could have devoured at least half of it when hungry. But he was getting really tired and ate only a few bites of pizza and a few chips. Pretty soon he was leaning up against me, the window, and eventually had his head on the table in some tomato sauce. But he didn’t quite fall asleep by the time we went back to our seats, and of course was wide awake by that point.

Jacob loves spotting the word “Amtrak” on things. It was very exciting when he noticed his orange juice at breakfast, and milk at lunch, were “Amtrak juice” and “Amtrak milk” due to the logo on the cups. At dinner he noticed we had Amtrak plates, and when I pointed out that his metal fork had the Amtrak logo on it, he got very excited and had to check every piece of silverware within reach. “Dad, I have an Amtrak fork too!…. And dad, YOU also have an Amtrak fork! We ALL have Amtrak forks! *cackling laughter*”

I finally insisted that Jacob lay down for some quiet time. I closed the curtains, and he finally did fall asleep… less than an hour before our arrival into Galesburg. So by 2:15 he was up to 4.75 hours of sleep, I guess.

We stopped in the train station briefly, then started our walk to the Discovery Depot Children’s Museum, which was right nearby. Although I made no comment about it, Jacob said, “Dad, there is a train museum RIGHT HERE!” “Yes, you’re right Jacob. I can see a steam engine and some cars here.” “Let’s go in!” “I don’t think it’s open today.” “It IS open — shall we go check?” It wasn’t, and that was mighty sad — though when he spotted another old caboose sitting outside the children’s museum, the day suddenly seemed brighter. He complained of how cold he was, although my suggestion that he stop walking through the big piles of snowdrifts was met with a whiny, “But dad, I WANT to do that!”

We went inside the museum (having to walk right buy the locked caboose — thankfully the people at the desk promised to unlock it for us when we were ready) and Jacob started to explore. There was some wooden play trains big enough for children to climb in which he enjoyed, but in general he went from one thing to the next every minute or two as he does when he’s really tired or overstimulated. Until, that is, he discovered the giant toy train table. It had a multi-level wooden track setup, and many toy trains with magnetic hitches. It was like what we have at home, only much bigger and fancier. He spent a LONG time with that. We then briefly explored the rest of the museum and went out into the caboose. It wasn’t the hit it might have been, possibly because there are several at the Great Plains Transportation Museum that he gets to go in on a somewhat regular basis.

After that, he was ready to go back into the museum, but I was feeling rather over-stimulated. On a day when the highs were still well below freezing, it seemed just about every family in Galesburg was crowded into the children’s museum, making it loud and crowded — which I don’t enjoy at all. So I suggested maybe it was snack time instead. A moment’s thought, then he started to pull me out of the caboose before I could get my gloves back on — “Yes dad, I think it IS snack time. Let’s go. Let’s go NOW!”

We walked over to Uncle Billy’s Bakery (Google link or minimal website). Jacob spotted some sugar cookies shaped like mittens. Despite my reluctance to get him more sugar, he was so excited — plus I had barely prevented a meltdown at lunch by promising him that he would get dessert later in the day — so he picked two red mitten cookies. I got myself a wonderful peach muffin and a croissant and we sat down at one of the tables by the window. I taught Jacob how to hang his coat on his chair and he lit into those cookies.

I spotted a guy at the next table over wearing a BNSF jacket, and asked him if he worked for the railroad. He had retired as an engineer a couple of years ago, and had worked various jobs before that. He grew up in Manhattan, KS and so was interested in our trip — and very friendly. While we visited, Jacob devoured his cookies and increasing portions of my snack as well. He told us about a new shop — The Stray Cat — just two stores down that was having a grand opening event today. They make decorations and art out of basically discarded items, and had some really nifty things that I may have bought had I not been wanting for space in our backpack.

Then I spotted Sweets Old-Fashioned Ice Cream, Candy, and Soda Shop across the road. I figured he’d love it and I was already in for the sugar so might as well. He picked out some “birthday cake” flavor ice cream for himself. I got huckleberry ice cream, which he insisted on calling “purpleberry” and managed to get some tastes of as well.

After that, we went to the train station. It was about an hour until our train would be there. I wasn’t sure if we’d find enough to do, but I shouldn’t have worried. Earlier, we had made the happy discovery that the station’s restroom featured the Amtrak soap, so there was that. Then there was the model Amtrak train in the ticket window, which Jacob kept wanting to look at while I’d hold him. And also, the California Zephyr came in. We watched it arrive from the station window, saw people get off and on, and saw it leave — maybe the first time Jacob has witnessed all that in person. And, of course, we looked at the pictures in that train station. The ticketmaster gave Jacob a paper conductor’s hat with puzzles and mazes on the back side.

And then it was time to get onto our train back home. We ate dinner — Jacob again ate little and almost fell asleep — and got back to our seats. I let Jacob stay awake until about 8, when he was starting to get a bit fragile. It took him awhile to fall asleep, but he finally did at about 8:30.

Today he’s still been all excited. He will randomly tell us about bits of the trip, that the man at supper called his grilled cheese sandwich piece “little” when it was really big, what we did at the ice cream store, etc. And I do think that he is now a train safety expert.

All in all, I think that is probably the most excitement he’s ever had in 24 hours and it was a lot of fun to be with him for it!

The only train service from here leaves at about 3AM in both directions. So starting about November, Jacob started asking me, “Dad, will you wake me up in the middle of the night to go to the train station TODAY?” He didn’t seem to get it through his head that we didn’t have another trip planned, although we surely would at some point. It just couldn’t possibly be, right?

So around Christmas, I booked a round trip from here to Galesburg, IL for just Jacob and me. We’ll get on the train at 3AM Saturday morning, get to Galesburg about noon, and then head back home at 5PM, getting home again at, well, 3:30AM.

Jacob is super excited about this. When the tickets arrived, he didn’t yet know about the trip. I thought he’d be excited then, but the ticket sleeve had a picture of a toy train that he didn’t own, so he was somewhat sad. But starting the next day he was very excited. We wrote “Amtrak” on the Jan. 15 spot on his pharmacy calendar (a local pharmacy gives them away free each year). He carefully checked off each day as it went past. And he’s been getting increasingly excited all week.

Tonight he couldn’t really think, couldn’t really play, couldn’t really calm down. He jabbered about how he would sit by the window, how precisely I would wake him up, and his eyes would open up “right away” and we’ll go straight there. He talked about how he will look out the window at the dark night, and was extra excited when I told him he’d see snow out the window like one of the Amtrak videos he likes to watch on Youtube. He already placed his order for breakfast in the dining car: “French toast with syrup on top.”

He ran past the computer while I was looking at things to do in Galesburg, and saw I had a map up, and immediately noticed the train tracks. Then he pointed to the station, and said, “Dad, that says ‘Galesburg Amtrak’.” A rather stunned dad replied, “Yes indeed it does, Jacob.” I guess it was some combination of pre-reading and detective skills, but that surprised me.

Anyhow, this is the first trip with just Jacob and me. We’re going to have a blast, I’m sure. I may, however, wind up going 24 hours without sleep if his adrenaline level is any guide…

Now, let me back up and set the scene. This was our annual Goerzen Christmas today. We already ate and exchanged gifts.

Here’s the thing about moving pianos, especially the old heavy ones with the cast iron frame inside: it’s not something where a group of people just get together, count to 3, and that’s that. No, you’ve got to start the project out right. You have to break the news that people will be moving a piano gently. And then, of course, you get a room full of people — usually mostly men — and at this point, before any lifting happens, you’ve got to plan. Tape measures must be produced, measurements taken, plans made for how to lift and who should lift where. Differing points of view have to be considered carefully. Then, of course, you have too many people for each one to actually help lift so each person not lifting has to find a job. And then when things actually start going, you realize that not one of the plans fully accounted for the unprecedented weight and maddening stubbornness of the piano, and you have to stop every few feet to plan anew. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a piano move happen in any other fashion.

So, today, my uncle, whose house our gathering was at this year, said, “Ahh good, lots of young backs. Just what I need.” Mildly concerned glances pass between my brothers, my cousins, and I. One brother looks like he’s pretending not to have heard. “We have a few things to move.” Anticipation. “A small couch” — probably not too bad, right? “An upholstered chair” — maybe a bit unruly but still not too bad. “And an old piano is going to a neighbor.” Full alert now — more glances, a pause for a second, and then acceptance: “Oh! Uhm… great!”

My uncle’s friend Ken teaches music at the local college, and on the side, Ken also teaches children how to play piano. One of Ken’s students didn’t have a piano at home, and my uncle and aunt had an old one they weren’t using, which they would give to the family of the student just a couple of blocks away. All that remained was moving it.

There was the inevitable measuring, planning, re-planning, until we got it out of the house and onto the back of my uncle’s pickup. We have about 8 men involved, plus my aunt. Most of us rode in the back of the pickup with the piano.

And of course, there came the inevitable request: “Ken, play for us!” So Ken sat on the edge of the pickup, at the piano, playing as we — and the piano — went through town in the open air. He started with Joplin’s Entertainer, then broke out into some Christmas music — We Wish You a Merry Christmas, followed by Nun Ist Sie Erschienen and a few others. It must be said that small towns in Kansas are probably not accustomed to their Christmas carolers having a piano with them, much less being played from the bed of a pickup. But there we were, mostly laughing too hard or enjoying the ride too much to sing.

To add excitement, or perhaps embarrassment, my uncle was sounding the horn. Some thought that his intent was to have it in time with the piano music from the back, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he meant to sound the horn in that rather random fashion.

Eventually we got to the neighbor’s house, and my dad and another uncle who hadn’t been on the pickup came running up. We hopped down and asked them where they wanted the piano. “Upstairs!” That got repeated among everyone there, producing laughter each time. More tape measures were produced, as it was a narrow staircase. The conclusion was that the piano could make it with about an inch (2.54cm) to spare.

So we got it out of the pickup and onto the porch, then into the house. Now, how to get it upstairs? This called for an extra helping of planning and calculating. Ken, the unofficial piano moving boss, kept reminding us in jest that “I grew up on a farm”. He said he could be alone at the top of the piano while we pushed. This quickly turned out to not be practical; due to the incline, the weight at the bottom was just too much to get it up over the stairs. Ken then went and picked up a wooden contraption they use to move pianos at the college. We tried that, but its supports underneath got stuck on the steps as well. Various ideas were tossed around at this point, until I pointed out that four of us on the bottom couldn’t get it up over a step, so when we get it into the stairway — only wide enough for 2 — we won’t be able to get it up anyhow.

That being considered a good point, various other ideas were tossed around. They all seemed to be wanting either for practicality or, perhaps, safety. Though the idea of having a dozen Goerzens stand at the top of the staircase pulling it up by a rope did have some excellent humor value.

In the end, perhaps wanting our group of free, highly ambitious, but somewhat less effective piano movers out of their house, the neighbors found a place for it on the ground floor. We all piled back into the pickup for the ride back, which was rather more quiet due to lack of horn and piano music.

So there you have it. The most fun I have ever had moving a piano. (Really, the only fun I have ever had moving a piano.)

Well, as is often the case with him, his interest in various things waxes and wanes over time. He hadn’t spent much time with his computer lately, until I suggested he try it one day. He did, and rediscovered sl (a simple program that draws an animated steam locomotive using ASCII characters) again. I showed him how to string sl commands together with the semicolon to get lots of trains, and he loved that.

Since then, he’s discovered that the up arrow accesses bash history and saves him typing.

But more impressive, the other day while I was at work, he was playing with his computer and it looked to him like it had locked up. (I believe he had hit Scroll Lock from talking with Terah.) He was fussy and bothered by that, but then decided he could fix it. He pushed to power button to turn it off, waited for it to shut down, then turned it back on. And logged himself back in. And got right back to his steam locomotives. I run Linux, so he had never been exposed to a power cycle as a troubleshooting mechanism.

You’re looking at one very impressed dad. And perhaps another future Debian developer?

(I’ll just put a few pictures from tonight within the story so you get an idea of what it turned out to be while you read.)

So I had an idea: why not build him a box that has some switches that he can play with? And why not make it a project we can do together?

So back in, I think, July, we went to the hardware store. We bought some AC power cord, some electrical boxes, and assorted supplies. I had some other supplies on hand already, so we didn’t need to spend much. I asked Jacob today if he remembered that day, and he said, “Oh yes! And I got popcorn to eat there!” Which was, indeed, quite true.

I had some surplus plywood, so I cut out two squares, one for a front and one for a back. Then, in 10-minute increments every so often over the last few months, Jacob would say, “Dad, shall we go work on my switchbox?” And by that, he meant that I should work on the switchbox while he pretends that my tape measures are train engines or raids the corner where disused toys are stored. After 10 minutes, he’d be done. Which meant that after I gathered up my tools, remembered where I was, and got to work, I made only a few minutes’ progress each week. But that was fine.

This week, I got it all wired up. It doesn’t have its sides and back yet, but it was enough for Jacob to try it out.

To add to the excitement just that much more, I spent a few dollars at the hardware store today and bought him four light bulbs: 25W red, green, and blue bulbs, and a 7.5W miniature white one. I let him choose two of them to use in the switchbox.

So he started playing with it, and after just a few seconds, said, “Dad, I am very very very very excited about my switchbox!” And a little while later, he burst into applause, and announced, “Dad, my switchbox is so so so so so fun! It is also so so so so so silly the lightbulb is green!”

I wired up a regular light switch that is a master on/off switch. Then the dimmer switch controls the light bulb socket but not the outlet. The dimmer switch also has a pushbutton on/off circuit, so there are plenty of opportunities for discovery.

This is a “play with it only with dad’s supervision” item for now, but after supper, he insisted in bringing Terah downstairs to show her how to use it too. He happily showed off the red and green lights, how to turn them on, and how to make the red light dimmer. I suggested he also show her what happens when he pushes on the dimmer switch, which he happily did, and also explained to her what it does.

He was just amazingly excited. Every so often he’d tell me how excited or happy he was, and some fun fact about it all.

And, really, that’s what I hoped would happen. I didn’t accompany it with these words, but I hope that projects like this can serve to remind everyone that toys and gifts don’t have to cost hundreds of dollars; they can be made with a few dollars’ supplies and some surplus materials laying around the house.

But not only that, but the best parts of this project were the ones Jacob and I spent together — from the time when just the two of us went shopping at the hardware store, through all those 10-minute times where he pretended my tape measures were locomotives and the tape was their track, right to today when he got to try it out. It took a long time, but when I asked him if it was worth the wait, he said “Yes!” and clapped while jumping up and down.

And, I have to admit, as I got into the car with my $4 worth of light bulbs today, I was almost as excited as him, just to see what he would do.

That’s the best part: I got to experience Jacob’s joy right along with him. It’s a time when I really enjoy being a dad.

We’re all used to seeing Yoda 900 years old. I’ve noticed over the past couple of months that Oliver, while eating supper, seems to resemble a 1-year-old Yoda. So I got out my camera one evening, with the results below:

Or this “what’s so hard about lifting an X-wing” pose?

And of course:

Before I go into it, I want to say thank you to all the many of you that have sent comments and support our way. Terah and I haven’t had the chance to reply to many of them, but we have read every one, and very much appreciate it!

Terah spent the night with Jacob, and I spent the day with him today (others were present for parts of it too). Jacob was mostly in good spirits. He was up and around, pushed his IV around himself in the room and to the bathroom. He called it “my VI machine” (not a typo — take that, Emacs, eh?) He continued to enjoy measuring his trips to the bathroom. We went “exploring” a few times. He would walk or run down one of the long corridors in the hospital, holding my hand, while I pulled the IV along. We often went by the cafeteria, which he called the kitchen. One time he insisted that I get a cup of coffee from the free coffee dispenser. I insisted that I didn’t want to, but eventually asked, “Shall I get a pretend cup of coffee?” “Yeah!” So he watched me get a pretend cup, pretend to fill it, and pretend to drink it — and smiled and clapped for me after.

He spent hours watching videos of trains on YouTube. This is a favorite activity at home too, but we obviously limit the amount of time he can spend doing it. I had to limit the amount of time he spent with it today too, of course, but he got rather more time with it than usual.

Jacob had his usual books, but I thought we might try something new today. This morning, I loaded The Tale of Peter Rabbit (with illustrations) onto my Kindle. Jacob loved it, and enjoyed pressing the Next Page button in the Kindle. We read it twice, and he is interested by the promise of other stories about rabbits. It also probably didn’t hurt that his grandma had given him a rabbit in the hospital yesterday.

As we got on towards evening, I told him that tomorrow could be a “normal day.” His response: enthusiastic applause and a big grin, plus “YAY!”

Jacob loved eating today. He wolfed down breakfast and lunch. He enjoyed the lemonade I brought for him again, and played with some toys, and yes, watched some more train videos in the afternoon. He also pretended to ignore the visitors he got as much as possible (pretty typical for him actually).

The doctor came by at about 6:00PM and again was just stunned at how well he’s doing. Jacob neither complained of any pain nor acted like he had any — even when the nurses would rub neosporin on his wounds. The doctor was still just stunned at how well he was doing. He told us his last tractor accident resulted in a death before LifeWatch could arrive, and the one before that turned a good student and a promising athlete into a wheelchair-bound person with a vocabulary of 20 words. “I can’t believe I’m discharging him today, but try as I might, as I go over all the details, there’s no reason for him to stay.” I thanked him for all his help, and he said, “I didn’t do anything for him. All I did was figure out what had happened to him…. I guess we have the CT to prove that something really did happen, but the fact that he showed up at my office in the first place was stunning enough.”

Jacob started to get more excited after the IV was unhooked from him. He didn’t particularly like having the needle removed, due to the pain of taking off the tape, but was happy to have it gone. He was making plans: “will we stop by the train station on the way home? It’s the middle of the night — maybe a train will be there!” (If it’s dark outside, it’s “middle of the night” to him) We agreed to stop by the cafeteria to pick him up one last lemonade, than stop at the train station.

The nurses offered a wheelchair to take him out to the car with. I said I didn’t think he’d want it. One of them said, “Wouldn’t you like a FUN ride in a WHEELCHAIR?” Jacob: “No.” Me: “I suspect he will want to run out of here.” Nurse: “OK then.”

We walked, or half ran, to the cafeteria to get his lemonade. Then we went out to the car. He was excitedly jabbering about everything: the car, my radio, and especially the train station. We did drive by, and at least got to see a freight engine go past. He noticed the Christmas lights starting to be set out along Main Street, and said, “Dad, it’s CHRISTMAS!” “Well, almost…” Then he got quiet, and eventually fell asleep in the car. He had almost fallen asleep while eating his lunch, but stayed awake, and then got interested in other things so he had no nap today.

When we got home, I unbuckled him and pulled him out of his seat. He opened his eyes for just a second, wrapped his arms tightly around my neck, put his head on my shoulder, and fell back asleep while I carried him up to his room. I put him down on his own bed. He had a contented sigh, pulled his favorite blanket up to his neck like he loves to do, and was back asleep in no time. Our little boy is home, safe and sound. It’s a happy day.

Terah, meanwhile, went to Wichita with Oliver. So it was just Jacob and me when we got home.

Jacob spent two hours playing “rivers” with me. A few weeks ago, he and I set this up outside. I found an old length of pipe on our property (my dad thinks it used to carry water from a well) and some cement blocks. I set it up on the blocks so that one end is higher than the other, and the lower end empties out at the top of a small dirt pile. Then I brought a water hose over to it, turned on the water at a very slow speed, and put the hose in the pipe.

The result is a small stream of water coming out at the dirt pile. After it runs just a little while, the dirt is soft enough that you can dig out little channels, or “rivers”, with your fingers or a stick.

Jacob enjoyed this the first time he played, but yesterday he really enjoyed it. We had a fork in the river, and he informed me that he would sit on his bank and I would sit on mine. He also wanted to give “river food” to his river (the fork closest to him). River food was loose dirt that he’d pick up and sprinkle over the water, and watch it get carried on down. I spotted some random bug in the area once, and that bug got food too. I think Jacob and the bug disagreed about whether this was particularly helpful.

Jacob enjoyed playing other games with the pipe. I had showed him that we could send things through the pipe, so he would take out the hose, stuff some dirt in one end, and then make sure I was watching to see if it came out the other end. He sometimes made a fountain by setting the hose on top of the cement blocks and watching the water drip down from level to level.

Then later in the day, I introduced him to Tuxpaint. This is a painting program aimed at children. I had told him I had a “painting game” to show him a few days ago, but because he made some bad behavior choices, he had lost access to my computer for a few days. Anyhow, we tried it yesterday and wow — he loved it. There was constant laughter and excitement. I first showed him how to select colors for the paintbrush. He quickly figured out how to make lines, change colors, and change brushes. Tuxpaint has sound effects for just about everything, which he loved too.

Then we explored the interface together and I showed him the “stamps” feature, which lets you paste pre-made pictures into a drawing. Tuxpaint comes with dozens of these, on kid-friendly themes such as animals, cars, fire trucks, signs, etc. This he loved even more. Terah and Oliver got home about this time, and Oliver and Jacob both sat on my lap for a time, both laughing loudly each time Jacob discovered something new to paste into his picture. Of course, then Oliver tried to eat my keyboard and smash my monitor, but there you go.

Yesterday, Terah had something going on in the evening, so it was just Jacob, Oliver, and me. Due to how the logistics worked out, she brought them to the office after work and I took them from there. We went to the post office, pharmacy, and a restaurant. Jacob and I had this conversation at the pharmacy.

Jacob: Ooo! We are at the Goessel pharmacy! *claps happily*

Me: Hmmm… Actually Goessel doesn’t have a pharmacy. This is the Hesston pharmacy.

Jacob: *gets a serious look on his face* Dad, actually Goessel has a pharmacy…. Look! A fire station!

Me: That’s right. And what can you see inside it?

Jacob: FIRE TRUCKS! They are all still.

Me: I guess there isn’t a fire.

Jacob: I think the Goessel pharmacy is on fire! Shall they go there now?

Me: I hope it’s not on fire. (what are you going to say to that?) Were you wanting to see a fire?

Jacob: YEAH! I think it IS on fire. Shall we go see?

So now he has an imaginary pharmacy with an imaginary fire and he wants to go see. Fortunately he was OK with just going inside Hesston Pharmacy instead.

#2: The Songs on a Ceiling

I read a book and sing a song to Jacob for bedtime every night. Over the weekends, sometimes I do that for him at nap time too. This weekend, he wanted us both to get on his bed, lie on our backs, and look at the imaginary songs on his ceiling. He gave me a whole tour, pointing to various (to me, nondescript) parts of the ceiling as he did so.

“Over there is a song about railroad tracks. There is one about trains. That train is upside down. That other one is stuck. There is a song about Word World. There is a song about preschool. There are the train tracks. There is a train on them. It might bump into the other train. Shall you sing a song about two trains on the tracks and they bump into the other train and go BLAM?”

He appeared to have a whole map in his head of his songs. The train songs were all at a specific place on the ceiling.

#3: Younger Brother

Oliver has really been changing lately. He occasionally will take a few steps by himself, and he has started to say a few parts of words. He communicates really well, though, especially with things he wants. He has a deep, vigorous nod to say yes, and sometimes it’s accompanied by “yesh” for extra emphasis. His face is incredibly expressive too, and he has a distinctive Yoda-like expression at times. I almost expect to hear him say one day, “Like that green bean I do not. Watermelon better is.”

Jacob, of course, is a lot bigger and sometimes is rough with Oliver. But they also have started to play together. Sometimes Jacob will put his head by Oliver’s face. Oliver will grab fistfuls of Jacob’s hair in both hands and pull. Both of them apparently find this hilarious and laugh on and on about it.

#4: Viruses and Stomachs

Sunday Jacob was complaining of a stomach ache. We were driving home, and shortly after we got home, he vomited on the driveway. Jacob really doesn’t like throwing up. It’s unpleasant and maybe a bit scary for him. He was about to start crying after vomiting, except…

One of our cats was hanging around. Claire came over, sniffed Jacob’s vomit, and started eating it. Jacob was so fascinated by what was happening that he stopped sniffling and stood there staring at the cat, then gave an excited report of events to Terah and me.

That evening, he was afraid he would throw up in bed. So we had a large bowl he held *directly* under his chin during story time. But then he didn’t want to lie down, since he was afraid he’d throw up in bed. Terah pointed out that he could have the bowl close while he slept. I went up and checked up on him an hour or two later, and he was sound asleep, face in the large bowl.

#5: The Jukebox

After the pharmacy, Jacob saw Skoops, a local 50s greasy spoon diner place across the street. He really wanted to eat there and get the “birthday cake” ice cream flavor. So we did. He was jabbering about getting a corn dog as we walked over, so that’s what he had to eat. I don’t know how he knew Skoops had them, as I don’t think he’s ever had a corn dog. Oh well.

There’s a jukebox inside Skoops, and every fifteen minutes or so, it’ll spring to life and play a random song even if nobody put coins in it. This was very exciting for Oliver. He’d twist all around in his highchair to watch it. And, most amusingly, he’d start bopping his head. Not really in time with the music or anything, but it was cute to watch. Sometimes he’d get really excited and pretty much his whole body was dancing. Well, as much dancing as you can do when you’re 1 and strapped into a high chair, at any rate.

One time, he heard the music, started “dancing”, and looked at me expectantly. So I started nodding in time with the music, and then Jacob saw us both and started sort of flailing about, somewhat in time with the music. All three of us wound up laughing after that.

I didn’t have as much time to go out and see things as Terah and Oliver did, but I did visit the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which was near Columbia University, as well as Grand Central Terminal. Both were impressive and worth the visit.

When we got home, Jacob stood on our porch teary-eyed and sad. He wanted to go back to New York and ride more subways. He had been all excited about the airplane ride, but it maybe hadn’t occurred to him that we were leaving New York for good, not just taking a trip within the city like on the subway. He was mopey for the rest of the day. But he spent a couple of hours spending a little time on many of his favorite activities at home — pulling out toys we hadn’t taken with us, using his favorite pillow, playing with the cats, or just soaking in being back home. I think he was happy to be home, even though he would deny it.

Saturday we had a busy day, and towards suppertime, Jacob requested a picnic. So we had a picnic. It was starting to cool off outside finally, so we ate at the picnic table on our back porch. It was fun to be outside — even the “keeping the cats off our plates” part. (I eventually let them lick the plates after we were done with them.)

I was completely surprised at how many people made a point to say hi to me, comment that they liked reading about my blog, and encouraged me to keep posting. It was dozens for sure.

I had never really thought that many people took much of an interest in what was, to me, some sort of cross between a journal and a way for family to stay in touch. I deeply appreciate all the encouragement, and the welcome that was extended to Terah, Jacob, and Oliver when they were present at Debconf events a few times.

Thank you so much to all my Debian friends I got to talk to at Debconf. It was a wonderful week and I hope to see you all again before too long. I am happy to be a part of this community.

Really dark blue,
really dark blue,
really dark blue…

The tune changed a bit, but the words didn’t. Terah and I wondered what was really dark blue, until finally we heard:

Really dark blue,
really dark blue,
really dark blue sky.

Really dark blue…

Then a little while later, we heard:

Really dark blue,
really dark blue,
really dark blue with morning stars.

It was such a cute moment that it’s hard to convey it in words.

I even got an audio recording of it on my phone, which I’ll perhaps post someday.

Update 21:05: For Jacob’s usual bedtime song tonight, I offered to sing the “really dark blue” song for him. When I sang “really dark blue with morning stars,” he said, “no, that’s not it. It’s MOONLIT stars.” So I guess my 3-year-old just corrected my blog post.

I see a career in copy editing in his future…

When we got on the train, in the middle of the night as usual, Jacob couldn’t stop chattering about how “great”, “fun”, and “exciting” it is. He told us about all the lots of great things on the train, the fact that we were on a “night train”, and generally couldn’t stop chattering. For an hour. At 3:30AM.

This was a typical sight from Jacob:

It wasn’t as relaxing as usual for Terah and me. Oliver is at the “grabbing everything in sight” stage. Which worked fine when Jacob was at the age, but with Jacob also along it was a bit more difficult to manage. I suspect that our next trip, when Oliver is a few months older, will go easier.

A highlight for both boys, as usual, is the dining car. Oliver loves anything related to eating solid food — it’s still novel to him — and Jacob loves anything relating to trains. What could go wrong? (Parents will probably identify the capability for two hyper-excited young boys to have plenty of things go wrong at a table in a restaurant here… fortunately we didn’t have anything go terribly wrong.)

Oliver turned out to find the things outside the window to require intense concentration — intense enough to stick out his tongue while he worked it all out.

And Jacob, of course, wanted to get the wrapper off his straw by himself. Which he can do, but takes a minute.

They also enjoyed the lounge car.

We were in a sleeper room on both trains. That was nice, and when we needed to go “explore”, we could. Jacob’s favorite part of the trip was when I folded down the upper bunk during the day for him to play. I pointed out that it was like a “train treehouse.” His face sure lit up. He loved that he had his own window up there to look out of. He climbed up the ladder, and after awhile of playing, said, “Dad, would you like to play with me up here?” Of course I would — it always makes me happy when he asks if I want to play with him.

As I was playing with him, I asked him if he was having fun in his train treehouse. He gave me a sweet smile, and said, “Dad, this is the best place of ever!”

In Chicago, Jacob and I went outside and walked around. He enjoyed walking across the bridges over the canal by Union Station. I checked some work email when we got back, tried but failed to reach some local hams with my handheld, and then we got on the train for New York.

The boys loved it too, and Jacob was very ready to be in New York when we got there. We got out at Penn Station — which was, I think, pretty much what my mind had imagined of an underground station robbed of its former glory (especially having been in that part of Chicago Union Station). We found the connection to the 2 train uptown, bought some MetroCards for the subway, and got on. Jacob was very interested in the subway. He sat very, very still — I thought he was scared — but on asking him some questions, realized that he was just very interested and engrossed in it all.

I had been trying out my HF antenna for my amateur radio setup a few days ago, and by some coincidence, kept making contact with people that grew up in New York. A guy from Fargo, ND — a native of Brooklyn — told me to make sure to get pretzels from a hot sauce vendor, Pastrami on rye or corned beef on rye from a Jewish deli (because they have the best meat), pizza from guys wearing red and white shirts, and don’t be afraid of rats on the subway tracks, and that our boys will love to feed leftover bits of pretzels to pigeons and squirrels. He got so excited about NYC that he went on and on, saying, “Man, you’re making me hungry now.”

During times I’m not at sessions at Debconf, we’ve found some time to do some things as a family. We went to Grand Central Terminal, just to see it — it is indeed still Grand. I knew there was a Jewish deli there, so I thought — hey — try out his advice. It was closed, and when I realized it was Saturday, I realized why. Oops. We hopped on another train to Brooklyn and checked out the New York Transit Museum, which is great and has a lot of exhibits about the history of the city’s subway and bus systems. It’s housed in a former subway station, and they have a lot of old subway cars down there dating back to 1905 — most of which are open to go inside of.

It’s been nice to meet people at Debconf that I have only known via email or IRC. The organizers of this conference have done a fabulous job. I have every expectation that this will turn out to be the best conference I’ve been to in at least 12 years — this is my first Debconf. It doesn’t skimp on the technical details, people are friendly, and there is a sense of common purpose. But just as important, while there is a set schedule, there is an easy way to add other ad-hoc sessions to the conference schedule. People can get together a group interested in a topic, and schedule an event about it for the next day very easily. I’m quite impressed by that, and am looking forward to the virtualization discussion that grew out of a question to the mailing list.

It was also neat to meet people that sort of knew our family from my blog posts. I had no idea that there were all that many people that actually read these things ;-)

The Debconf kick-off was great. As I was walking across the campus of Columbia towards it, it was a nice temperature, with some light rain, and I heard bagpipes in the distance. Beautiful. And when I left after the evening sessions, I still heard bagpipes. So I went to check it out, and ran into Gabriella Coleman, one of the Debconf organizers — and the person that gave the talk I just left — on the way, with the same idea. The Columbia campus is beautiful and historic, and it is an excellent venue for the conference.

New York is a great city and I’m sure we’ll be back. It is great to walk out of the hotel in the morning, buy a fresh peach or two from the street vendor 20 feet away, and then go buy a roll or two ($0.75 each) from the bakery down the street. I have been so missing rolls like that since we got back from Germany in March. These weren’t quite like the German bakeries, but the closest I’ve had to it.

It is interesting to note how differently people from different places look at things. Terah has told several people how we live 6 miles from a town with 500 people in it, and people that stop to think about it realize how different it is from New York. It was a surprise to me to hear that some New Yorkers think of Columbia as “country”. It is beautifully landscaped, and feels different than the rest of the city.

The numbers I’ve seen suggest that a typical fall weekday has more people on the Columbia campus than in the entire county where we live. And that county is twice the size of New York City.

That’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with New Yorkers thinking of it as country, any more than there is of me thinking of a town with 15,000 people as a pretty big town. It’s a different perspective, and I enjoy different perspectives — which is another thing I like about Debconf. There are so many people from all over the world there that different perspectives are inevitable.

[H]is shop is a lone outpost; in a single generation, the American who built, repaired, and tinkered with technology has evolved into an entirely new species: the American who prefers to slip that technology out of his pocket and show off its killer apps. Once, we were makers. Now most of us are users.

I remember as a kid eagerly awaiting each year’s new RadioShack catalog. I’d read them pretty much cover to cover for fun. And who wouldn’t? The catalogs had fun things like radios, telephone gadgets, calculators, tape recorders, electronic “lab kits”, books, components, LEDs… I loved the catalogs and loved the store.

My parents bought me a electronic kit (if memory serves 20 years later, it’s the “deluxe 160-project electronic kit” from page 156 of the 1988 catalog, though it may have been purchased a different year). I had endless fun with that thing. It had resistors, diode, capacitors, oscillator, speaker, LED, relay, etc — plenty to make a bunch of kid-friendly projects.

Just looking at the catalog makes me excited even today. On the next page from the kit I had is a $5 crystal radio kit which needs no power source — “Solderless. With earphone, instructions, theory.” On page 28 there was a revolving red light, and some microcassette recorders on p. 36 (I had one of those for awhile).

I had enthusiasm for building and figuring out things for a long time. My dad let me take apart an old lawn mower for fun once — I’m sure he knew ahead of time it would never be back together. One of his friends from work built homemade contraptions out of things like an old vacuum cleaner (attach a cardboard tube to the exhaust and you get a great tennis ball shooter). And there was always all sorts of fun junk to discover up in the barn.

I eventually shifted to a different sort of “making things”: programming. It has kept me busy for quite a number of years.

But the Wired article has a point. RadioShack is struggling. Many people have no interest in making or fixing things anymore. The best-selling smartphone in the world comes sealed in a metal case where not even the battery can be replaced, the software is dictated by a company in California, and good luck trying to program for it without signing your life away first. A far cry from the first computer I used, a TRS-80 Color Computer II, bought, yes, at RadioShack. Turn it on, and in a few seconds you get a BASIC prompt. Can’t really use it without programming. Being able to read its manual was an early motivation for me to work at learning to read.

It is sad that so many devices can’t be worked on anymore, and that so many people don’t care. It is difficult for me to give Jacob (and later, Oliver) the sort of experience I had as a child. Companies would love to sell us $50 DVD sets, $300 “educational” game systems, $40 educational games, and any number of $30 plastic toys (some of which we have and the boys enjoy).

I’d rather give him a $10 bag of resistors, capacitors, wire, battery holders, LEDs, and a book, and see what he can come up with (when he’s a bit older, of course). And, in fact, he and I built his first computer together. We installed the ultimate in operating systems for tinkering: Linux.

This all brings me back to RadioShack. I’ve been working on ham radio lately, with an eye to that being a project for Jacob (age 3.5), Oliver (just turned 1), and me to enjoy in the future. I needed some cable, and had been told by many people to visit the RadioShack in Derby, KS. It’s like the one mentioned in the Wired article: huge, selling everything from washing machines to bulk cable, except this one specializes in amateur radio.

I asked Jacob if he would like to come with me to a radio store. “Dad, I would LOVE that!” He brought his little semi-broken walkie-talkies with him to use during the hour drive there. At one point, he was concerned that a radio store is like a library and he might have to leave them on a shelf. I assured him he could keep them.

We got to the RadioShack and he loved it. He couldn’t even really contain his excitement. He ran back and forth along the bright green stripe running down the middle of the carpet. He excitedly watched them measure out 60ft of RG-8 coax for me. He pushed buttons on the demo clothes dryer, looked at all the antennas, and just had a great time.

And he’s been interested in my radio, too. When I was talking to somebody on it the other day, he said, “I think he is at the radio store. He is having fun there.” Right now, everybody I talk to on the radio is at the radio store to him. Jacob loves the fact that the backlight on my FT-857D can change colors, and often comes into the office just so I can put it into setup mode and let him spin the big wheel to change the colors. He enjoys opening boxes of components, and came out to help (and run around) while I suspended a dipole from some trees last Friday.

I had told Jacob when we got to the store that “This radio store is called RadioShack.” He obviously took that to heart, because now if he hears me talking about “a radio store”, he will say, “Dad, actually it is radio SHACK.”

So I say thank you to the Derby RadioShack for keeping the magic of making things with your dad alive for another generation.

Yesterday, though, I introduced Jacob to several bits of technology that really got him excited.

We have a pair of FRS radios. These are low-power “Family Radio Service” devices, with a maximum practical range of maybe a mile, and are about as cheap a radio as you can buy that still has any sort of practical use. Anyhow, the receive circuit on one broke. I ordered a pair of TriSquare digital radios to replace them, which are incompatible. So, I have two radios, one with a broken receive circuit. What to do?

GIVE THEM TO JACOB! I explained that one radio is the “talking” radio (the broken one) and the other is the “listening” radio. Then I demonstrated how I could use the talking radio and he could hear me on the listening radio. That was great fun. I encouraged him to go to the kitchen and see if he could still hear me in the next room. Cackles of laughter gave me the answer. Then he discovered the “call” button would make the other radio sound like a telephone, which was all the more exciting. He and I took turns with the talking and listening radios.

Then I used the belt clip and attached the listening radio to the back of his shirt. I pointed out to him that this was sort of like a loudspeaker. Anything he said into the talking radio while holding town the transmit button would sound louder because it would also come out the radio on his back. Much cackling followed, and he ran around the house yelling “MEOW!” at the top of his lungs into the radio, then saying, “Dad, did you hear THAT? It was VERY loud!” He has spent hours listening to himself, listening to me, and generally enjoying life with radios.

Jacob’s second discovery was a cassette tape player. Awhile back, Terah rescued an old cassette tape player that was being thrown out, and bought a few 15-cent tapes for Jacob at a thrift store. The idea is that we can just let him play, and not care if he smashes it to bits. He enjoys it, but like the computer, didn’t really get excited about it. Until yesterday, when we had this conversation:

Me: “Jacob, would you like to record your own voice on a tape?”

Jacob: (excited) “Sure!”

Me: “OK, bring me your tape recorder.”

Jacob: (exasperated) “Dad, it’s not a tape RECORDER. It’s a tape PLAYER.”

Me: “Jacob, it is a tape player, but it’s also a tape recorder too.”

Jacob: (paused for about 5 seconds, then…) “Ooooo! That is silly!” (scampers off to find it)

He found it, and I helped him put some tape over the write-protect tab on a cassette he had. Then he recorded his voice. He eventually figured out the stop, rewind, play, and record buttons with my help. But he’s still confused: while he’s recording, why doesn’t he hear anything? Our first recording had me asking him some questions, and then telling him to press the stop button when he was done. He listened to it dozens of times, and each time my recorded voice asked a question, he answered it a little before his recorded voice did. And each time my recorded voice told him to press the stop button, he would say, “I don’t want to” while his recorded voice asked “is this it?” He pretty well understands what the radios are about, but doesn’t really “get” the tape recorder yet. Nevertheless, it has just become a far more exciting device in his eyes.

Terah has been rolling her eyes at me today as I’ve been trying to think up what other broken or old bits of technology we might have that Jacob would enjoy. My latest plan involves adapting his broken old batte
ry-operated fan into some sort of lego-related car. I think he’d have fun working on it with me too.

All this reminds me of things I did as a kid. My dad worked with a semi-retired man (Herb Miller) that loved to build weird contraptions. One of my favorites was a ball shooter made out of an old vacuum cleaner with a cardboard tube attached to the output spot. I also remember building a motorized car out of an erector set that sort of bent the rules at a school science class project. The idea was to launch a vehicle down a ramp and person whose vehicle went the farthest got a prize. There were no rules against using batteries and a scavenged motor to get that extra little edge over gravity. My car was the only one to manage to crash into the wall on the far side of the gymnasium. The science teacher, in a bit of fast thinking perhaps, announced my car the winner of the “electric division.” For some reason, I seem to be poised to encourage this sort of thinking in Jacob…

This procedure is somewhat delicate. Running through each half of the thyroid are nerves that control the vocal chords. Also embedded in each half are tiny parathyroids, which regulate the body’s calcium levels. Losing either of these things in one half of the thyroid is no big deal, but losing either of them entirely can be serious. For this reason, the general plan was for Terah to have half of her thyroid out, unless it was obvious in surgery that it would be a health risk to leave the other half in, or that it was obvious that the removal of the first half had successfully preserved the nerves and parathyroids.

Jacob and Oliver spent the night with my parents last night — an event that Jacob was incredibly excited about. I came home last night to find him running in circles in the kitchen. I had this conversation with him:

Me: Jacob, are you excited about something?

Jacob: Yes!

Me: What are you excited about?

Jacob: I don’t know. (He usually says this when he doesn’t want to say, but I figured it was his pending overnight stay)

.. a minute later ..

Jacob: I am excited about something blue.

Me: [genuinely confused] Hmmm…. I don’t know what blue thing you might be excited about. Can you tell me?

Jacob: A blue house!

Me: Oh, is it grandma and grandpa’s blue house?

Jacob: YEAH! Now you’ve got it! I’m so excited!

He was still running in circles the whole time.

So Jacob and Oliver left, and Terah and I worked on the house.

This morning, we arrived at the hospital at 6:15 to check in. At usual, the staff there was incredibly friendly and helpful. And two of them made connections: one of the intake nurses had taught at the college where my dad works, and another nurse knows his cousin. Living where we do, we were not surprised by this. (You sort of wonder how many connections you’ll make at a place like this.)

The surgery area is right next to the ER, and people waiting for people in surgery normally wait there. Having got my fill of the TV playing infomercials for the morning in the 5 minutes we sat there, I arranged to wait in the cafeteria (which is large and quiet in the middle of the morning) and they just called my cell phone when Terah was done.

I was with Terah for as long as possible, then ate breakfast in the cafeteria, walked over to the doctor’s office next door for my weekly allergy shots, and then waited with my Kindle in the cafeteria. They called, and a little while later the surgeon explained how the surgery went: far easier than they had expected. He was confident the left side surgery went well, and so took out the whole thing — and was confident the right side removal also went well.

I went to wait in Terah’s room for her to exit recovery, and our pastor and his daughter showed up to wait too. When she arrived, she was very tired but said a few words before going to sleep. Our pastor gave the two of us a minute before coming in, and read a selection from Psalm 139 before leaving.

I then mostly waited with my Kindle some more until she woke up. I brought back some lunch from the cafeteria, and eventually Terah woke up. We chatted just a bit (it was mostly me talking). I went to pick up the boys, and brought them to the hospital. They were glad to see her.

But then, the dilemma: I had promised Jacob that we would eat in the “hospital restaurant”, but it was only 4 and they didn’t start serving supper until 5. Jacob somehow remembered that we “went exploring” in the hospital when Oliver was born 11 months ago, and had been talking about doing this already. So off we went: Jacob sometimes “helping” me push Oliver’s stroller, sometimes running on ahead, enjoying himself and spelling out letters on big signs on the walls. We got a whole bunch of smiles and compliments. Oliver was laughing, and Jacob was happy and well-behaved. We went towards the cafeteria at 4:30 and I got Jacob some of their free lemonade. He was complaining about not eating, and I remembered that he noticed a nurse walking out of there with an ice cream cone while we were exploring.

Obviously the soft-serve machine was already up, so I got him and me ice cream cones. I’m sure he’ll be talking about the hospital ice cream for days. Anyhow, it took him about half an hour to eat it, so it was perfect timing for supper. We ate, went back to see Terah, and then headed out. I do believe that these may be the only two boys I know of that actually think of a hospital as a fun place to go. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Jacob asks to go back there.

Both boys fell asleep on the way home. Jacob, unfortunately, had a rather significant accident, possibly due to the large amounts of free lemonade he insisted on drinking. And it was hot outside. So I carried Jacob in, and he sort of groggily looked at me. I suggested he take a nap on the rug in the kitchen (his room is upstairs) while I bring Oliver in. He sort of collapsed onto the rug and was back asleep a few seconds later. I got Oliver in, and brought down new shorts and an overnight pullup for Jacob. Put them on, had him use the toilet, and got him in bed. By that time, Oliver was awake and hungry. So I got him fed, and neither one of them quite went to sleep easily — but they did. I watered the flowers and garden, did a load of laundry, etc.

Jacob had been worried about the surgery, though had trouble verbalizing it. I think he’s better about it now, though some of his trouble falling asleep tonight was probably still worry about that. Hopefully he’ll be better once Terah is back home, which should hopefully be tomorrow.

Anyhow, Jacob doesn’t remember the last time we went camping; he was not quite 2 at the time. I explained that we would sleep in tents, and he’d get one just his size. He laughed at that. Then I explained that he would get a bag to sleep in, and he thought that was hilarious. He kept talking about tents — and even more so about sleeping bags — until he actually got to be in one.

It seems like each time we go camping, we wind up somewhere else. We’ve camped at Kanoplis Lake and Marion Park and Lake in the past few years. But this time we went to Cedar Valley Reservoir near Garnett, KS. It was a nice place to be, with some “wilderness camping” areas far from any RV hookups (though right next to a gravel driveway where we could park).

Almost as soon as we got out of the car, Jacob found a partially-burned stick left in a fire ring. So of course his hands were black pretty quick. He kept track of that stick the whole time we were there, and used it for everything he could think of. His favorite use, though, was at the lake to splash water:

The lake really was his favorite feature. He loved to throw rocks and sticks in it with me, to splash himself, and to stick his feet in. Oh, and to splash me.

The pier was also a great thing for him — he at first thought it was a boat, then really wanted to go. I made him hold my hand the whole time, and he liked walking on it. But he was frustrated that he couldn’t reach the water.

Somehow, Jacob acted as if he could sit in the hot sun for hours, just making small splashes with a stick. I, on the other hand, felt the 90-degree heat strongly, and eventually we found a shady spot to play in the lake.

Oliver enjoyed crawling around on a blanket or on the grass. Though Terah put a stop to that after she noticed that he came across a pile of fish heads and was about to reach for one and put it in his mouth.

We cooked over a campfire Friday night and Saturday morning. It took me a lot longer to start a fire than normal. Part of the problem was that there had been a lot of rain in the area, and it was humid, so there was little kindling to be found. Plenty of larger pieces of wood, so once the fire got going, it burned nicely. We cooked brats, brought along some homemade bread, had grilled foil-wrapped potatoes, and had stir-fry vegetables. Oliver got to eat with us too, of course:

Terah is a big believer in smores, so after supper we made some smores — Jacob predictably got sticky from the marshmallows and chocolate.

Jacob started asking when I’d set up the tent almost as soon as he found his stick. All afternoon he kept asking. Finally we got it set up, and of course he was so excited that he played inside it for an hour before he fell asleep.

Terah had bought a $4 lantern at Walmart to give to him to use in his tent. I told him that there would be a “surprise lantern” in his tent for him to use. And he loved his lantern. It could turn on, off, and flash red. At one point he asked me, “Dad, do you have a surprise lantern too?” “No, I will just use my flashlight.” He looked a bit sad about that. For about 5 seconds. Then he turned on his lantern again. Here he is with it, still playing happily about 2 hours after his bedtime:

And in the morning, of course he was still wanting that, but also wanted to play with his digital camera (a kid’s version that also has a simple game or two on it). Without leaving the tent, of course.

Oliver was getting hungry while we worked on breakfast, so I gave him some bread to munch on.

We used our cast iron skillet to fry some bacon for breakfast. Then Terah made some pancakes in the skillet (with the bacon grease). Greasiest and best pancakes ever. After that, we had some fried and scrambled eggs. After that, we had more smores (I wasn’t kidding about Terah being a big believer in them.)

Jacob decided that he wanted to play in the other tent. He enjoyed playing with Terah, Oliver, and the air mattress (that Terah appreciated as much as I thought it took up too much space in the car). There’s a little window on the back that can open to a screen or open completely. Jacob and Oliver enjoyed looking out of it while open. Or rather, Jacob enjoyed that, while Oliver enjoyed licking it.

I had my Droid with me to keep an eye on the weather. The forecast for several days had called for a 20% chance of storms on Saturday. I checked Saturday morning at 7, and it still called for 20% chance of storms after 1PM. We decided we’d pack up our tents after breakfast so we could stay as long as we liked — or leave on short notice if we preferred. Clouds seemed to be building, though, so I checked the forecast again at maybe 9. Now it called for 60% chance of thunderstorms and heavy rain before 1PM. Guess I shouldn’t have been surprised; it is Kansas after all.

As I had the first tent about 90% put away, it started to rain. We rushed to get the rest of the stuff in the car, and by the time we did, it was raining heavily. We had planned to spend at least part of the afternoon there, but decided we’d look for another place to stop on the way home.

We stopped first at Garnett’s North Lake, as the rain had let up for awhile. We spotted a fishing pier that Jacob wanted to walk on, but the bridge out to it was underwater, so we passed on that. While Terah fed Oliver in a shelter, Jacob and I played on some swings. Then we walked down to that lake. Jacob carefully came to an abrupt stop and looked both ways at each disused road between us and the lake, saying “OK” when it was clear to go.

The rain picked up again, so we started heading towards home. It got quite heavy, with thunder and everything, which Jacob didn’t care for at all. Both boys went to sleep, though.

We stopped at Marion Reservoir on the way home. Jacob hadn’t been able to play in the lake at Garnett (the place we stopped had a bank that was too steep) and so we played there. He waded into the water at the swimming area, and predictably enjoyed — yes — throwing rocks into the lake.

When we got home, I set out the wet tent and tarps (it’s not good to store that stuff wet) to dry — there hadn’t been rain at home yet.

Camping’s a lot of work, but it was a good family activity. I’m looking forward to our next time, and hope we can choose a weekend a little less hot and damp.

So I wound up taking 824 photos. Hurray for digital cameras. We narrowed that down to a few of our favorites, which you can view as a slideshow. I’ll highlight few of those below.

Jacob walking down the drive way, gazing at all the beans coming up off in the distance

Hmm, Oliver, let me see too…

Running is fun!

Peek-a-boo

Goerzen’s Law of Child Photography: If you attempt to get them to pose, a minimum of one boy will have a weird expression at any given time.

Also, chances are good that a cat will sneak in and also do something.

My imagined conversation for this one: “Here Oliver, this is how you use a piece of bark.” “Quiet, I’m trying to eat this grass.”

Oliver decides that grass stuck on his teeth isn’t fun

No explanation for this one.

Classic brothers. Jacob is using a piece of bark to mess around in some dirt, while Oliver quietly learns how to do it. He never said it, but I can easily imagine him saying, “Here Oliver, here’s what you do with bark: you dig up dirt like this! It’s funny!”

BONZAI!!!

Guess I better watch where I point that camera…

Here kitty — get ready for some more petting… *thwack* Strangely the cat seemed to love it. Our other cat avoids Oliver.

Jacob deriving a great deal of joy from telling us that his shirt says “big SPIDER”. He came up with that joke himself and thought it was hilarious.

This is one of a few photos of Jacob wearing a suit that I once wore.

It’s hard to stand still when the hammock has a great “train whistle” on it.

I have no idea what he’s planning here. But really, I think I should be afraid.

It’s… a fridge door. Yay?

We did that this evening, and wow — he loves it. While the Debian Installer was running, he kept begging to type, so I taught him how to hit Alt-F2 and fired up cat for him. That was a lot of fun. But even more fun was had once the system was set up. I installed bsdgames and taught him how to use worm. worm is a simple snake-like game where you use the arrow keys to “eat” the numbers. That was a big hit, as Jacob likes numbers right now. He watched me play it a time or two, then tried it himself. Of course he crashed into the wall pretty quickly, which exits the game.

I taught him how to type “worm” at the computer, then press Enter to start it again. Suffice it to say he now knows how to spell worm very well. Yes, that’s right: Jacob’s first ever Unix command was…. worm.

He’d play the game, and cackle if he managed to eat a number. If he crashed into a wall, he’d laugh much harder and run over to the other side of the room.

Much as worm was a hit, the Linux shell was even more fun. He sometimes has a problem with the keyboard repeat, and one time typed “worrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrm”. I tried to pronounce that for him, which he thought was hilarious. He was about to backspace to fix it, when I asked, “Jacob, what will happen if you press Enter without fixing it?” He looked at me with this look of wonder and excitement, as if to say, “Hey, I never thought of that. Let’s see!” And a second later, he pressed Enter.

The result, of course, was:

-bash: worrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrm: command not found

“Dad, what did it do?”

I read the text back, and told him it means that the computer doesn’t know what worrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrm means. Much laughter. At that point, it became a game. He’d bang at random letters, and finally press Enter. I’d read what it said. Pretty soon he was recognizing the word “bash”, and I heard one time, “Dad, it said BASH again!!!” Sometimes if he’d get semicolons at the right place, he’d get two or three “bashes”. That was always an exciting surprise. He had more fun at the command line than he did with worm, and I think at least half of it was because the shell was called bash.

He took somewhat of an interest in the hardware part earlier in the evening, though not quite as much. He was interested in opening up other computers to take parts out of them, but bored quickly. The fact that Terah was cooking supper probably had something to do with that. He really enjoyed the motherboard (and learned that word), and especially the CPU fan. He loved to spin it with his finger. He thought it interesting that there would be a fan inside his computer.

When it came time to assign a hostname, I told Jacob he could name his computer. Initially he was confused. Terah suggested he could name it “kitty”, but he didn’t go for it. After a minute’s thought, he said, “I will name it ‘Grandma Marla.’” Confusion from us — did he really understand what he was saying? “You want to name your computer ‘Grandma Marla?’” “Yep. That will be silly!” “Sure you don’t want to name it Thomas?” “That would be silly! No. I will name my computer ‘Grandma Marla.”" OK then. My DNS now has an entry for grandma-marla. I had wondered what he would come up with. You never know with a 3-year-old!

It was a lot of fun to see that sense of wonder and experimentation at work. I remember it from the TRS-80 and DOS machine, when I would just try random things to see what they would do. It is lots of fun to watch it in Jacob too, and hear the laughter as he discovers something amusing.

We let Jacob stay up 2 hours past his bedtime to enjoy all the excitement. Tomorrow the computer moves to his room. Should be loads of excitement then too.

And, more importantly, last night I introduced him to the Linux command line interface, which I called the “black screen.” Now, Jacob can’t read yet, though he does know his letters. He had a lot of fun sort of exploring the system.

I ran “cat”, which will simply let him bash on the keyboard, and whenever he presses Enter, will echo what he typed back at him. I taught him how to hold Shift and press a number key to get a fun symbol. His favorite is the “hat” above the 6.

Then I ran tr a-z A-Z for him, and he got to watch the computer convert every lowercase letter into an uppercase letter.

Despite the fact that Jacob enjoys watching Youtube videos of trains and even a bit of Railroad Tycoon 3 with me, this was some pure exploration that he loves. Sometimes he’d say, “Dad, what will this key do?” Sometimes I didn’t know; some media keys did nothing, and some other keys caused weird things to appear. My keyboard has back and forward buttons designed to use with a web browser. He almost squealed with delight when he pressed the forward button and noticed it printed lots of ^@^@^@ characters on the screen when he held it down. “DAD! It makes LOTS of little hats! And what is that other thing?” (The at-sign).

I’ve decided it’s time to build a computer for Jacob. I have an old Sempron motherboard lying around, and an old 9″ black-and-white VGA CRT that’s pretty much indestructible, plus an old case or two. So it will cost nothing. This evening, Jacob will help me find the parts, and then he can help me assemble them all. (This should be interesting.)

Then I’ll install Debian while he sleeps, and by tomorrow he should be able to run cat all by himself. I think that, within a few days, he can probably remember how to log himself in and fire up a program or two without help.

I’m looking for suggestions for text-mode games appropriate to a 3-year-old. So far, I’ve found worm from bsdgames that looks good. It doesn’t require him to have quick reflexes or to read anything, and I think he’ll pick up using the arrow keys to move it just fine. I think that tetris is probably still a bit much, but maybe after he’s had enough of worm he would enjoy trying it.

I was asked on Twitter why I’ll be using the command line for him. There are a few reasons. One is that it will actually be usable on the 9″ screen, but another one is that it will expose the computer at a different level than a GUI would. He will inevitably learn about GUIs, but learning about a CLI isn’t inevitable. He won’t have to master coordination with a mouse right away, and there’s pretty much no way he can screw it up. (No, I won’t be giving him root yet!) Finally, it’s new and different to him, so he’s interested in it right now.

My first computer was a TRS-80 Color Computer (CoCo) II. Its primary interface, a BASIC interpreter, I guess counts as a command-line interface. I remember learning how to use that, and later DOS on a PC. Some of the games and software back then had no documentation and crashed often. Part of the fun, the challenge, and sometimes the frustration, was figuring out just what a program was supposed to do and how to use it. It will be fun to see what Jacob figures out.

Anyhow, we made it to the airport in Prague with plenty of time to spare. That trip that involved a tram, a subway, and a bus, and was on a Sunday morning when all of these services run less frequently. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but we did it in right at an hour, just as the hotel desk had estimated.

Anyhow, in Prague they were heavily steering people to the self check-in kiosks. So we tried it, and got about halfway through the procedure when it asked us to put our passport on the glass scanner. I did so, and it appeared to process, then complained that “the document is not a passport.” Eventually an airport employee came over, had the same result after trying it twice, so beckoned us over to the counter.

Then on towards our gate. We briefly considered some sort of snack, since we wouldn’t get to Munich until after lunch, but the terrible prices scared us off. An entire dinner with friends the evening before cost only 235 crowns ($12.53) for the two of us together, and one restaurant was advertising a panini and Coke for 1 person at 220 Kc ($11.72). Anyhow, we eventually found ice cream bars at a reasonable price.

While sitting down at our gate, in the out-of-the-way “small planes only” part of the airport, we noticed only the second drinking fountain in Europe — conveniently labeled with an icon indicating what it’s for. The only person other than me that used it washed his hands in it, and did not sip the water.

We eventually got on the packed bus to our plane, then flew to Munich. Over there, announcements at regular intervals suggested that passengers flying to the USA go to their gate immediately so they can pass the extra security screening. What joy. We headed in that direction, stopping only to change my remaining Czech crowns to dollars.

And then we got to go through passport control followed by security for the second time of the day. This one took special interest in our camera and Terah’s scissors. Mysteriously, there was a stream of people not going through security, and we never quite figured out why.

We wanted something for lunch, and inside this special security zone there was only one real option: a bar of sorts. We got there, and watched a guy pay for two small beers and a pretzel. They shop conveniently let him pay for dollars, and the price came to $25. Worst exchange rate ever. We bought a pretzel and two croissants and I got rid of my last Euro note (EUR 5) and a EUR 1 coin.

Eventually our flight got going. It was interesting comparing our international flight on Lufthansa to our flight to Hamburg on Continental. Lufthansa came through the cabin — even in our “cheapest economy seats” section — with hot wet wipes, handed out and later collected with tweezers, before each meal. The food was slightly better than Continental. The in-flight entertainment system had more things on it, though there were not power hookups at the seats. I still didn’t really care for any of the entertainment options, though I did watch a Ricky Gervais movie which was OK. I caught a brief nap and read my Kindle.

In Chicago, we got to go through American passport control. To get into the USA, even as a citizen, you get to fill out a whole form. That’s a bit different than getting into Germany, where they check your passport and send you on your way without even bothering to inspect your bags. (There’s a voluntary office you can go do if you have anything to declare.) I had noted on our form that we were bringing in food, and they asked me what kind. I told them it was chocolate still in the wrapper, and they said, “OK, that’s fine,” and waved us on. So in the end it was really no more involved. All the customs people we saw in every country were friendly and helpful.

In Chicago, you have to go through security again after customs, so that made our third security check of the day.

At our gate, CNN was showing the House debate on health care, and the bill finally passed just prior to boarding for Indianapolis. That was a pleasant “welcome home”!

Our flight got to Indianapolis a bit after midnight (as scheduled, sigh), and then there was a bit of a drive. We spent the night in Indiana. Jacob and Oliver were staying there with their grandparents, but of course were already asleep. Jacob woke up in the middle of the night at one point, panicked because he couldn’t find the butterfly he always sleeps with. Terah helped him find it, and apparently he just sat there staring at her for a minute.

Both boys were happy to see us in the morning. Jacob was talking about the toys, and Oliver was just laughing. We ate breakfast, then tried to get on the road as soon as possible — we had an 11-hour (before stops) drive ahead of us, and had to complete it all in one day. We had talked about what we would be doing, and Jacob was sad to leave grandma & grandpa and their farm.

About an hour into the drive, Jacob said, “Dad, where are we going?” “We’re driving home.” “Kitty doesn’t like that. We should go that way.” (and he pointed out the back window.) “Back to grandma & grandpa’s house?” “Yeah!”

Jacob has this habit of referring to himself in the third person as a kitty, and probably more so when there’s something sad or difficult.

We stopped for lunch or “running around breaks” a few times, and wound up getting home at about 8:30. Oliver started laughing when he saw our porch, and we got inside, Jacob said, “I want to run around all over the place!” and he did. They were happy to be home.

In Leipzig, Fritzi had chosen a book to give to Jacob. On Monday, I got it out, and explained it was from “Fritzi in Germany.” Jacob was very interested. I told him it was about a mole (Maulwurf), and he thought that was great too. I couldn’t remember Brad’s translation of the German story, so Jacob and I made up our own story as we went. This was a big hit, and he had me read the book three times all at once. Then he wanted to talk about who gave him the book again.

In all, I’m very glad we took the trip. It was fun seeing the sights, visiting with friends, and being a part of an environment that’s different from our own. I hope we can do it again before too long.

It was getting late, I was tired, and so I was a bit disoriented for a few seconds when I saw my own words flash up on the screen. At the time, his most recent story had excerpted my review of paper books. Wow, I thought. This never happens when I’m about to review Dickens. And actually, it’s never happened before, ever. I’ll admit to owning a big grin when I saw that one of my favorite authors liked one of my blog posts.

And Wil Wheaton is one of my favorite authors for sure. I enjoy reading others too, of course, but Wil’s writing is something I can really identify with like no other. My parents were never in a London debtor’s prison like Dickens’ were; I was never a promising medical student like A. C. Doyle. But I was, and am, a geek, and Wil Wheaton captures that more perfectly than anyone. After I read Just a Geek a few years ago, I gave it to my wife to read, claiming it would help her understand me better. I think it did.

In The Happiest Days of Our Lives, Wil recounts memories of his childhood, and of more recent days. He talks of flashbacks to his elementary school days, when he and his classmates tried to have the coolest Star Wars action figures (for me: calculator watches). Or how his aunt introduced him to D&D, which reminded me of how my uncle got me interested in computers. Teaching himself D&D was an escape for the geeky kid that wasn’t good at sports, as teaching myself Pascal and C was for me. Between us, the names and activities are different, but the story is the same.

I particularly appreciated Wil’s reflections on his teenage years. Like him, at that age, I often found myself as the youngest person in a room full of adults. Yet I was still a teenager, and like any teenager, did some things that I look back on with some embarrassment now. Wil was completely honest with himself — he admitted crashing a golf cart on the Paramount studio lot, for instance, but also reminds me that he was a teenager then. He recognizes that he didn’t always make the best choices and wasn’t always successful with what he did, but isn’t ashamed of himself either. That’s helpful for me to remember; I shouldn’t be unreasonably harsh on my 16-year-old self, and need to remember that I had to be a teenager too.

I also identify with him as a dad. He wrote of counting the days until he could teach his boys about D&D, about passing on being a geek to his sons. I’ve had a similar excitement about being able to help Jacob build his first computer. Already Jacob, who is 3, loves using the manual typewriter I cleaned up for him, and spent an hour using the adding machine I dug out on Sunday while I was watching the boys. (I regret that I didn’t have time to take it apart and show him how it worked right then when he asked). And perhaps his 2nd-favorite present of Christmas was the $3.50 large-button calculator with solar cell power I got him as an impulse buy at the pharmacy the other day. He is particularly enamored with the square root button because a single press replaces all the numbers on the screen with completely different numbers!

I can’t find the exact passage now, but Wil wrote at one point about his transition from a career in acting to a career in writing. He said that he likes the feeling he gets when his writing can touch people. He’s been able to redefine himself not as a guy that “used to be an actor on Star Trek” but a person that is a good author, now. I agree, and think his best work has been done with a keyboard instead of a camera.

And that leaves me wondering where my career will take me. Yes, I’m an author, but of technical books. Authors of technical books rarely touch people’s hearts. There’s a reason we read Shakespeare and Dickens in literature classes, but no high school English teacher has ever assigned Newton’s Opticks, despite its incredible importance to the world. Newton revolutionized science, mathematics, and philosophy, but Opticks doesn’t speak to the modern heart like Romeo and Jiuliet still does. Generations of people have learned more about the world from Shakespeare than from Newton.

I don’t have Wil’s gift for writing such touching stories. I’ve only been able to even approach that sort of thing once or twice, and it certainly won’t make a career for me.

Like Wil, I’m rarely the youngest person in the room anymore. His days of being a famous teenage actor on a scifi series are long gone, as are mine of single-handedly defeating entire teams at jr. high programming contests. (OK, that’s a stretch, but at the time it sure felt exciting.) But unlike him, I’m not completely content with my niche yet. I blog about being a geek in rural Kansas, where there still aren’t many. I’m a dad, with an incredible family. And I write about programming, volunteer for Debian and a few other causes, and have a surprisingly satisfying job working for a company that builds lawn mowers. And yet, I have this unshakable feeling of unsettledness. That I need to stop and think more about what I really want to do with my life, perhaps cultivate some talents I don’t yet have, or perhaps find a way to make my current path more meaningful.

So I will take Wil’s book as a challenge, to all those that were once sure of what their lives would look like, and are less sure with each passing year: take a chance, and make it yours.

And on that score, perhaps I’ve done more than I had realized at first. Terah and I took a big chance moving to Kansas, and another one when we bought my grandparents’ run-down house to fix up and live in. Perhaps it’s not a bad idea to pause every few years and ask the question: “Do I still like the direction I’m heading? Can I change it?”

Wil Wheaton gives me lots to think about, in the form of easy-to-read reflections on his own life. I heartily recommend both Just a Geek and The Happiest Days of Our Lives.

(And that has nothing to do with the fact that the Ubuntu machine he used to write the book probably had installed on it a few pieces of code that I wrote, I promise you.)

If you spend much time in our house, chances are you’ll hear Jacob, our 3-year-old, ask me that question. It might sound a bit mysterious, but in 3-year-old logic, it totally works.

One day, Jacob and I accidentally invented “tunnels”. I would sit on the couch, the footstool a foot or two away, with my legs on it. Jacob started crawling underneath the resulting “tunnel”, then got excited about crawling on top of it, crashing down off of it, or slowly sliding down. Sometimes I would take one leg off, and he would “fix” the tunnel. Afterwards, he’d excitedly tell me, “Dad! I fixed the tunnel all by myself!”

This being winter, I usually wear slippers around the house to keep my feet warm. Jacob steadfastly refuses to wear anything but bare feet, maintaining his feet are warm when asked.

One day while we were playing tunnels, Jacob started trying to steal my slipper. I defended it by using my other foot to tickle him. He eventually got it, much to his delight. Then he’d try to get the other slipper. If you were to listen to a CD of this, you’d hear a frenzy of cackling, laughter from both of us, and eventual shrieks of delight as he steals the second slipper.

At this point, what’s a 3-year-old to do with two ill-gotten slippers? Why, put them on and try to run off with them, of course! So Jacob puts them on, and if I am too slow trying to recover them, will helpfully prompt me with “Shall you get the slippers back?” When I stand up, he’ll shriek, and waddle off at top speed — which isn’t that fast, considering he’s wearing slippers that won’t fit his feet for another 15 years.

Eventually I will make a big show of having very cold feet and wanting my slippers back. He will laugh in delight, and continue trying to escape. Eventually I’ll catch him, lift him up high, and shake his legs until the slippers fall off. Then it’s a mad dash to see which one of us will get them back on first. If I do, then it’s back to the couch for more tunnels and slippers.

So there you have it: tunnels and slippers.

Interestingly, I asked Jacob the other day if he wanted to wear HIS slippers. He predictably said no. I pointed out that if he wears his, he’d be just like me. He said, “Here they are. Shall you help me put them on?” I did. He walked around proudly. I asked him if his feet were warm. Yes, they were, he said. “So you won’t need to steal my slippers anymore?” A brief look of panic crept across his face! I felt bad, until he replied with, “No, my feet still VERY VERY cold, dad! Shall we play tunnels and slippers right now?”

The Train to Indiana

Our last train trip (to Chicago) was in May, before Oliver was born. Jacob always has enjoyed the train, but this time — wow.

We told Jacob about the trip the day before we were to leave. Several times in the day, he’d get a sly smile, and ask, “What are we going to do?” Terah or I would spell out the day’s activities, and when we’d get close to the part where I’d wake him up at night and we’d go to the train station, he’d have a big smile.

The big hour (2AM) arrived and Jacob woke up while Terah was putting his shoes on. I was there a moment later. Normally Jacob is terribly grumpy after waking up, even more so if somebody else woke him up. That day, I saw a very groggy-looking boy. I asked him, “Jacob, are you ready to go to the train station?” He answered, “YEAH!” while rubbing his eyes. “Dad, let’s go!”

We had Amtrak’s family bedroom for the first time this trip, and it worked out great. Jacob actually slept, despite his extreme excitement.

He’d been talking about eating in the diner car for quite some time, and was really excited when breakfast time rolled around. We sat down, and he pressed his nose up against the window right away. He counted the freight trains the he saw, pointed out train tracks and “crossing guard lights”, noticed barns and trucks, and gave us frequent updates on how fast we were going. His voice was high-pitched from excitement, and sometimes we’d have a running commentary we could barely interrupt, and other times he’d sit there silently just soaking it all in.

But he didn’t eat. He didn’t want to turn his head away from the window for a second to take a bite. I kept reminding him to take a bite, and finally, fearing he’d be really hungry as soon as we went back to our room, fed him a few bites for the first time in ages. I don’t believe he realized that happened. He just opened his mouth by reflex — and once I had to tell him to close his mouth around the fork that was in it.

It was much the same story for lunch, and for dinner on the train — though less so for dinner since it was dark outside. At dinner, a man sitting across the aisle from us said, “If you weren’t getting your meal free [since we're in the sleeper], I’d buy it for you. Your boys are amazingly well-behaved!” I thanked him politely — Jacob and Oliver both were doing well — but didn’t really think it was that unusual.

Oliver and Jacob were both big hits on the train. They got smiles from so many people on board and in the stations. Several of the dining car staff seemed to linger at our table longer than elsewhere, looking at them (and especially Oliver).

Oliver slept well on the train:

And here are a couple of typical Jacob photos:

In Indiana

I’ve got to start this out with one of the family gatherings at Terah’s aunt’s house. They have a large kids’ area in their basement, and a swingset with a slide outside. Jacob loved all of this, and spent hours playing with me. Sometimes if I’d go upstairs with the adults, I’d hear Jacob’s voice from the basement a few minutes later:

“DAAAAAD!!!! Shall you come back downstairs? DAAAD!”

And, of course, it’s hard to resist a 3-year-old that wants to play with me, so I inevitably would. We played air hockey — Jacob shrieked with delight whenever anybody scored a goal in any way. At one point, he stood up, looked around, and said, “Hmmm. Where are all the trains?” Apparently he expected every home to be stocked with toy trains, and this one wasn’t. A few seconds later, he was all excited. He ran over to a toy semi, and said, “I will use the semi train!”

Outside the short slide had a ladder going up to it. I held Jacob’s hands while he climbed up the first few times, but I knew he could do it himself. I started helping him less and less, and eventually refused to help him at all. He was rather frustrated with that for a moment, but a couple times later, climbed up and said, “Dad, I got up here all by myself!” A few times later, it looked like he was having trouble, so I tried to help, and got shooed away with, “No, dad! I can do it.”

The best moment of the weekend came during the drive back to Terah’s mom’s house where we were staying. Terah was driving, and I heard Jacob say, “Shall you come closer?” Not sure how to do that from the front seat of the car, I reached my hand back there and he held it. He held one or the other of my hands for 20 minutes until he fell asleep in the car. It’s funny what feeling needed by a 3-year-old makes a person feel, but that was surely a happy day.

Jacob got to see all of his Indiana grandparents on this trip, and loved playing with them. He especially liked using a “perfect red train” (his words!) he drug home from the nursery at church on Sunday, and a child-sized tent in the basement. I’m not sure how many times I heard “Gampa Mike! Shall we go to the basement?” that weekend. One point he wanted me to come down to see it and play with him, so I did. Then he decided we all needed to be down there, and told me “I’ll go pick up mom. I’ll be right back. Stay downstairs, dad.” Fearing that Terah wouldn’t know what to do when Jacob attempted to “pick her up”, I tried to discreetly follow at a distance. That was no match for a 3-year-old. He looked back at me from the top of the stairs, pointed an accusing finger at me, lowered his voice, and said, “Dad. Stay.”

Terah and I spent a day in South Bend and stayed at the Oliver Inn while Jacob and Oliver got some time to themselves with their grandparents. We had dinner at the beautiful Tippecanoe Place, just next door.

The Trip Home

We had a few hours in downtown Chicago on our way home. We went and ate at a small Indian restaurant. Jacob kept alternating between three things: “This food is very spicy! I like spicy food. I need another drink!” A little while later, Terah decided we should have some dessert. So she and Oliver stayed in the waiting area while Jacob and I went “asporing” (exploring) to find something. We walked a block or two to the nearest Dunkin Donuts, then to a Starbucks, and then back. Jacob carried the sack of donuts, guarding them so carefully that I was afraid he might smash them. (They were cream-filled so that wouldn’t have been good.) He had a lot of fun exploring Chicago Union Station, and also enjoyed walking in Chicago (though not quite as much; it was all a little too loud for him.)

In the train station, he loved the escalators. Up and down we went, whenever we wouldn’t get in people’s way. I had to eventually drag him away from them as I was getting a little self-conscious at all the people standing around watching us repeatedly go up and down the escalators.

Jacob has found a 3-year-old way to express his feelings: he’ll pretend to be a kitty, and say “the kitty is sad” or something like it. All day he had been saying “the kitty is hungry.” He hadn’t had a big breakfast, but he had plenty of opportunity to eat at lunch, and a snack. We were a bit confused, but I think we finally figured it out on the train back to Kansas. We didn’t have time to eat breakfast in the diner on the train from South Bend to Chicago, so Jacob missed out on the dining car then, and I think he was disappointed or confused about that. Once we had dinner in the dining car, he was happier.

Since we’ve been back home, he’s been talking about our next train trip. He says which suitcases we’ll take, that we’ll eat in the diner, that it will be a night train we take, and generally is still very excited about it.

It was a fun trip.

He wanted me to sing Home On The Range several times as we drove. We stopped at WSU first, and he enjoyed running down the wide sidewalks and trying to hide behind bushes. Then it was on to lunch at HuHot Mongolian Grill. Jacob chose his own ingredients (with some help from me). He chose fish, which noodles he wanted, and of course had some baby corn and carrots. He got a full bowl of ingredients, and of course his favorite part was watching them grill it. He polished off most of his plate, too.

He had been talking about ice cream all day. In fact, mention Wichita to Jacob, and he’ll almost immediately say, “Shall we get some ice cream?” I wonder who he gets that from…

Terah usually takes him to Cold Stone Creamery, but we didn’t have enough time to go there. So we went to The Old Mill Tasy Shop, something of along-time local legend in downtown Wichita. Jacob enjoyed noticing that the old brick wall had holes in it while they scooped out his chocolate ice cream and my strawberry sundae. He was too busy devouring his ice cream to notice it came in a metal bowl until I pointed it out to him.

Then it was off to the Great Plains Transportation Museum. It was a quiet afternoon in November; not the packed crowd like the last time we were there.

He went for the old Santa Fe diesel passenger locomotive first (which he insists is a “freight train”). Of course you get to go inside almost everything, and he enjoyed going inside that one, sitting on the engineer’s chair, and playing with handles and knobs.

We went in several of the cabooses, and he noticed the “train potty” in one. It’s the old open to the ground type, and if you look down inside it, you see the rocks that are underneath the caboose. Jacob thought it was very interesting that “the train potty has rocks in it.”

The museum is right next to some active freight tracks, and Jacob was very much hoping that there’d be a freight train going past. He wasn’t disappointed; we saw two, plus an airplane and a helicopter. A successful visit, I’d say.

So I didn’t really get done anything I had planned to today, but in spite of being behind on stuff, it’s a better day than I had planned. I really enjoy going off and doing things with Jacob. While we were eating lunch, I asked him if he had fun at the bookstore. “Yeah! I have fun EVERYWHERE!” What a fun perspective, huh?

You might imagine there are several problems here. One is that VHS tapes degrade over time. Those that were recorded in EP mode (6 hours on a T-120 tape) are especially prone to this. I’ve been worried about how well those 22-year-old tapes will perform even now.

Another problem is that VHS tapes are getting hard to watch these days. We own a VCR, but it’s probably been 7 years since it was hooked up to anything on a regular basis.

So I have meant for some time to convert these old VHS recordings to DVD format. My initial plan was to use the PVR-250 hardware MPEG-2 encoder card that is used with MythTV to do that. But it’s in the basement, used with MythTV, and would generally be a hassle. As a result, I’ve been “meaning to do” this project for about 5 years, and haven’t.

Last night, I found that tape from 1987. It has a few priceless seconds of my grandpa Klassen on it — he passed away in 1990.

The Panasonic DMR-EZ38VK

I initially set out looking for a dedicated DVD recorder with an S-video input, but wound up buying one with an integrated VHS deck as well: the Panasonic DMR-EZ38VK.

I started with a DVD recorder review on CNet. I was primarily interested in video quality. Surprisingly, it seems there is significant difference in video quality among DVD recorders, which was what led me to the Panasonic line.

I was initially planning on a DMR-EA18K or DMR-EZ18K (the difference is whether or not they include a TV tuner). I was having trouble finding them in stock at the vendors I normally use, and wound up with the DMR-EZ38VK instead. B&H had a open-box demo unit at a special discount, so I snapped it up.

Video Quality

I’ve been recording most items to DVD in “SP” mode, which stores 2h per single-layer DVD. I’d concur with CNet: this produces spectacular results. I don’t think I’ve noticed any MPEG compression artifacts at all in this mode.

Some items, such as TV programs or home recordings with little motion, I’ve recorded in “LP” mode. This mode stores 4 hours on a single-layer DVD. It’s also surprisingly good, considering the amount of compression needed. I have noticed MPEG artifacts in that mode, though not to an extremely annoying degree.

The copying process

I start by popping an empty disc in the drive. Then I’ll put in the VHS tape and position it to the place where I want it to start copying. Then I hit Functions -> Copy -> VHS to DVD -> without finalizing, and away it goes. It automatically detects end-of-tape and helpfully won’t copy 6 hours of static.

When a tape is done copying, you can copy from more tapes to the disc, eject it and finalize it later, or work with it.

When I’m ready to finish a disc, I’ll go and change the “disc name”, which is what shows up at the top of the disc menu that the unit generates. If I feel ambitious, I might change the titles of individual titles as well. But all of this has to be done with an on-screen keyboard, and thus takes awhile, so I usually don’t. Finalizing commits the menu to disc and fixates it, and takes about a minute.

Track Detection

This feature is both a blessing and a curse.

The Panasonic recorder can often detect the break between a recording on a VHS. Newer VCRs would explicitly mark these, but it can detect it even with older camcorders with reasonable accuracy.

When it detects this, it creates a new title on the DVD. This takes a few seconds, so it also rewinds the VHS tape a few seconds, then starts copying again.

Unfortunately, if you’re just wanting to watch one long recording all the way through, this results in a few seconds being duplicated right before each scene transition, which is rather jarring. There is no way to disable this feature, either. The only workaround is to read from an external VCR. But if you do that, you lose the end-of-tape detection.

Generally I’ve decided to just live with it for now. It’s a cheap price to pay for an otherwise pretty good workflow.

Other annoyances

While copying, you can’t access the position indicators for either the VHS deck or the DVD recorder. So you don’t know how far along on the tape you are, or how much space is left on the DVD, until copying stops.

Also, it would be very nice to be able to tell it “copy 23 minutes and 15 seconds from VHS to DVD” when you know you don’t want to copy the whole tape.

The unit also has SD and USB ports for reading digital video. Frustratingly, a USB keyboard can’t be used to edit disc or track titles. That seems like an obvious and cheap feature to have.

Overall

Overall I am happy with the unit. It produces very good quality results, and is pretty easy to use overall. I don’t think I’d pick a different one if I had to do it again. But it could be made better for people that are copying large numbers of VHS tapes to DVD.

Generally, though, I can just start the copy and let it sit for a couple of hours, trusting it to do the reasonable thing with a tape. That’s convenient enough that I can get other things done while it’s copying, and takes little enough of my time that I’m actually working through stacks of tapes now.

Update 8/27 I have now tried some discs from this playing back on my PS3 connected to a 1080p HDTV. On that setup, compression artifacts are noticeable at the 2hr setting, and more are noticeable at the 4hr setting. I don’t think that they are any necessarily any more noticeable than any other home-produced DVD, though, especially on the SP setting. They had not been very visible on SD equipment.

Jacob used to go to daycare twice a week, but with Terah being a full-time stay-at-home mom, that’s not happening anymore. Thursday was his last day there, and I think he and I both are going to miss it.

Jacob always got to ride with me to and from daycare in the car. We’d have conversations about all sorts of 2-year-old interests: what sort of crops were in the field, what was in the silos, how soon we’d go over the train tracks, whether the crossing guard lights would be on, how many water towers there are.

He also evolved sort of a routine. When I’d drop him off in the morning, he was usually moving slowly. He’d get to his room, and then dive into playing with some sort of toy, and completely ignore me.

When I’d come to pick him up in the afternoon, as soon as he saw me, he would come running and crash into my legs as hard as he could, giving me a sort of hug in the process. Sometimes he’d see me before I got to the door; those days, he’d stand on the other side of the glass smiling impatiently. Then, after pointing out any fans in the room, he’d run for the door. I had to let him open it. If I opened it, he’d insist that I close it again so he can open it. Then, we’d have to “check out the fish”, which consisted of him standing beside their aquarium counting them, occasionally banging on the glass or sticking his tongue out at them.

Then all of a sudden a run to the outside door and on to the car, stopping to jump off the sidewalk and making sure to walk on any yellow lines along our path. On the way home, he’d speculate about whether or not Terah would be home before us, and maybe tell me what he had for lunch at daycare.

One day they had a fire drill, and the blinking light and buzzer made quite the impression. For weeks after that, each afternoon he would tell me whether the buzzer came on and was flashing that day.

Sometimes on his way out, we’d have to stop to “check out the turtle.” They have a short gravel path through some plants, and along it is a stone shaped and painted to look like a turtle. Sometimes it would be on the ground; other times, in a dish. He’d stop and look, then say “OK”, and run off.

As for other things happening: we’ve got a 3-week-old baby in the house, so that of course creates change. One of my brothers is going off to college this month for the first time, and the other one started a job as a pastor yesterday (after having been my colleague at work doing programming for awhile).

Meanwhile, with Jacob no longer going to daycare, I’ve been able to bicycle to work more often. Which is nice, except when it’s 100F with 25MPH winds.

We first headed over to “check out the beans” as Jacob likes to put it. We found that yes, they were getting tall. Jacob found a couple of sticks to carry, and wanted to walk himself for a little ways. When we got to some tall grass, back into the wagon he went. We were heading over to our creek.

We went through the tall grass for awhile, and came to the fence. The creek is in a pasture, and there’s a fence with both barbed wire and electric fencing. I crawled under, had Jacob lie down in the wagon, and then pulled the wagon under.

Soon we came to some cow pies. Jacob, of course, wanted to know all about them. I explained that the gray ones were “old cow poop” and the brown ones are “fresh cow poop.” This was tremendously interesting to our toddler. When we got to some shady areas, Jacob almost shrieked, saying, “There old cow poop ALL OVER!”

When we got to the creek, Jacob was excited to see it. He rode along it for awhile, until we got to our old camping spot. I saw some scorched logs over there from the last time we went camping. I said that we built a campfire with them and used it to cook food. Jacob was too young to remember it, I’m sure, but he pointed to one log and said, “That Jacob’s.” Then another log — “That dad’s… and that mom’s… and that one Jacob’s too.” Pretty soon he had assigned each log to a person.

Then we went to the bank of the creek. Jacob wanted to go in, but it was all muddy and didn’t seem like a good idea. I asked him if I should throw in a stick. “Yeah!” So I threw a large stick into the creek, and it splashed. Jacob cackled. “Again?” I did another stick. More cackling. “Again?” I had to go back to a tree to break off dead branches a couple of times because he was having such a good time.

We went past two of my grandpa’s old junk piles while we were exploring back there. Jacob enjoyed seeing the old tractor tire and barbed wire, though he didn’t get to touch the junk. I spotted an old Kansas pickup’s license plate from 1971 in one pile, and pulled it out. Presumably that used to be on grandpa’s old green pickup.

On the way back to the house, I pulled Jacob’s wagon past some bales. As we passed each one, he wanted to stop to touch it. I pulled his wagon up to it, and he got to sit there touching the bale as long as he liked.

Jacob learned about lots of things along the way: he kept asking “what’s that, dad” — and a big part of the challenge was figuring out just what he was talking about. He learned about black-eyed Susans, deer trails, the bumpiness caused by cattle walking around in mud, and various bugs that go “buzz”. I also explained why the grass in the pasture was shorter than the grass elsewhere — he’s been very interested in which animals eat grass lately.

We both had a great time, though I was ready to sit for awhile after pulling a wagon through tall grass for a total of about a mile.

Yesterday I took Terah’s mom to the train station for her 3AM departure — she’d been staying with us ever since Oliver was born to help out. When Jacob woke up, he wanted to “Go downstairs. See Nana!” I explained that Nana wasn’t here anymore. Jacob agreed. “Yeah. She on night train!”

The day Oliver was born, Terah’s mom surprised Jacob by being there when he woke up. We had told him she’d be arriving, though. Apparently he sat up, saw her, and without missing a beat, said, “Hi Nana. You came on NIGHT TRAIN!”

Jacob has been interested in Oliver all week. He wants to make sure Oliver always has toys available. Jacob has also wanted his own pacifier to suck on and play with. We decided to let him, figuring it’s good that he’s curious, and it’ll of course blow over. Jacob has decided that “pacifier” is a silly word. He calls it “my suckifier.”

We made some hurried phone calls (I was supposed to pick up her mom at the train station at 3:30AM), and went to the hospital. And Oliver Goerzen was born by about 4:15!

As the doctors were finishing up Terah’s surgery, I held Oliver for awhile. He was awake, alert, and looking around the room. He had so much fat on him (9lb 11oz) that he couldn’t help but make a scowl the whole time.

We’ve had lots of visitors, of course, but the one we were most curious about was Jacob. Terah’s mom brought him by on the same day Oliver was born. Jacob was very interested in the baby. He came over to where I was holding Oliver and took a look. He really wanted Oliver to wake up, and was disappointed that he stayed asleep the whole time. We talked with Jacob about using “gentle touches” with Oliver, and he really came through well. He felt Oliver’s hair. I suggested he might want to touch his nose. Jacob said, “I touch his TIIINY nose!” And gave it a gentle touch.

(That’s my mom holding Oliver with Jacob looking on; he had to touch Oliver’s nose several times.)

Jacob had several presents waiting for him, which he liked. He had gone to a sibling prep class, where he had taken a photo of himself and made a border for it. The photo was supposed to be in the baby’s crib, so he can “get to know” his big brother. I showed Jacob that it was there, and he seemed really proud of that.

Terah had the idea that we could take Jacob to Build-A-Bear a little while back. Jacob built a bear for himself, and another for the baby. And when he came to visit, he gave a bear to Oliver. He was very serious about it. Pretty soon, he really wanted us to put Oliver back in his crib, and we finally figured out that he wanted that to happen so he could put the bear in with Oliver.

I took Jacob to eat in the “hospital restaurant” for supper, while Terah and Oliver got to spend time with other visitors. Jacob was on pretty good behavior, though it was difficult to keep him away from all the buttons on Terah’s hospital bed.

As I was taking pictures of Jacob and Oliver, Jacob said, “Flash will wake Oliver. Need more flashes!” He was puzzled when the flash didn’t wake Oliver.

Oliver definitely has a distinct personality already, but also of course likes to eat and sleep like any newborn. He has enjoyed lying and sleeping on many laps already. Also, we will still not need to invest in a baby monitor. Like Jacob, Oliver’s cry is plenty loud to be heard just about anywhere in the house.

On day 2, Jacob came back with Terah’s mom. This time, Oliver was awake, which made Jacob happy. Jacob was particularly proud that Oliver would hold his finger. I took Jacob to lunch while Terah’s mom got a chance to hold Oliver. I’ve been trying to spend as much time with Jacob as I can, so he doesn’t feel left out. I think he feels a little left out, because Terah can’t hold him right now, but this helps.

Jacob enjoyed his hamburger and ice cream for lunch. Then we came back to the hospital and went “exploring”. We walked (or, in Jacob’s case, RAN) down some halls in a semi-purposeful manner. We walked through a walkway that connects to the clinic where our doctor’s offices are. We stopped by the clinic, where Jacob’s favorite receptionist was very happy to see him (and gave him some yogurt as a “big brother” treat). Which he managed to devour, despite just having had a large lunch. He jumped all the way back down stairs, ran back to the hospital, pausing only to point out the C, A, and R in the word “CANCER” on the Cancer Center sign.

When we got back to the room, Jacob walked in, breathless. “Go sploring again?”

We had an “I’m a big brother” sticker for Jacob today. He loves stickers, and we figured he’d proudly put it on his shirt. He took it, and seemed to ignore it for a minute. Then he said, “Put sticker on baby.” I think he wanted to give Oliver a gift.

So our two boys seem to have really gotten started on the right foot, which is great.

Meanwhile, we’ve been enjoying Oliver’s baby noises, his already expressive face — his glare at bright lights, his interest when I stick out my tongue at him.

Terah is doing reasonably well — about as well as can be expected, and a lot better than last time. Oliver is healthy too.

Then last night, Jacob was in bed while I was out mowing. His bed is right next to a window, and apparently he was watching me mow. Terah kept hearing him saying, in a cute and tired voice, “There you are! I see you!” Checking on him later, he had fallen asleep, his head resting on his hand in the windowsill, as if he was still gazing out the window.

I’ve written a lot lately about my Grandma Klassen, who passed away this week. But I’m going to start this post about my Grandma Goerzen.

She died when I was just an infant. I never knew her, but as the years pass, it seems that I remember her better and better.

After we moved out to the farm where she and Grandpa Goerzen lived for decades, we noticed some flowers she had planted 30 years ago were still coming up, having withstood hail, hot summers, frost, construction equipment, and neglect all that time. Terah said, “It’s like your grandma left us a housewarming gift.”

Some of these flowers had never bloomed. Until this week.

One bloomed for the first time the day Grandma Klassen died.

A second bloom appeared the day of her funeral.

Music #1

My jr. high and high school band teacher loves music (and old engines, but that’s another story). You couldn’t sign up for “band” at my high school; you’d sign up for the class called LIFE. To him, music and life are indistinguishable. He says that anybody can speak to somebody, but music is the best way to speak to the heart.

My Grandpa Klassen died when I was 11. Grandma Klassen, before her health declined, loved to tell me the story of the music at his funeral. At his funeral, my mom and I played a piano duet of Nearer, My God to Thee which we had already learned for a different event. When we were done, Rev. Epp went to the pulpit and said something along the lines of, “If the music in heaven is as good as that, it’ll be a great place indeed.”

I was just 11, and though music did speak to me at that age already, I don’t think I understood how it moved people, such as my grandma, until many years later.

Music #2

Grandma Klassen loved music, too, and that’s reflected in each of her children — all of them play trumpet, for instance. So it’s no surprise that there was a lot of music this week.

She died as two of her children were singing hymns to her at her room in the nursing home.

Two of her grandchildren played trumpet for her at her burial.

And my brother and his wife played trumpet and piano at her funeral.

It was all beautiful, and like my band teacher said, it spoke to my heart.

Music #3

I knew about gradma’s love of music for quite awhile. When she was in better health, I took her to concerts sometimes. One of her favorite hymns was Joyful, Joyful, but she hadn’t known it was based on Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. I learned that the Wichita Symphony Orchestra was performing the 9th, and took her to the performance. She loved it, and I seem to recall that she kept talking about it for a few years afterwards. It certainly didn’t hurt that the singing on the 4th movement was in German. I burned her a “new-fangled” CD of it, which I frequently saw in or near her CD player.

The Kansas Mennonite Men’s Chorus is an all-volunteer choir with about 300 members. They give a couple of concerts a year, and occasionally tour throughout North America and Europe. Their motto is “we sing that others may live” because 100% of money collected at their concerts goes directly to charity.

Attending one of their concerts is a powerful experience not easily forgotten. I think the only time I’ve heard a choir come close to being as amazing as that was when I had the opportunity to attend a Robert Shaw concert a few years ago.

I went with grandma to one of the Kansas Mennonite Men’s Chorus performances a few years ago. As you might expect, she loved it — I think she called it “powerfully good.”

This year, I finally joined the choir. I still remember that first practice. We “warmed up” by singing Holy God, We Praise Thy Name — a song that has opened every KMMC concert for years. These people hadn’t sung together for almost a year, and there were plenty of new people like me there too. But it only took a few bars of singing before I realized just what it was I had joined. The choir started out with the quietest, but most powerful singing you can imagine: “Holy God, we praise thy name.” By the time we got to the end of the page, the building was ringing from 300 men singing “Infinite thy vast domain, everlasting is thy reign!” at the top of their voices, in perfect harmony. We got to the end. The director said. . . “Wow.”

I don’t think a first practice ever spoke to my heart before that day.

Music #4

Nearly 20 years ago, Grandma Klassen bought me a new bible. After she gave it to me, I asked her what some of her favorite passages were. She took me straight to the blessing in Numbers 6, and made sure I underlined it and bookmarked it. It goes like this:

“The Lord bless you,
The Lord keep you,
Make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you,
The Lord life up his countenance upon you and give you peace.”

My uncle had read this blessing to her the last time he talked to her. And the KMMC for years has ended their concerts with a beautiful benediction based on this passage. Grandma heard it at the concert I attended with her. It has been a favorite of my mom for years, too.

So I had the thought: we really ought to sing it as a benediction at her funeral. It was hard to find the right mix of people on short notice, but we wound up with me singing baritone, my brother singing 2nd tenor (we both normally sing bass), and his wife both playing piano and singing 1st tenor, and relying on the piano to fill in the bass part.

We had a little chance to practice before the funeral, but not a lot. The two of them have done a lot musically, but I haven’t nearly as much, so I got in some extra practice at home, too.

When it came time to sing, it was an emotional moment for sure — more than a bit hard to focus, knowing the history and meaning of these words. When we got to “and give you peace”, and moved into the chorus of “amen” that finishes the song, I almost broke down right there, but didn’t quite.

We didn’t give a perfect performance, for sure, on such short notice. (And they had me singing with them, so we wouldn’t have been perfect even with plenty of notice!)

But it didn’t have to be perfect. After we ended the last, quiet “amen”, I think I heard about a half-dozen noses blowing all at once. My band teacher was right about music speaking to the heart.

Later, during lunch, my aunt said to me, “Wow, John, I’ve never heard you sing before!” “That’s right, and this may be the last time you hear me sing, too! I don’t normally sing in a small group like this.”

A few minutes later, my uncle that gave the message came over and talked to the three of us. “John, today you three brainwashed me.” “Oh?” “Yes. For years, I thought that there was no music as beautiful as the trumpet. After hearing you three sing, I have to reconsider.”

And so my band teacher was also right: music is life. My grandma was a person that could hardly speak without touching the heart. That beautiful melody of her life didn’t stop when she died Tuesday afternoon. I’ve been hearing it all week.

My uncle, a pastor, gave the meditation. He had been a missionary in Vietnam during the war, and he remained there after the United States withdrawal. During that time, things were very dangerous for him, and all means of communicating with the family back home were completely cut off. My grandparents had no way of knowing if he was OK.

He later heard of a conversation my grandma had with a neighbor one day during this time:

Neighbor: “You must be so worried about your son in Vietnam!”

Grandma: “Not really. I gave him back to the Lord the day he graduated high school.”

Neighbor: “If you’re not worried, then I’m REALLY worried!”

Grandma: “Why worry? Heaven is just as close to Vietnam as it is to Kansas.”

That exchange sums her up pretty well, I think. She was so deeply religious that it gave her a great sense of peace about life.

We heard so many stories about her this week. We heard how, when she was already in her upper 80s, she helped a farmer get his equipment out of the mud and ran some heavy farm machinery. She was in charge of my cousin’s schoolwork for a little while (she lived with them back then, and his parents were taking a trip). She apparently made sure he did every little assignment left for him in exacting detail, even the ones that his mother had said were “extra”, just in case he needed something else to do. Apparently when his parents got back, he said he loved his time with grandma, but begged them to never put her in charge of his schoolwork again!

I told the story of learning to play chess when I was a child. My grandpa was teaching me the game. I was having some trouble learning some of the rules, and was frustrated because he was also beating me (like usual). After a little while of me getting more and more frustrated, grandma said something to him in German and all of a sudden I started winning.

Yesterday evening was the community Good Friday church, with the combined choirs of our church and Alexanderwohl singing. That wasn’t the easiest thing to do after the funeral in the morning, but I’m glad I did. Tomorrow I’ll be singing again for Easter.

Today started normal enough, but by 2:45 I got an email from my mom, saying that grandma had taken yet another turn for the worse; her pulse was racing, her temperature feverish, and her breathing shallow and difficult. The last grandchild that was going to be there made it, and got the last flicker of recognition from grandma. I wrapped some things up at work.

Then I made the short drive from work to the nursing home, and got there just after 4. I went in to her room there, and it was full of family. Two of her children were singing her favorite hymns. I can never forget my uncle’s deep bass voice as he stood at her bedside, holding her arm, while my aunt patted her head, both of them singing. Grandma’s only remaining sibling, her younger brother Melvin, sat on the other side of the bed, looking on.

Grandma’s white table and chairs, which were in grandma and grandpa’s house as long as I can remember, and followed grandma through all of the four other places she lived in the last years of her life, were in her room at the nursing home too. It always felt like home to be with grandma and those familiar things that she always took with her. Despite what was happening, I was glad she was back at home.

My uncle motioned me over to her bedside, and I took her hand for a few minutes. It felt cold and weak; for the first time, she didn’t grab my hand at all.

A nurse came in to check oxygen saturation, but the machine wasn’t able to get a reading due to poor circulation to her hand. She wasn’t able to get a heart rate either because the heart was racing so fast. She discussed briefly whether the family wanted them to continue giving her oxygen, and they decided that they would, for her comfort.

My uncle and aunt kept singing. I blew my nose and dabbed at my eyes, and there were hugs all around. And just a few minutes later, grandma peacefully stopped breathing, maybe 20 minutes after I had arrived.

They went to get the nurse, who came back to listen to grandma’s heart again, though we knew what she would find. She took the stethoscope off, and she almost lost her composure, but managed to say “you can turn the oxygen off now.” Several people gave grandma a last hug.

After a few minutes with just the family, they told the nurses to go ahead and call the funeral home. That set off a lot of activity making arrangements for the next few days, funeral plans, and the like. I stepped back into grandma’s room a few times, while the family was in the sitting area right outside it discussing. I looked around at the family photos on the wall, the old table and chairs, the recliner. Now, these are the things that were grandma’s. It didn’t feel like home anymore.

Terah and Jacob were stuck at home — Terah’s car was at the mechanic for repair today. I called to give her the news. She wanted to come to be with the family, but I didn’t really want to leave. She tried calling some friends to see if they could give her a lift to the mechanic, but not one of them was available. I talked to her again and suggested she just call the mechanic. She wasn’t even halfway through describing the situation when he interrupted with, “We’ll have it at your place right away!” “Well, I don’t expect you to have to do that, or you could certainly wait until you close.” “Nope, this isn’t your average community, we’ll bring it right over. You should be there.”

Grandma has enjoyed a simple life and had requested a simple death: no extraordinary measures at the end of life, no embalming either. So, by law, the burial must happen within 24 hours of death, and will be tomorrow.

After all the arrangements, people realized nobody had supper yet. We went to the quickest available option — pizza — and ate there. It was paid for out of grandma’s remaining money — the last meal of so many that she provided for her family over the years. It was a happy meal.

As I drove home, NPR news was on the radio. There were the same stories we hear all the time: the economy, the mideast, the president. Normally I’m interested, but today I shut it off. Today is different.

Tomorrow, for the second time in four years, I will help carry a grandparent’s casket a few days before Easter.

I’ll end tonight with this photo. It was taken soon after Jacob was born. Grandma came to the hospital and held him. That smile sums her up perfectly.

Terah, Jacob, and I got dressed and went to the hospital to visit. Grandma had been in a partial coma that left her able to hear, nod, and hold hands, but unable to speak. Apparently she came out of it overnight, and was talking and even singing with my mom and aunt some. She seemed happy, loved to hear the old German prayers she grew up with. She said some memorable things I’ll have to write about later too.

By the time we got there, she wasn’t that active anymore, and was about like she was yesterday. She could see us, and give our hands a squeeze, maybe nod occasionally. She drifted asleep often. One time when I saw she was awake with her eyes open, I lifted up Jacob to where she could see him. Immediately her face brightened, and I saw the biggest smile on her face that I’d seen in days! She smiled and waved to him, and with a small bit of coaxing, he waved back. Then she wiggled her foot, and when Jacob noticed, he wiggled his foot back at her. He’s 92 years younger than her, and they still managed to communicate just fine.

Grandma held my hand for awhile this morning; she loves to have a hand or two to hold. My cousin showed up for a visit, and I was going to get up to let her sit down, and when grandma felt my hand leaving, she grabbed on tighter. I went around to the other side of the bed and held the other hand.

In the last couple of days, grandma’s hearing has become much sharper than before, and I’m pretty sure her memory has too.

When it was time for us to leave and go to church, I was holding her hand, looking into her eyes, saying goodbye, and how much I loved her. I got a hand squeeze, and saw a few tears at her eyes — the first I can remember seeing that. As I pulled my hand away to leave, she once again grabbed tighter and was still looking at me. I think she thought this was the last time she’d see me, and didn’t want the moment to pass too quickly. But that also guaranteed that I’d be back in the afternoon.

It was Palm Sunday in church today, and as every year, the Palm Sunday celebration ends with Bill singing I walked today where Jesus walked while Dale carries in a heavy cross. Right when Bill is singing “I climbed the hill on Calvary, where on the cross He died!”, Dale is climbing the steps to the stage and laying the cross there. Hardly a dry eye in the room at that.

For lunch, my parents were still hosting their monthly college student get-together/home cooking event — which we usually attend too. After that, I dropped off Terah and Jacob at home, and went back to the hospital.

By the time I had left, grandma had 27 visitors just today. When I arrived, my great uncle (her brother) and aunt were there, along with her pastor and a deacon from her church, plus my mom and my aunt. More people came and went throughout the afternoon, and I enjoyed visiting and hearing stories about the family and grandma all afternoon. She was sometimes awake and able to look at people, and sometimes deeply asleep. I heard her say “God bless you” to several people.

It was awhile before I had a chance to go be with her, and when I did, she was asleep, so I sat beside her bed and held her hand for quite awhile, maybe an hour, while visiting with family in the room. At one point, a nurse came in to give her some more morphine by IV. I got up to get our of her way, but the nurse said, “Don’t think of it; I can work around you, and what you’re doing is more important than what I’m doing anyway.”

Some of her old friends from church came by, and prayed with her in German, and recited the words to some German hymns and poems, which I think she really enjoyed. Her eyes were closed through most of it, but when they got to the end of each item, they opened, saying thank you, I believe.

Eventually things calmed down, and it was time for me to head home. Grandma was awake by then, and I looked at her and said goodbye, and that I was glad I got to see her again. We gave each other a final hand squeeze, and then she let go of my hand this time. I’m glad I came back for sure.

They say sometimes that people that are dying feel like they need permission to die, before they will let themselves go. I wondered if grandma was feeling that way today. But then I hear that my uncle, who is driving in from 8 hours away through wintry weather, called and ask that she be given this message: “Tell mom that I’m coming, but if Jesus gets there first, she should go with him.” That might not work on everybody, but for her, it’s the best way I could think of to give her permission.

She was in her room, looking better physically today than yesterday. When I walked in, I said brightly, “Hi Grandma!” She took my hand warmly, and said to me, “Now I don’t think we’ve met. Who are you?”

I knew that moment would happen someday, but still was surprised when it happened.

Mom told her that we were there to tell her we love her. Grandma counted out the seven of us, and said, “All these wonderful people here to tell that to ME?” That’s Grandma still there!

It was a difficult moment. Many of us were tearful, and Grandma was sick enough that she sometimes lost the battle to stay awake. But we were all glad it was happening.

Mom thought it right (me too) that she should tell Grandma about the latest word from the doctors. The conversation went, in part, something like this, with my mom addressing her mother:

My Mom: “Mom, the doctors say your heart is probably wearing out.”

My Grandma: *shrug* “Yeah.”

My Mom: “And your body is probably tiring out too.”

My Gramdma: “Yes it is. I’m 94.”

It’s not that Grandma was depressed or anything. Just that she had long ago been at peace with the idea of death, and actually told us more than once that the was rather surprised that she has lived to be as old as she has. So it wasn’t frightening or surprising to her to confront her own mortality. To her, it was a fact, and an obvious one at that.

My brother brought along Grandma’s old Bible. She had given it to him a few years ago. It was filled with highlights and handwritten notes from cover to cover. She had carefully analyzed it, and when she bought a new Bible, had carefully copied the notes to it. My brother read to her two passages that she had highlighted:Psalm 23: (which she has noted as “a favorite of many Christians”) and Numbers 6:24-26. He then held her hand and said a prayer with her. Then he said a blessing for her, and as he was getting to the end, she interrupted, saying the last word for him: “forever!”

She still had her sense of humor, and made us all laugh several times. She said, as she always has when any of us stop by to visit, how happy she is that we came by, and what a wonderful family she has. She said several times “Danke schön, Danke schön, Danke schön!” (Thank you, thank you, thank you! — she had made sure to teach a few German words to all of us as kids.)

When it was time to go, she got lots of hugs from us, and made a point to tell each of us individually “thank you for coming!”

As we walked down the hall, I was reminded of her old tradition going back many years. Whenever we would leave her house, she’d wave to us from the porch. And, if it was dark, we’d turn on the car light and wave back. Since she’s been in the nursing home, she’ll wave to us from her doorway as we walk down the hall.

And, sure enough, today’s visit ended with her waving to us from her doorway with both hands (as she always does) and a big smile. We all waved back with a smile as we walked away, too.

I don’t know if this will be the last goodbye with her, but if it is, I can’t think of a better one.

Grandma would often be in her curlers, and we’d often leave her in the evening saying goodbye in the pink fluorescent lights she had shining on her plants by the door.

Other times, we’d just go to visit, or I’d ride my bike over. I liked helping Grandma cook or bake peppernuts. And when I was trying to learn chess from Grandpa, and Grandma thought he was being too hard on me, she’d say something to him in German and I’d magically start winning.

Grandma volunteered at a local thrift store weaving rugs. These were made by hand on old looms in a traditional way, mainly out of donated clothes and drapes that were too tattered to sell. My mom used to drop me off with grandma while she went shopping. I maybe brought my lunch, and watched grandma, until one time I asked her if I could help. She let me, and eventually the store manager told grandma that I ought to be able to work on my own loom. Pretty soon we had a routine down: in summer, Grandma would pick me up at home, I’d read a computing magazine in the car to town, and work at a loom side-by-side with Grandma. That lasted until I got too busy in high school. But ever since then, Grandma delighted in telling this whole story almost every time she saw me, and she remembered word for word what the store manager said — something I never quite could remember.

I remember watching Grandma care for my brothers when they were sick, or helping out my parents with whatever they needed help with. We had a tradition for a number of years of spending New Year’s Eve at Grandma and Grandpa’s house, and going back home the next morning. The three of us boys slept in a cold upstairs room, but we didn’t care because the bed had more layers on it than we could count, and an electric blanket besides.

When my Grandpa Klassen passed away in 1990, Grandma missed him but didn’t get too worked up about it. She was convinced that he was in a better place, and appeared to be at peace with it. Death was a normal part of life to her, and it didn’t surprise her that it happened.

In the last few years, Grandma’s health has been failing. Her knees have been bothering her for years, and she has also been struggling with dementia for a few years. It’s been hard on me to visit her, because in some ways she hasn’t been the same person I remember for awhile now, and in other ways she’s exactly the same. Lately she hasn’t always remembered where I live, or what Terah and Jacob’s names are, we knew to expect that and are respectful of the situation. For years now, Grandma has been saying, “I don’t know why the Good Lord doesn’t take me up to be with him yet. My bags are packed and I’m ready!”

Last time I saw her, I mentioned that we used to do weaving together, and she couldn’t remember. That was a sure sign to me that things had taken a turn for the worse. Our last several visits have ended with a big hug, and her still iron grip on my hand, with her saying, “Thank you for coming! My family is so good to me. We love each other!”

She’s been battling infections and heart problems the past few weeks. This evening, I got an email from my mom saying “It’s time” to say our goodbyes. She had been to see Grandma today, and Grandma still managed to tell her, “We love each other.”

As much as time has changed her in the past few years, she’s still there, the same loving Grandma as ever.

So I leaned back gently a bit, and said “squish!” Jacob yelled, laughing, “QUISH!” “Quish again, daddy!”

So I’d lean back a bit, gently, again, this time reaching behind me to tickle him a bit as I leaned. “Squash!”

Louder laughing. “QUASH!!!” Right in my ear — ouch, but I didn’t mind. “Do it again, daddy!”

Right now, being a dad seems complicated enough. You’ve got to have the right touch to “squish” a 2-year-old without really squishing him. Or have the presence of mind to realize that when Jacob was happily playing outside, then suddenly comes running over, very upset, saying “Go inside!” it means he probably needs to use the potty urgently, or just had an accident. (Or both, as it happened today.) Or to recognize that little walk that means he really does need to use the potty even though he’d rather not. And, of course, there’s figuring out what he’s saying, when his words can still be a bit garbled.

But these all seem simple to me, compared to what will come. How will we help Jacob to grow as a person of good character? How will we meet his need to be challenged intellectually? Will we be able to maintain a good relationship, and yet still have the judgment to have the right set of rules, when he gets to high school? Will I have a good relationship with him as an adult? And how am I going to react when the day comes when he tells me I ought to move into the nursing home?

Jacob, of course, doesn’t care about any of that right now. Each night, when I put him down for the night, he wants me to cover him up with blankets. Once I’ve done that, he peeks out and says, “Have a good night, dad!” I always reply with “You have a good night too, Jacob!”

If we can get along that well for the next 60 years, I guess we’ll do all right.