Ben2

I wonder if I'm limiting the value of doing these at night. I guess one of the goals is that to do free-form writing, first thing in the morning, you get everything out of your head so that you're freed up to be creative throughout the day. I wonder if I'm not freeing up anything, or if I'm giving my brain license go elsewhere while sleeping. If that's the case, then maybe I should stop -- a recent dream was far too close to home about my insecurities at work.

Anyhow, the big news of the day, that's why you're here. Our little guy turned two today. It was quite a bit of a non-starter. I took the day off, I like to do that when it's a family birthday, but Rachel still had school, so we didn't go anywhere special. We went to Target and Borders with Ben and bought his birthday presents, that's how behind we've been lately. But, the good news was that he showed absolute delight at something that we would have never considered. For one thing, it's 12-36 months. So while he fits right in the middle, it seemed a bit childish. But he giggled and laughed at what little of it he could interact with while it was still all wrapped up, so, yeah, he'll receive that on Sunday at his official family party.

After the shopping, we went and picked up Rachel and headed to Red Robin. That, unfortunately, did not work. That was the Blue Bayou all over again, except this restaurant wasn't in pitch darkness like that one and this restaurant didn't have a drip right above the first table we were seated at. Well, and the food was like 1/10th the cost, too. But yeah, he wasn't having any of it. He didn't eat anything, preferring instead to throw everything on the floor. And he cried and screamed and was only quiet when one of us was carrying him. So we took turns carrying him around the restaurant while the other ate quick bites. At one point, it was Rachel leading Lori and Ben while I tried to scarf the last of my food. We had the tell the waiter to cancel the singing, cancel the free ice cream. And so we headed home and all sat on the floor in the living room while Ben ran around for awhile, and then after some transition time, it was off to bed for him. He had a long nap, we talked about wishing we had the energy and desire to be productive, and not a lot happened. Rachel read books quietly, Lori rode the exercise bike and watched TV and I... well, I'm not sure what I did... read some Google Reader, I guess. Then I shaved, and then I felt productive. I enlisted Rachel to start sorting and putting away clean laundry and then I started running more laundry, getting other chores done, good stuff. We were on quite a roll.

And then it was time to get Ben up, so we got him up, took him down to the living room and he started playing. So the three of us went back upstairs and looked at the presents and picked a bunch of them, took them down to him, sang to him and gave him his presents. The little cell phone was a huge hit. It plays music, plays tones and you can record a message on there that plays when a certain button is pressed. Rachel spent a lot of time recording messages saying she loved him.

We do hope, however, that the poor phone survives our new tile floor. It did experience a lot of falls and throws today. We decided that any future tile-tosses would result in us relocating the toy to the carpeted living room.

All in all, a very low-key birthday, I'm pretty sure he was unaware that it was a special day for him. He ended the day with his usual fight against sleep.

Which brings me to now. Just exercising, watching Breaking Bad. All's quiet. Tomorrow and Friday, work. Friday, Small Group. Saturday, getting the house ready for Sunday's birthday party with family. Even if he's still not aware of the day being special, he will really enjoy being able to see so many of his family members. Lori's mom, my mom and dad, my brother and his wife and their son and a few very close personal friends from church should all be there to help celebrate.