I plan to leave Savannah around 2 or 3 a.m. and as usual I end up leaving around an hour later then planned. Usually my hold up is me not wanting to get out of bed. I’m off driving to Chicago like of I’ve done 1000 times before. I use to make this long distance run while in college. Since my school was on the quarter system I would drive home for Thanksgiving then again at the end of my last quarter for the year, to be honest I pretty much make this drive now on pure instinct. The only real plan of attack is to pretty much try and miss rush hour traffic in all the major cities, which in the last several runs I’ve been able to master. The drive holds certain nostalgia to it. I reminisce the thoughts of architecture theories and then when I pass the firework stores in Tennessee my childhood spirit rears its head. By Illinois I’m wishing someone has invented a teleporter, since now I’ve been in the car for almost 9 hrs and still have 6 hours more to go. As usual the last hour of my drive is based on the pure adrenaline of just being done, and when I reach my brothers door step I hope to never get behind the wheel of my car.
So now on to my nephew; Parker is about 10 months old. The one game I play with him that I find most enjoyable is throwing balls. Let me paint the picture of how this game is played. Parker has a ball pit full of plastic balls, so I would lay up against it and sit for about 15 minutes throwing balls at his poop filled diaper (to me the most cushioned part on him.) The fun part was to watch his face as the balls would bounce off him, he would look at the balls with a look of; “where did that come from” and my thoughts were from the guy throwing them at you. When my A.D.D. would kick in I would then turn to Parker and say clean up this mess. The beauty was he would look at me with a face that truly showed he had no idea what I was saying, then he would just smile. After awhile I realized what the smile was for, he really did know what I was saying and he was just playing dumb so I would have to pick up all the balls. Then again how do you argue with a 10 month old.
Now once again not being an owner of a child, I don’t have the first clue on how to take care of a kid. I find it interesting that Parker comes home from daycare and has to get the germs washed off of him. In my opinion I would leave the germs on him so he could build a strong immune system (this is maybe why we don’t have kids.) Oh and I also learned that babies skulls aren’t fully developed until they are 1 yrs old, so mom and dad guard lil Parker’s head like a hockey goalie. I have yet another solution to remedy this problem. How about a helmet to protect under developed heads, I would have to say that answer was strike 2 in the raising of a kid. So the rest of my time was spent tormenting little Parker, only for the reason he will probably never remember any of my tutelage that I gratefully bestowed on him. I can’t finish this story without Strike 3 right? So strike 3 would have to be when I would get frustrated that Parker would not talk or do any other social behavior, so I decided to try and teach him his first words, “you want fries with that.” Whenever I would say this to him, Jamie, his mom would give me the evilest stare. My only come back was, “I’m just trying to teach him something useful.”
