most of us are blissfully unaware of The Near Misses; the calamitous collisions with Fate that could have Changed Everything but, improbably, didn't when the seemingly inevitable conclusion of the chain of Could Have Beens doesn't actually make itself manifest - much to the chagrin of The Cosmic Oddsmakers - and allows one to continue to hold the belief while watching the nightly news that The Horrors only happen to other people.

but occasionally the veil is lifted, such as when you find a burned out plug that likely caught fire, given the wisps of carbon on the wall above the outlet, just a few feet from your child's bedroom that leaves you left to ponder What Is and What Could Have Been.

so, we're minding our own business at the grand rapids children's museum running around while checking out the new clifford the big red dog exhibit and i, of course, am in full blown pops-arazzi mode when all of a sudden a stranger approaches and says, "i knew it! i saw the camera and recognized odin and had to come over to say 'hi!' i read your blog all the time..."

i guess The Uber Sur(Real)ist moment will happen when someone recognizes us, secretly snaps a picture of me taking pictures and then sends me a link to it on flickr :-)

it's H-O-T! already almost 90F/32C with umpty billion percent humidity by mid-morning. so it wasn't long before we sought refuge. but it was fun while it lasted.

since we were playing in the hot weather, it seemed reasonable to seek some cool comfort and a large chocolate shake from dq ( not the best shake in the world, but odin doesn't know that the options are limited on a sunday morning ).

i insisted that no mention of the mid-morning shake could be made when he inevitably refused to eat a proper lunch, but he broke his end of the agreement by repeatedly calling "more! more! more!" when i tried to take it away from him as we walked towards the house :-)

and yet, somehow, he still managed to eat more cottage cheese than i could ever keep down.

kris and i aren't really the regular beach going types. i guess we never understood the appeal of baking yourself slowly in the sun while getting sand in every nook and cranny of, well, everything. and then there's the fact that if you live in michigan, going to the beach usually means visiting one of the great lakes which as early as fifteen years ago were described as a hazard to human health and while the situation has improved in recent years they are still giant sinks soaking up livestock waste and mercury emissions.

i mean, am i the only one who is a little leery of wading around in an already polluted body of water while surrounded by thousands of the unwashed masses who are doing who knows what in the water? apparently given the turn out at the beach, i am the only one.

but i guess, as a parent, one must occasionally rise above one's own obsessive idiosyncrasies and head out to the beach with friends and family - you know, for the children.

and your children will reward you by showing you how much fun it is to eat sand.

you can click on each image for a brief description.

in preparation for an adventure at the beach today we gave odin a new shovel and pail to play with in the sand.

being excellent at adapting tools to the situation at hand, odin decided at lunch that the shovel was superb for making short work of his mashed potatoes.

odin went of adventure to a small, local zoo and had a chance to see many animals that he had only read about in books. he had a grand time as we learned that there are few things more tiring than running around after a toddler on a hot, humid day at the zoo :-)

you can click on each image for a brief description.

many, many, many(!) thanks to everyone who helped to get me a new lens for my birthday.

i ended up going for the sigma 18-50mm F/2.8 based on the good word of philip greenspun; the 10-20mm f/4-5.6 but eventually lost out to the much more flexible 18-50mm F/2.8. good on all of you all for getting me what i wanted and supporting my little hobby. and if you didn't get a chance or just forgot, then you really shouldn't feel badly since you can still send me money online and i won't turn it down, i promise :-)

that's right - on this day 34 years ago, i was born 3 months early, weighing 2 pounds 8 ounces.

interestingly, i was always under the impression that i was born between 26 and 28 weeks and i've heard recently that there's very little evidence any babies born at 26 weeks survived prior to the introduction of surfactant and mechanical ventilation ( neither were in use 34 years ago ). one person even claimed that *no* 26 weekers survived and the survival rate for 27 and 28 weekers was vanishingly small. the theory is that most of the very small babies that survived were actually low birth weight later term infants and the actual gestational age was simply not well known. so, if anyone who knows that facts cares to clarify, i'd be interested in hearing just how well established it was that i was born between 26 and 28 weeks :-)

and that all has very little to do with the fact that odin and kris were making me a birthday card today and practicing saying "happy birthday, poppi". except, of course, that it makes me all the more appreciative of the moment.

you can even listen to odin practicing, if you're so inclined. by the time i got the laptop out to do the recording he was pretty sick of saying "birfday" and decided to simply shorten it to "day".

try as he might Fat Boy never would quite gain as wide - ahem - appeal as his more cosmopolitan cousin, Big Boy; a fact which always struck him as a bit ironic given the public's apparent love for ever expanding waistlines.

for years they managed to muster a thin veneer of cordiality, that is, until The Unfortunate Incident - which was also rumored to involve Our Beloved Fugitive - on that crisp fall morning after which things were never the same.

i don't think i've ever seen odin and his cousin evelyn, who was born almost exactly on his original due date ( meaning 15 weeks after he has actually born ), walk around holding hands.

but today they decided to do just that, although one of them doesn't seem quite sure what to make of the situation. or at least what to make of the situation being photographed :-)

sigh. i guess it comes with the territory of living with a toddler who was born too soon that when you see this sort of behavior your first thought is that it's symptomatic of a sensory integration disorder and not simply a result of prickly grass feeling funny on one's bare skin.

they'll feed you a whole bowl of ice cream and bananas in the middle of the day when you're not sitting at the table and not care a bit when you smear you sticky hands all over their pillows and couch.

to those without children it might seem a minor accomplishment and i can't really ascribe the achievement to much beyond luck and genetics, but nonetheless i have to admit that it fills me with parental pride to know that we have a son who seems to be acutely attuned to when he is tired and proactively communicates his desire to go to bed before launching into a tantrum.

if we're out visiting family or friends he'll often announce his intentions by suddenly walking around while waving and exclaiming "buh, bye!" to his hospitable hosts, which of course means, "please take me home and put me to bed." during the day, he'll helpfully give us an unmistakable clue by clasping his hands together and placing them against his tilted head while quietly whispering, "nap." and after a particularly long day filled with errands and running around stores, he'll look up, his eyes filled with sleepiness during the briefest of baths, and sweetly say, "all done, baff."

it seems like just yesterday that we were test driving odin's new highchair. but really it was 479 days ago! and recently we've been noticing that he's getting so big that he really doesn't need the highchair anymore and that it's really just a convenient toddler corral for us during mealtimes. so we thought we'd spend more time concentrating on teaching him good table manners and say goodby to the highchair. but not before we had a celebratory snack of cottage cheese and bacon, which are two of his favoritest foods.

i have no idea when it's "normal" to ditch the highchair, but my guess is that there's a lot of variability - maybe somewhere between ages 2 and 3 is the average? regardless, thanks to the wonders of digital photography and flickr you can take a trip down memory lane and watch odin grow up in the highchair slideshow.

the following is from the original mother's day proclamation which was written in 1870 in reaction to the american civil war and the franco prussian war. who knew that mother's day was started with the belief that woman have the responsibility to shape their societies at the political level? all these years i just thought it was just another hallmark holiday.

"From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says: "Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe our dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace..."

clearly someone didn't get the memo that it's april showers that bring may flowers. there's no subclause about may showers, little less the 16 days of rain that has been predicted. adding insult to injury we've been getting wind gusts up to 45 miles per hour.

of course, to odin this just means that after a dry and mild start to spring, the conditions are finally perfect for putting on his firetruck boots and stomp! stomp! stomping around.

if you ever watch jack's big music show, then you know which laurie berkner song we're singing. every once in awhile he'd pause and wave to the water running down the storm drain and exclaim, "buh! bye! rain!"

oh the Incredible Interestingness. and while we've been better at Getting Past No, we apparently couldn't prevent the death of not one but two ibook power supplies.

sigh.

actually i guess maybe we should be amazed that they lasted as long as they did since the cumulative wisdom of 721 reviews reveals the power adapter to be a remarkably craptastic $79 (!) piece of molded plastic.

odin helped wash the car for the first time today, and if you can't tell, he thought it was The Absolute Most Funnest Thing To Do, EVAR!

there was lots of good natured hootin' and hollerin' and splashin' and sudsin' and even a little bit of car cleanin'.

you can click on each image for a brief description.

normally i probably wouldn't feel compelled to document such avian carnage, but only just recently john posted an image of his rendezvous with bird death and it occurred to me that i couldn't remember the last time i saw a hairless, dead baby bird laying on the sidewalk. and then in a morbid flickr coicindence, just a few days later while walking mauja, i nearly tripped myself as i attempted to avoid not one, not two, but three birds. all lying in a straight line, evenly spaced about a stride's length apart.

no sign of a bird's nest nearby.

first, there's microwave-sized ice chunks falling from cloudless skies, then unexplained sonic booms. and now hairless birds are now myteriously appearing on sidwalks. what could it all mean?

most of his prior field research had led him to the conclusion that slides were supposed to be slid down while sitting on one's posterior. but in a curious turn of events, he's recently observed that some Big Kids like walk up the slide.

to the best of my knowledge odin has not yet constructed a coherent theory that explains the behavior, but he definitely believes it warrants further study.

given his intense interest in the The Slide, he missed the unique opportunity to observe a mentally challenged adolescent boy who pulled down his pants to take a pee while seemingly oblivious to the horrified protests of a young mother standing nearby with her children. seemingly i say, at least until he started throwing bark chips at her.

after decades of watching the benford probabilities for sixes and nines slowly and almost imperceptively skew towards zero, agent affords had finally found the culprit.

a flower so dense that not a single six or nine could escape, which naturally and inevitably results in a numerical singularity of sorts. [ view large ]

it doesn't seem possible that six months have passed since odin's previous eye exam, but i guess the calendar doesn't lie, which is why we found ourselves sitting in the exam room, reading a magazine, waiting once again for the dilation drops to do their pupil dilation thing.

the good news is that while 6 months ago his diopter was about -5.25, this time his doctor thought it was a little better at -4.25! so, the optimistic view is that his eyesight might have improved slightly. or at the very least didn't significantly worsen. and since there's a chance that his eyesight might be improving, his doctor wants to wait a bit longer before prescribing glasses. i guess the theory being that glasses might hinder the natural self improvement. he'll have another exam in four months to see in the improvements keep improving.

we'll need to watch him closely over the next year to make sure that not correcting his vision isn't impairing his ability to get on in the world. if i were a betting man, i'd wager that there's almost a hundred percent chance that he'll have glasses before his third birthday ( not that there's anything wrong with that ), but i suppose you never know.

amazingly, both of his eyes still have the same diopter and therefore, there's less of a chance of him crossing his eyes or developing a lazy eye which would require immediate correction since it can relatively quickly lead to cortical blindness.

all-in-all it was a very positive visit; well, except the actual dilating the pupils and shining the bright light in odin's eye part. he's so strong that it takes both kris and i to hold him down and it's No Fun for everyone involved.

if you're one of those kind, thoughful people who likes to give me things on my birthday ( and, of course, you remember my birthday is on may 25th! ), then i'd like you to know that all i really want is a brand new camera lens. see, i've been using the same lens(es) for two years and it's increasingly becoming an irritant to not have an effective focal length less than 75mm ( insert long, boring explanation here about what happens when you use 35mm film lenses on a digital camera ). but the new lenses i'm looking at ( i'm leaning towards either the Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 EX DC HSM or the Sigma 18-50mm F/2.8 EX DC on the recommendation of philip greenspun. ) are mighty expensive. and given the upcoming Big Adventure, it's probably not a super idea to be dropping $500 on a lens.

but if everyone who might normally send me a giftcard or buy me a shirt or take me out to dinner and a movie all collectively sent me $10 or $20 or $50, well, then it looks a lot more reasonable. and just think you'll be helping to support me to take more pictures of your wonderful friend, daughter, son, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, nephew, grandson and great-grandson ( and probably quite a few gorgeous landscapes ). which will be all the more important because we might be moving away soon. and it would be a shame if i got all burned out and uncreative and didn't take anymore pictures. yes, that would be terrible indeed.

via the magic of teh internets you don't even have to send me a birthday card. you can simply click on the donate button below to send me money using a credit card ( no, you don't even need a paypal account. ). don't worry. i don't think it's an impersonal gift.

of course, you don't have to feel guilty if you don't help support me in getting the only thing i want for my birthday. but really. think of the children.

if you act fast we promise a no money back guarantee.

if his stomach really is the size his of fist, i have absolutely no idea where he's putting all the food he's been eating lately. i mean, after eating a good sized bean and cheese burrito and a whole container of yogurt there wouldn't be much room for anything else. but of late he's taken to also gulping down 15 ounces (!) of whole milk before falling asleep for the night. fifteen fluid ounces - that's almost half a liter!

and more often than not he's sleeping 12-14 hours a night in addition to taking a 3 hour nap during the day.

all this eating and sleeping makes me wonder if he'll be fitting into any of his clothes in the near future as i imagine his body is working overtime building new infrastructure.