I beamed with excitement the moment that the ultrasound technician broke the news to my wife and I that we were having a boy. Healthy and happy were first priorities, but this news just made me smile. I knew from the beginning that boys transitioned into toddlerhood as steaming balls of energy nearly impossible to contain. I had seen others’ children in action enough to understand this. All that said, I figured that the phrase “bouncing off the walls” took on a figurative meaning. I figured wrong. Jamie is 22 months old and he almost always resides in some state of motion when he is not sleeping. One of his favorite things to do is run from one wall in our front room to another, while yelling as loud as he can. Except when he arrives at his destination, he doesn’t stop. His momentum carries him into a hard surface with a thud, and his voice shakes. He bounces off the walls. The contact doesn’t phase him. He doesn’t stop. He isn’t hurt. He simply turns around and does it again, continuing on his quest to burn energy. It really is tiring to watch, but there is no alternative for him while the subzero frigid winter temperatures rage outside. We recently took a family vacation to South Carolina, and Jamie behaved extremely well on the hour-and-a-half flight. By the time we were driving to the rental house after we landed, he became a little stir crazy. So when we settled in, we drove Jamie down to the beach, where there were no walls to confine him. And he ran, and ran and ran. He yelled, he stretched his arms out, and he ran some more. And dad ran with him. It was a refreshing break from winter to watch him run like that right next to the ocean. With young toddlers, there is no logic or reason as to when to turn this mode off. Our southern vacation was to attend a family member’s wedding. When we entered the Catholic church, Jamie made a break for the canister of holy water in the corner yelling “Wa-Wa!!!” the whole way. I credit some early morning runs that I have made in an attempt to stay in shape for the ability to stop him before he figured out how to start drinking. Life with a toddler is nothing if not interesting. There is no off switch for Jamie’s energy. You cannot tell him to slow down because you are tired. But it is contagious.  I hope he is able to channel it into various aspects of his life when he is older....

As I sat down on the floor to play mega blocks with my almost 2-year-old son, I showed him the picture on the box. A choo-choo train and a station built from the blocks in the set graced the cover. I fought back the urge to open the box and begin explaining how they could be created. Why? There is plenty of time to build what the set is intended for later. The concept seemed a little bit over his head, and I don’t think he would have learned anything from it. Instead, I wanted to see what else he could come up with. Granted he is at an age where he is just beginning to see how the blocks fit together at all, but it is refreshing to see someone play with a toy totally new, and the curiosity they bring to the endeavor. I don’t care if he used the train set to build a used car lot or a lemonade stand, all these toys are sparking his imagination, and it is great to watch. Instead, he pulled the blocks out of the box, and simply experimented with how they fit together. I showed him what a couple blocks looked like assembled, and he was content simply playing with them. No urge to build anything complex yet existed, but that’s alright. Once he figures out what he has and how they work, the creativity will flow. He has plenty of opportunity for following instructions later in life. There will be plenty of moments where he will be told “do this” and “don’t do that.” It is important for him to use his toys to spark his own imagination—especially since he is an only child. The process has already begun. For instance, he regularly plays with a toy kitchen that his grandmother bought him for Christmas. He heats up coffee in his fake coffee pot and hands us empty plates telling us it’s fish. This always cracks me up considering it is not something he eats with any great frequency. However, when we eat what he cooks he lets out a “Yay!” and continues playing. I know he is young, but I want him to value his play and creative time – before somebody tells him that something he creates is good or bad, or that it must be done in any certain way. Kids seem to have that innate ability to create without judgment, but somewhere along the line it is pounded out of most adults. As a writer I always struggle with my inner editor. I need to simply get ideas down on paper or on the screen, and then go back and tweak. However, if...

My son’s first visit with Santa, as well as his Christmas went better than this picture would seem to indicate. I just love the honesty of the moment. In what seemed like a Christmas miracle unto itself, Santa was able to turn my son around and make him smile as he gave him a high five while sitting on his lap. Jamie also showed a tremendous amount of joy and excitement as he unwrapped each of his presents on Christmas morning. He tried to play with everything all at once. He showed a lot more awareness of what was going on around him this year than he did in his first Christmas, and it was great to watch. Christmas has definitely taken on a new focus in our house. At the same time, I am glad it is over. I’m really not the bah-humbug type, it’s just that watching the collective consciousness shift out of whack can be exhausting.  I don’t participate in any Black Thursday (otherwise known as Thanksgiving) or Black Friday shopping. Instead I watch news reports roll in about fights for the latest and greatest thing, and shake my head. I love supporting small businesses, but Christmas is a very Amazon event for me, since it keeps me out of retail establishments during December—and that can only be viewed as a good thing. Christmas also seems like a good way to wind down the year. So once the tree is down, the toys are shoveled into their appropriate place, and the New Year’s resolutions take hold, it is like starting fresh. I regain my house back from the Christmas bomb that includes the tree, toys, and boxes of decorations that occupy our storage closet and garage for 11 months out of the year.  That feeling of a fresh slate has always outweighed the stresses of Christmas. The calendar provides that natural reset point with New Year’s, and I see why it becomes that obsessive moment for so many as they adjust their work habits, go on diets, and make countless resolutions. You really need to perform all sorts of mental tricks to survive a Chicago winter, and Christmas acts as a natural dividing point on the calendar. Any major cold or snow occurring after Christmas can be viewed as something that will at least end eventually, since winter will be on its way out within two months or so. The thermometer is on an eventual uptick. No matter how nice the celebration, I always feel better starting fresh. Bring on the rest of the year.      ...

I never understood the tradition of watching grownups lug colossal inflatables down the street as a way to celebrate Thanksgiving. Of course this typically occurs while someone barely famous talks with random guests about sitcoms I’m not interested in watching, or Broadway musicals that I don’t care about. Turkey and football have always provided enough backdrop for me to give thanks. That is until my 20-month old son points to each inflatable with great enthusiasm trying to figure out what they are. No matter his accuracy, his adorable enthusiasm is contagious. “Baby?” “No, buddy. That’s a clown,” I said pointing with him at Ronald McDonald. “Mickey?” “No, buddy. That’s a police officer.” It is fascinating watching Jamie begin to piece together his surroundings, and he did begin to get a few of the parade floats right. He recognized Elsa on the Frozen float, while bouncing up and down and pointing with great enthusiasm. Of course, he is also prone to walk up to a television that is turned off and emphatically plead “Elsa, Elsa, Elsa!” as a way to ask you to watch Frozen for the hundredth time. I’m not sure what it means that he is infatuated with the isolated, more dangerous of the sisters, but there is plenty of time to analyze that. He is beginning to count and repeat some of the ABCs on his own. He knows his body parts better than ever before. And he sure loves his books. We settled into a routine of reading Good Night Moon before bed, that he now anticipates almost every night, except he refers to it as “Bye bye moon.” He can finish certain lines in the book, and has become strangely infatuated with the mouse on the floor in the room. The main character says good night to some extremely arbitrary stuff in that book, but the fact that the mouse is his favorite has his mother slightly disturbed. It is fascinating to watch him piece more and more things together. He is beginning to move past words, into phrases and starting to put together some concepts. Watching his mind at work is enough to tolerate (and possibly enjoy) the change to the Thanksgiving Day routine. Nothing he can say will convince me to like musicals,...

Even though we have a 19-month-old boy, there is still one way I am outnumbered in my own home. The ratio for the love of musicals does not fall in my favor. We recently showed our son Aladdin, and he loved it. He watched attentively the majority of the movie, bouncing up and down with some of the songs. Maybe I’m not open to my hopeless romantic side. Maybe the realist in me has never seen two people supposedly in love sing to each other that much about every single thing. Either way, my hope is that Jamie’s interest in the movie had more to do with the animation than singing and dancing to advance the plot line, but it is too soon to tell. My wife loves musicals. I have fundamental issues with the genre that prohibit me from sharing her passion. Any movie that uses song to show us gangsters about to fight is begging for ridicule (West Side Story). Any movie that uses song to tell us about the character who served a 19-year prison sentence for stealing bread is begging to be considered absurd (Les Miserables). There is something in cinema called the suspension of disbelief. The viewer needs to be able to accept what they see. It’s the fancy term for a B.S detector. If you are willing to buy what a musical is selling you, it might be time to bring your suspension of disbelief in for a tune-up. I couldn’t expect my son to be born with this innate sensibility. However, it is something that can certainly be taught. My wife likes to remind me that a lot of cartoons have music in them. With cartoons for young kids, that music is used as a mnemonic device, and not to advance the plot. It is also a cartoon, and not very lifelike. So viewers are willing to show a little more leeway with the plot. What makes Aladdin different is that it is classified as a musical. I’ll let Jamie enjoy this one for now, but some of the other musical classics would open up too many cans of worms. “Jamie, that is not how gangsters behave,” is not something I imagined needing to explain to him before the ripe age of 2. I may need to prohibit him from watching West Side Story even when he is older, and have him read Hunter Thompson’s Hell’s Angels instead. This isn’t about language or violence. This is about creating a realistic interpretation of what outlaw life is about. Finding a Les Miserables substitution is perhaps a little easier. The book would give him a more accurate interpretation of life in a French prison from...

A few days ago, I had a conversation with two younger coworkers that ended with me feeling much older than my age. To them, Kurt Cobain had always been dead, and one of them did not remember Harry Carey. The phrase “It could be, it might be, it’s caught by the shortstop,” should be in everyone’s lexicon I’m sitting here writing this post from my table in a coffee shop that is scheduled to close down in a few short weeks. It is a major chain. Meg worked for this chain in a location that’s already been closed for quite a few months. Change in the name of progress is severely limiting my coffee variety. The world spins whether you want it to or not. All of this has me thinking about how I will have to explain the world to my son as he gets older: • The names Derrick Rose, Patrick Kane and Paul Konerko could all be distant memories. • Walter Payton, Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen and Andre Dawson may as well be Ernie Banks, Ron Santo, Bob Love and Dick Butkus. • The Chicago Bears used to be called the Monsters of the Midway. That nickname came when playing defense meant something. • The Chicago Blackhawks are still the only Chicago sports team to have won a championship in your lifetime. • There used to be many different places you can buy a cup of coffee. Today, there is Starbucks. • The day that Kennedy was shot, and September 11 are equally foreign concepts. • This is the new Rolling Stones album. Yes, they used to make music in the 1960s, when grandma and grandpa were young. No, Keith Richards isn’t dead yet. • I don’t know what the World Series is. I’m a Cubs fan.    ...

A few months ago I popped a morning news show on the television while I finished getting my son ready to go to my parents’ house for the day. The Talking Heads version of Take Me To The River played for exit music before a commercial. My son began bopping his head and doing his little toddler dance, loving what he heard. When the show went to commercial Jamie looked disappointed, showing me his lip. But as dad, I had this one. I whipped out my phone, and sure enough I had Take Me To The River. He smiled and danced on. Jamie’s always had a thing for music, and it’s really been awesome to watch. He used to kick to a couple Straight No Chaser songs when he was in the womb. I even joked with my wife that one of daddy’s favorites, Wilco, was his first show, since he “witnessed” it from the womb. I have no anecdotal evidence on what he thought of that show, however. It makes me so happy that he is into music, and I want to do everything I can to cultivate his interest.  The other day I had Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon on in the car, and he tried to harmonize with the background vocalists on Great Gig in the Sky. This was truly priceless to hear.  Personally, I love music, but couldn’t carry a tune to save my life. I’m sitting listening to some old time jazz records in the basement while I write this. Right now, these records have been dad’s way to unwind at the end of a day. Once Jamie overcomes his need to feel, touch and destroy everything that he comes in contact with, maybe I’ll start playing some of these records for him at night. I am sure he would enjoy them. Music has a way to make your whole body move, and toddlers don’t hide it. At least mine doesn’t. Who knows, maybe Jamie will be able to take this love for music and turn it into playing an instrument, and maybe not. But that love and appreciation for it is something I hope sticks with him for the rest of his...