Is “Uh-oh” a word? She’s said it several times now. She will repeat it if you say it. The first time I heard it I kid you not I cried.
She has done it a few times. We got her on video below but it is not the best example of it.
Chris Isaac
Staind
ACDC
Janet Jackson
Marilynn Manson
Dido
Barry Manilow
Hulk Hogan
Edward Norton
Joaquin Phoenix
Mel Gibson
Rene Zellweger
Magic Johnson
Gerald Lavert
Alice Cooper
Brittany Spears
Jaime Lynn Spears (she was 7 or 8 at the time.. lol)
Justin Timberlake
Eve
nsync
Back Street Boys
Winona Rider
DMX
Larry Holmes
Robert Picardo
Tiffani Thiessen
R kelly
Whoopi Goldberg
Morgan Freeman
Michael Douglas
Kathy Bates
Kevin Spacey
Winona Ryder
Benicio Del Toro
Dikembe Mutombo
Larry Holmes
Steve Yzerman
I love cooking and my earliest memories of television are of Sesame street, Mr. Rogers and Wok with Yan. Indeed a good deal of the cooking I do is Chinese style cooking with a wok. I owe a debt of gratitude to Stephen Yan.
When I was a child I didn’t get sarcasm. I imagine I was teased often because I took things perhaps a little too seriously and was hurt a lot. When I attended high school things all fell into place and I became as sarcastic as the best of them.
My new wit served me well. It has been ingrained into my personality and through the years it has given others and myself many a laugh. The other day however I said something in a joking manner and someone else didn’t take it in the fashion I had intended it. I think through the years I’ve become somewhat numb to the impact and power that words can have.
It was at that time where I had a realization. If I have a tendency that can easily hurt people, I should change that. I will change this. I feel as though this is a natural process of my maturation and growth as a human being, and development as a parent and a teacher.
So specifically what this means is:
I will try to keep from using negative sarcasm in speech (I will still probably use what would be considered by others as harmless).
additionally I’ve decided to try to be a more positive person, to stop complaining so much and to make a determined effort to remove the snarkiness that has crept into my personality over the years.
It has always been a goal of mine to work to love all other human beings I believe that this should be more than a position but it should be reflected in my acts, and attitudes.
God I love swimming! I love Michael Phelps!
First there was the 400 M free relay… Holy cow that blew me away…
then there was the Fly photo finish! This race was unbelievable!
Then came the Medley Relay….
It was all great!
Dara Torres… Ryan Lochte, Michael, Aaron Peirsol, Cullen Jones, Katie Hoff, and Natalie Coughlin… You guys all are so inspiring.
The swimming portion of the Olympics has just about floored me.
We are in the process of closing on a town home. I’m really excited about it. The following pictures are from the ad for the place. First are the community it’s in. There is a nice park for Navab to play in, a nice pool, and a pond. The place itself is really nice, large and will fit all of our needs.
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The Dark Knight is simply the best superhero movie ever. No movie of this genre will ever… ever… be able to compare to it.
Babies are emo.
I usually don’t post other people’s work to my own blog, but this animation just blew me away…
wow!
Okay… be warned… this entry has a lot of boisterous parent talk that you might want to skip or avoid if that type of thing annoys you.
We just had a family moment, but no one was able to capture it on a digital photo, but it was more of a feeling than a visual, but I will paint a visual for you nonetheless.
We had all simultaneously lost consciousness on the couch: Lacey, Navab, and I.. this is something so normal and natural yet it was completely magical almost as if we had been put under a spell. Lacey had been at work all day feeling deprived of the blessing of proximity to her beautiful daughter was holding her closely and had started to fade slowly after noticing Navab was asleep, then once they had both journeyed into dreamland I found myself drifting into oblivion like a feather in its last three teeters before it softly hit the earth.
I was woken by my disturbing phone ring. It is the opening line to Them bones by Alice In Chains. Talk about a rude awakening. When I woke I studied Lacey and Navab together. Navab’s head so naturally pillowed my Lacey’s female stature. I started to think about our current role reversal.
It’s funny how our gender roles are spelled out for us in some ways by our biology and in some ways by our society. Right now as fate would have it ours are sort of reversed in a way. I am at home because I am a teacher and it is summer, and Lacey is at work because her maternity leave is now over. Therefor for now, during the day it is my duty to take on the role of nurturing, caring for and educating our child at this brief moment in her life.
It’s amazing how freaking hard this is… lol.. I am so amazed by caregivers everywhere, yet I enjoy the challenge as it is bringing me closer to my beautiful daughter.
I remember when I worked at the Bahá’í National Center and my co-worker Husayn remarked how it was hard to find time to even do something as simple as brush his teeth when caring for his daughter Amia. At first I thought he was joking, but he insisted that you don’t have any time.
I understand what he meant now. It’s difficult to even go to the bathroom. Your 10 week old child will assume if you are out of her sight for even a moment that she has been abandoned forever. Still, I feel as though I have been giving a unique opportunity to bond with Navab before the school year starts.
I can not tell you how annoyed I get when men are spending time with their own children and they call it babysitting. whenever this happens I usually correct them immediately.
“It’s not babysitting when it’s your own child.”
Still, so many of us inherently think that what I am now doing is unnatural… That a man’s role is relegated to bringing home the proverbial bacon and not much else. God forbid that he hugs, kisses, and shows emotion or shriek… even says I love you… If he watches his child it’s babysitting because it’s considered unusual… almost abnormal… he should be paid for watching his own kid because it’s not the natural order of things….. I hope someday if I ask a young father what he is doing during the weekend the last thing to spring from him will be the word “babysitting”.
I wonder how many people sit there with their baby and with a slightly insane encouraging yet desperate smile look in their eyes say “Da-Da” pointing to themselves for ten minutes straight hoping that that will be the first word their child utters and at two months she will be declared a genius and he gets the bragging rights to tell all of his friends that his daughter said her first “word” at 2 months…
um.. yeah… I’m that guy.. er um.. freakazoid..
I am however very proud to tell you that she is highly intelligent (considerate even) because she already automatically lifts up her bottom when you lay her down to change her.
It’s crazy to be there when My daughter smiles and coos… I get so excited each time a new odd sound comes out of her mouth. I sit with her, walk her around drive her around, take her to the pool, bottle feed her from the stockpile her mom has pumped and I feel like I’m more zen now than ever. Nothing has you in the moment you are living in more than a child that has needs to attend to.
This was their meeting at the airport!
Last year (it’s so nice to say that…***sigh***ahhh.. summer!) I had my students create clay animations using playdoh. I set all of them to start uploading to Flickr before we all left for the airport to MI, and it appears that half of them uploaded before the uploading stopped. Well anyways, below you will find one of these student creations, unfortunately it kills off one of our favorite furry little red muppets :*(
We are in Michigan now. I’m sitting typing inside a house that I called home for many years. A place where I matured from my teen years to manhood. The place where my sister died. Home, in a sense. I spent so many years bent on escaping this place that its hard to imagine my sorrow at seeing a for sale sign in the front of the house and it’s 40 acres, yet that is what I felt. Still, it may be awhile before it is sold in this market…anyways… on the the reason whe are here.
Navab is getting to meet her paternal grandparents for the first time. It was a very special moment when I first saw my Mom holding my daughter.
Tim has told us a few funny things about how people react to Navab’s name. Obviously it is … different. Trust me, I’m the father, and a lot of times people do look at me with a slight confusion over the name choice. Apparantly when they react confused about the name he just makes up some crazy story about some female conquerer from ages ago ..lol.. he had Lacey and I cracking up.
“What??? you haven’t heard of Navab? She conquered half of the known world…”
We could have given Navab a western name, or something that was more familiar to people, but the name means a great deal of significance… Particularly to Lacey. Navab is named after Bahá’u'lláh’s wife. Lacey feels a strong spiritual kinship to her. Indeed my wife is very devoted to the Bahá’í Faith and spent a lot of time at the grave site of Navváb (the way it is spelled in the Bahá’í writings) in the holy land.
In fact it was at that very site where she asked God to help guide her to decide whether or not I was the one for her.
Fast Forward two years…
We were at feast one day. Lacey and I had been discussing baby names earlier that day. We had mostly been coming up with silly crazy names like “Zapatos Pantalones Gerard” to ease the stress of the importance of naming our child. After some prayer, I began reflecting on how important and significant Navváb was to Lacey and to our being together. I struck me. During the treasurer’s report. I caught Lacey’s eye and wrote the name Navab on a piece of paper and tilted it toward her for her to see. The look in her eye said it all she knew exactly what I was inferring. She smiled the biggest smile and shook her head yes. This was to be our daughter’s name. I can’t tell you how important it was to Lacey that we name her this once it was mentioned, it just felt very right despite it not being a very Anglo name. It holds the same significance that a Catholic naming her daughter Mary does, or perhaps more. Because of this with all respect to everyone’s creativity in coming up with nicknames that are more Anglo-friendly we hope everyone will honor the meaning of the name has for Lacey (and myself) and call her Navab or just Nava for short, even if it is a little weird at first.
I’m annoyed. There is a federally funded program that would forgive up to $5000 of my student loan debt because I’m a teacher in a title I school. Great!… well, not so great for me because. I do not qualify for this because… ahem..
“To qualify for up to $5,000 loan forgiveness under this program, you must not have had an outstanding balance on a FFEL or Direct Loan program loan as of October 1, 1998, or on the date that you obtained a Direct Loan Program loan or a FFEL Program loan after October 1, 1998.”
this is so annoying because my student loans were started in October of 1997, which means if I had started school just one year later I’d have $5000 less in financial debt! Arrrgghhhh!!
why couldn’t they have set it a little earlier… it just doesn’t seem fair!
As Lacey has mentioned Navab is now 2 months old. Wow! It seems like it was yesterday that she was born, and I’ve already been a father for 2 months…. that blows my mind. Every day she seems to be getting larger. She has just recently started smiling more, but we still have to give her a lot of encouragement to smile. It isn’t quite second nature yet. I’m really looking forward to when she expresses a complete emotional palatte.
Last year I worked over the summer as a lifeguard, I managed four pools in the Sugarland area. As of Yesterday I finished a week long lifeguarding instructor certification course. I’m now a certified Lifeguard Instructor. This means I can make people into lifeguards, as well as train people in first aid, CPR, and the use of an AED (defibrillator).
whoohoo! I’m glad, because I really want to be able to do a few things with this.
1. Give my swim team members a source of summer income while giving them the experience and with it the valuable lessons I learned about responsibility by becoming a lifeguard.
2. To be able to instruct other coaches at my school lifeguarding thereby eliminating my need to be at the high school’s pool at all times when it is being used.
I have to figure out the logistics involved still, but I plan on teaching lifguarding at some point in this new school year. As an incentive to get three managers for the swim team, I’m going to give them half of of the class. I’ve already spoken with the school nurse and she said I could teach the students in the nursing center (for the dry land portions like CPR, and first aid and the book materials).
I finished my triathlon on Sunday! That was my major goal: to finish!
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1. I am a strong swimmer, but I didn’t think much about how hard it is to swim through other people. I inhaled and swallowed a good deal of water becuase of battling it out through a herd of swimmers. This cramped me up and slowed me down some. Oddly enough I found myself relying a lot on breaststroke during the swim which I hadn’t anticipated at all.
2. My legs felt so bizarre running after biking I did not train in race order at all. I usually biked to the gym then jogged on a treadmill and swam last so in effect I reversed the order. I realize I need to train in the correct order if I am to anticipate how things will work (or not) and feel during the race.
3. My stride was great at first during the run but it shrank as I got tired. I will have to work on keeping my stride going as I tire.
4. My transitions were faster than most peoples and I don’t have to worry about that so much. I think I beat one person just from having faster transitions though, although my overall place in my age group was very low.
I think I’ll be doing a lot of these!
The other day I had a chance to do some quick building in clay with a model as a reference. I did the following pieces in ten minutes each.
Man, It seems like it was just yesterday that I was changing her diapers.. oh.. thats right… it was today.. So Navab wanted to try out riding bikes so we decided to let her.
not bad… and I thought it all was going to end there, but you know the old adage, give them an inch and they’ll take a mile. Next thing you know, she wants to steer the car.
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Artist, writer, singer, husband, father, son, triathlete, comic book geek, Bahá'í, teacher, coach, |
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