Fine. I surrender. You win. I give up. Since everything I post about ends back up on the subject of my beautiful kids, let’s talk about them.

They are gorgeous. In anticipation of all the “they must take after their mother” jokes, they both actually favor me a fair bit. That little fact sticks in Marilyn’s craw quite a bit. I believe that she (having more dominant traits than yours truly) expected to have them favor her a bit more. Frankly, so did I. But it didn’t turn out that way and I’m taking what I can get.

We had at one point thought that JD would be our last child. My thoughts on the matter are this: when you are kicking out kids like this, maybe you ought to stick with it. It’s hard to discuss this without sounding like I’m bragging (and maybe I am to some extent), but I think we are only helping the gene pool. I have no idea how many kids we might end up having, but we have recently discussed the possibility of a third. Give us a year, we might abandon that whole idea again.

Everyone who reads this blog with any frequency realizes that JD had an operation. He took it like a champ and except for a little scar you couldn’t tell he had anything done. I don’t know if after 2 months a personality can be assessed, but I really expect him to be the quiet type. He is strong as a little baby ox, so that is what I’m expecting him to be–the strong silent type. Of course, neither his father or sister are silent very often, so maybe we will influence him.

On the subject of his sister, well, I really don’t know what to say. You have to experience Emily to understand what being with her for very long is like. She is beautiful and she knows it. She is also scarily smart and she knows that, too. As her skills at using both of those gifts increase, I expect her to become a force of nature. My biggest hope is that I can teach her to use her powers for good. It might be a challenge, though, teaching her how to use beautiful and smart when on my best day I might’ve hit cute and clever. But what the heck, Leo Mazzone coached John Smoltz for years, maybe I can pull the same sort of thing off.

We recently sent her pictures to a modeling agency in Atlanta. She really likes to be in front of a camera and pose and say “cheese”. So combining that with her good looks, we are hoping that at least we could get her some modeling gigs to help pay for college. If it gets bigger than that, that would be cool , too.

The smart thing is way harder to deal with. She is way beyond her 3.25 years in some respects but right at it in others (we just recently got her potty trained). It requires a balancing act that is difficult to maintain. At slightly over 3 she has been using the computer for almost a year and a half now. I have a mouse with thumb button that I change to be like a left click so that her tiny little hands can use it easier. She flips through noggin.com and related web sites with ease. I’ve also sat and watched her win a game of regular solitaire and a game of spider solitaire by herself. I only learned to play spider solitaire myself in the last few months and she and I play it at the same difficulty level. In my defense, I do win more than she does.

I worry about her, probably needlessly. She picks things up so quickly and so easily that I don’t worry about that much. I worry about not spoiling her too much and I worry about molding her into a good person. I’m caught in the Parent’s Paradox: I want her life to be tough enough that she develops character and easy enough that she never needs it. It will be 20 years or more before we have any idea of how it turns out. Scary.

So those are my kids. If you hadn’t noticed, I have been posting a bunch of pictures to my Flickr account recently. Feel free to check them out.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 17th, 2005 at 9:34 pm and is filed under family, life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.