"Eh.  Son.  Back in my day, we didn't have no fancy polychromatic school-of-fish lollipops. In my day, the were of one color.  Either round, round-with-an-equatorial-belt, or a slice of round (like a cut of an onion or a beet).  If we were lucky, it had a tootsie bar or gum core.

"And we were glad to have it."

Uncle Dan, Zachary and Zoe.

Dash doing a really good job swimming.  It was the first time I'd seen him in the middle of the pool taking multiple breaths before heading over to a support.  He can survive a fall, I'm relieved.  But not for long, his technique doesn't leave much endurance.

We're here at Norwood's Fine Seafood for the first time since we were here with Dad as our very common post-Smyrna meal.  I always used to get the Flounder and Danny used to get the Smoked Mullet.  They had a major renovation, decades ago it was low and dark.

Her future husband will trigger this behavior with an innocent face-splash on their honeymoon.  We all have our baggage.

This is the Castle/lagoon that enabled FishPatrick to present himself to Dash.

Warm water.  Almost worth moving to.

Boy is not afraid of waves too deep to touch bottom in.  Maybe 60 degree ocean is a safety thing...

You ever get that feeling that you’re enjoying something more than you should?  At least if you take that event in isolation?  “Hey, I’m enjoying this too much.” There are generally deeper reasons for it, associations with earlier events, connections to the past.

I like go to theme parks even when you don’t do much there.  Standing in lines doesn’t bother me there,  though it drives me nuts pretty much anywhere else.  Traffic in general. 

Going boating, even if you just drive around the bay for the umpteenth time, too cold to actually lounge about and too bumpy to let down your guard (it’s definitely more like off-road biking than street biking).

Pretty straightforward explanations for both.  Growing up near Disney World, you go so much that the thrill in the thrill ride is drops to “routine” fun in a couple of visits.  Ultimately the memories that last are the emotional connections you make there.  The lines are like sensory deprivation tanks where you and your guest have nothing to do but talk.  So waiting in line now is like family dinners, but with less getting up for things and far less Carrots and Sticks to get Dash to eat his meat.

Boating, like the going to the beach, goes beneath any memories of any event, it was our Family Time, though we never made it seem that important at the time.  It was the one time we consistent forgot about everything else and were just in the moment, together.  On or at the water, the brain just lets go and reboots.  Whatever burdens you are carrying are put down.  When you pick them up again, you’re picking them up anew, refreshed – the endurance clock is reset. 

What you do at the park or on the boat doesn’t really matter.

So Dash and I play around after his lesson, doing whatever.  He, like most kids, loves the water.  He’s swimming well, though I’m not sure he can actually breathe, there are no areas where there isn’t a grasping point within 20 feet, which seems to be his range for not having to breath.  Arms flap over the water, but ultimately through it, enough to pull him forward.  His kicks like he’s riding a bicycle, using only the bottom of his feet, his arches, to push the water.  I could fix his kicks in ten minutes, if he’d let me.  But he seems to be getting by. 

I resisted getting him goggles, thinking he’d be dependent on them, and he now is, but he’s also now very comfortable under water and spends a lot of time under it even though he’s buoyant like a cork.  When he first got the goggles he’d pull himself to its bottom and sit there looking around, doing his own version of the AquaMan thing.

So even on his own, without necessarily interacting with me, he is consistently all smiles and in that increasingly rare state of pure joy.  So there’s one obvious source of my joy in swimming with him.

At first he would start with a weak “dive” from floating at the surface.  He’d make some progress when he’d sweep his hands back, but as soon as his armstrokes end at his side, he’d start bobbing back towards the top.  Eighteen inches down, twelve inches up, eighteen down, twelve up, eighteen down, twelve up.  So he’d get to within a couple of inches of the toy and think he could stretch to get it, but then he’d cork up about a foot.  Even with the goggles on, you could see his eyebrows hunker down with determination as he’d strain to get to it.  Close, then a reach, and the cork.  Repeat this process a few times.  I made the mistake once of laughing underwater, bubbles escaping my mouth.  He hit the surface before I did, when the water cleared away he was crying mad at me for laughing at him.  I, of course, apologized and gave him the never-believed line about laughing with him (I really was, though). 

By the end of the session, though, his underwater strokes were far more effective, hands cupped better, much longer, stronger pulls.  He made sure he got much closer to the toy before going for a much faster grasp.  Almost no missteps.  To see him make that sort of improvement in such a short amount of time impressed me strongly.  The fact that he made those improvements without any instruction impressed me more strongly.  It was the first time I’d seen the intuitive body sense that he’s shown on land.

So, there’s another aspect of the mysterious depth of feeling about the swimming: see something your spawn has worked hard at for a long time and finally seeing a tangible example of a quantum growth of competence.

Here he shows very nice backwards technique.  Whether any of this is on purpose is moot in my mind.  

I think he "gets" it.

The boys got a full, long day in.

They had their first "game".  I forgot my camera, but Dayanne had her i-phone.  

Big field, seven kids.  Lots of running.  Dash scored on a breakaway, showing good instincts.  He got it high on the right wing, barely keeping control on the high speed run, managed to nudge it to keep it from going wide and then kind of guided the ball in with his foot over the top of it (I likened it to a dunk in basketball).  Dayanne's picture shows the ball breaking the plane of the goal, foot on top, and most importantly, no one getting hurt.

Retirement $$$, here we come, right?  

Dash blew his cover as he actually knows how to listen (a skill he had been very careful to keep secret around the house and at school)

 Just kidding.  

Mostly volcano- type reactions with household ingredients.

Here's Dash a couple of nights before trying on his ski bib.

We drove up on Saturday after soccer practice.

Sorry about this, only the first 20 seconds is good, I couldn't trim the video without it ballooning 20 times its original size.

The first 20 seconds is him sliding down the hill, doing a hard right turn, evading the instructor (and the instructor's attention), picking up speed, smiling, digging it.  At 20 seconds, I realize that he is going to whacking into some equipment unless I go catch him.  The remainder of the tape is the run, catch, and reassurance with the camera flailing about.

At Kathryn's suggestion we went to June Mountain, where we had never been.  Chances were that the ski school would be less populated than at Mammoth.  A little more one-on-one instruction.  As it happened a monster storm was rolling in that was supposed to drop between seven and nine feet o' snow.  Do I have snow chains?  Yes.  Do I have snow chains that fit without having to be jerry-rigged with shoe laces?  No, but I seemed to have forgotten this from five years ago.

At June Mountain you actually have to take a chair lift to get to the "base" of the mountain.  So Dash go his first chair lift ride.  By now the blizzard was underway.  The slopes were deserted, white out conditions and high winds seemed to have scared everyone with sense off.  The lodge was half full of sensible people riding out the storm, including Kathryn, Leigh and me.  The only people visible from the lodge were two four year olds and and instructor:  Dash, Max, and Van. 

As I was heading back down the hill to fight with the too-small tire chains, Van, the instructor, said that he was going to find an escort to take both the kids up the chair lift to ski down the hill (he felt that hold-the-stick was going to simply exhaust them without any fun being had).  Dash was in high spirits, not realizing that he should be intimidated by the whole thing.

He seemed to have had a very good time.

I was looking forward to this primarily because he was at an age where he was excited about my birthday.  Let's face it when you've had forty-plus, it gets a little routine.  Ahh, the fresh perspective of youth.  Basking in the novelty of it, the lost appreciation of it...

Notice Dash's Dimples during the card opening...

We followed that up with a Cold Stone ice cream cake (peanut butter).  Delicious.

Afterwards, for reasons I no longer remember, we decided to have a concert.  It had been a while (Dash seems to have moved on from music to coloring).  We put in "Under a Blood Red Sky" and broke out the mic and the amp.

Forty minutes of Dash singing a bit but mostly aping Bono's microphone and stage movements, we came to a point where I said "uh-oh" and looked back over my shoulder at him.

Click here for backstory.

Everybody is on to it.  I have kids yelling to me in the parking lot:  "Hey Dash!" (the parents are called by their kid's first name (no one, including the adults, seems to know any of the parent's names)).  "Dash was on the yellow apple."

It's getting to the point where you have to put a little bit of effort into setting up delight.  It's worth it when you do, though (he did enjoy the Sea World rides, for example).  

So the Polar Express had decorated passenger cars on a trip to the North Pole.  Dash had his first hot chocolate and a big ole chocolate chip cookie.  

We helped Dash fill out a wish list for Christmas. The train had flood lamps illuminating the scenery, which out east in El Campo is a lot of undulating rocky terrain.  Somewhat surreal. 

After about 20 minutes outbound (west by my reckoning) the floodlight lit up the North Pole, with a bunch of elves and Mr. and Mrs. Claus.