My father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at the end of last summer. This form of cancer has a high mortality rate, and unfortunately my dad was no exception. He passed away yesterday.
Of course, I have lots I could write about: his life, our relationship, the funeral planning, etc. But what I’m intrigued about right now is Twitter and Facebook. I tweeted a couple quick messages about traveling to see my Dad as he was dying, and then planning for the funeral. My Twitter messages automatically update my Facebook status, and so pretty quickly all of my FB friends as well as people following me on Twitter knew about my father’s death.
I received emails, tweets, FB messages and FB wall messages offering prayers, thoughts, help, peace and love. And it meant means a lot. Maybe there are people who think that words offered through a screen are not as “good” or “real” as words on paper, over the phone, or in person. But those people probably don’t know the feeling that comes from sharing your life with a community of friends across the country world, and receiving peace and love back within minutes from all sorts of people throughout your life.
I could list reason by reason why these relationships are as “real” as any others. But I don’t need to, because I know they are. And millions of other people know they are. It’s a reality that is here, and if you don’t get it, well, it’s not going away.
Posted by : Shawn in (Family, Geek)
I’m a geek, and my wife and son have geekish tendencies too. At Christmas, the geek in me manifests itself in some scary ways. My favorite Christmas album is The Jackson 5 Christmas Album, which I intersperse with mashups from the various Santastic albums. I also have this creepy singing Christmas trees with green glowing bulbous eyes. But the way I know that my wife really loves me, is that she lets me hand my Star Trek ornaments on our Christmas tree.
I have almost all of the Hallmark Star Trek Keepsake ornaments. These are a series of spaceships (the orginal Enterpreise, Enterprise-D, Voyager, a Borg Cube, etc.) They hang on the tree and plug into the Christmas lights so that they light up and talk. You haven’t had a Merry Christmas until the Borg wish you a happy holidays and tell you that “resistance is futile.” So each year I choose six of my favorites and put them on the tree.
Our son, Ben will turn three really soon and he is now old enough to be pretty interested in spaceships. He thinks my Star Trek ornaments are pretty darn cool. So he helped me choose which ones go on the tree this year. His first choice was the Enterprise-D from Star Trek:The Next Generation, which is a good geek choice. TNG ushered in a new era of geekdom, and I think it is entirely possible that we wouldn’t have the new Battlestar Galactica without Picard and that Shatner-wannabe Riker.
It’s moments like these that make me so proud of my little geeklet.
1) My two year old son, Ben, and I were doing some errands the other day. While we were driving around he told me that “D is for dismal dungeon.” This is a line from the ABCs of Halloween book we’ve been reading. Call me a geek, but as soon as I heard the word dungeon come out of his mouth I swelled with pride. My son knows the word “dungeon”, as in Dungeons and Dragons! The dungeon is one of the basic concepts of all sorts of gaming goodness! I am a dedicated fantasy role-play gamer from way back when, and I can’t wait to introduce Ben to all sorts of geek games.
2) And speaking of geek games. I’ve moved on from World of Warcraft and City of Heroes for the moment and am playing Lord of the Rings Online. And in order to enhance my gameplay, I’ve started reading the LoTR trilogy again. I’ve read the Hobbit but I’ve never actually read the trilogy. I started it a couple of times but stopped reading out of boredom. I know that I lose major geek cred for this, especially since Middle Earth is kind of the building blocks of Dungeons and Dragons and all sorts of fantasy gaming, books, movies, etc. Maybe this time I’ll get through it.
Posted by : Shawn in (Family)
- A love of ice cream runs in my wife’s family. On my first visit to her grandparents I was told that we were going to have “company breakfast” the first morning. I wasn’t quite sure what this was, but I was instructed to get a bowl of cereal. So I put cereal in my bowl and then poured some milk in it, and was promptly scolded by Papa for putting milk in my cereal. So he dumped it out and gave me a new bowl of cereal. Not with milk in it but with ice cream. Company breakfast.
- When Carrie was pregnant with Ben she would often tell me that “The baby needs ice cream.”
- When Carrie was pregnant with Ben I would often tell her that “The baby wants me to have ice cream.”
- Carrie is no longer pregnant but “the baby” often tells us that he needs ice cream.
- Some people often have alcohol at the end of a long day. We often have ice cream.
This is why I am buying this machine for our house.
A pregnancy is fairly easy to announce. You usually don’t have to find a way to work it into conversation. You just say “Guess what? I’m pregnant!” Or if you are the soon-to-be father you get that dorky looking smile on your face, put your hand on your wife’s stomach and say those annoyingly cute and inaccurate words, “We’re pregnant!” But I’m finding that it doesn’t feel as easy to announce an adoption.
Although, I guess I kind of just did. Carrie and I have decided to adopt a child from China. It’s something that we’ve thought about on and off at least since we got married. But this past winter we began considering it as a serious option for our lives right now. There are a million and one steps that led us to this decision and maybe I’ll go into them at some point, but regardless of how we got here. Here we are.
Here we are at the beginning of a new chapter for our family. We have a lot of paperwork to get in order before we send our dossier to the Chinese Center for Adoption Affairs (the agency within the Chinese government that handles all international adoptions). Once our dossier is approved, then we wait. Probably a year and a half to two years, and hopefully not more. The wait will be hard. We know that once we are with our daughter (most Chinese adoptees are girls) the wait will hopefully not matter, but right now it does.
For the moment we are actively gathering vital records, medical forms, net worth statements, background checks and a dozen more pieces of paper that will be part of the measure of our worth as parents. We are going to have a fairly extensive home study with a social worker from Great Wall. We’ve both read the book The Lost Daughters of China which helped us make our decision and gave us a good beginning into learning about the birthplace of our daughter. I’ve even got ambitious plans to give some of my precious IPod time to learning some conversational Chinese.
It’s hard to catalog my emotions. I am definitely excited and happy, but it seems so daunting to envision the next two years culminating in a trip across the world. A trip with Carrie and Ben to welcome someone else’s child into our family - forever.
Who knows what will happen between now and then - and after then.
Posted by : Shawn in (Family)
Hopefully, as a parent you get the opportunity to read a lot of children’s books to your children. Some of them over and over and over. Lately, we’ve been reading Tootle which is a book about a baby train who loves to play in the meadows. But he wants to grow up to be “The Flyer” - a very fast passenger train, and in order to do so he has to learn how to Stay on the Rails.
The book ends with all the townspeople and train instructors conspiring togther to wave red flags at Tootle in the meadow (red flags mean stop and Tootle hates to stop). So a freaked-out, sobbing Tootle finally goes back to the track (where the only green flag is) and stays there.
What an awful book.
