Snippets of Conversation on and off the Poker Table

Been slammed with my parents in town to visit for the holidays. Still managed to get over to the local casino and play some Texas Hold'em late night, a couple of times, but it was tough juggling all kinds of activities, considering both sides of my kid's family were omnipresent.

They've sort of put the Harrahs weekly on hiatus so no poker tournaments for me to speak of. One day, I did get stamped for parking there but it was when I took the boy to the aquarium, he loved it. I'll tell you a little anecdote about that in a second but first, let me get my bearings a little bit. I never wanted to be pretentious parent, the kind of braggart that bores any nearby listener with the minutia of every little detail of his child's development, but I've found that recently, that disposition has seeped into me--so my apologies to my readers. I guess there is some consolation in that I am self-aware of behaving in a fashion that I used to take umbrage with, but that’s small consolation at best. Yes, I’m self-aware I’m being a prick by cutting in line in front of you, so you should hate me less? Nice logic.

Course when you are around both sets of grandparents for an extended amount of time, and they yearn for any detail in their grandchild's development like Kirstie Alley and ice-cream, and they gobble it up like Kirstie Alley and ice-cream, you suddenly think your son counting to three is as pertinent information to everyone else as say the Ruskies firing off some missiles toward our hemisphere. So I apologize for the sharing of these details in advance. And somebody get Kristie Alley some ice-cream.

I think there is some genetic switch that clicks on any time your spawn spawns their own spawn and thus once a person becomes a Grandparent even the most distractible and disinterested person suddenly is engrossed by the teeth count of an infant. I think this is true even of parents that were absentee in their own children’s development. Suddenly, maybe they recognize their own mortality and realize that at least some of their DNA is going to live on, so that grandchild must be the greatest think since color television sets.

So, in this compacted amount of time, I’ve undergone a change. Being able to engross two audiences, either set of grandparents, with the mere babblings of my son, has me more ready to share the details with others... so blame them, if I end up bragging in the future.

Okay... that’s explains why I’m sharing a baby story, now on to the pretentious part. You hear about parents trying to turn their children into future geniuses by torturing them to classical music sessions, speaking foreign languages in their presence and you probably think like I do, what a bunch of wankers. One day my child will push them off a swing. Then you become a parent and you're like... well it can't hurt the kid to expose them to Mozart.

My wife and i heard that infants really get a lot of benefit from sign language. They get frustrated because they can't yet talk to express their needs to their parents, but they can sign before they speak. Yes, you've probably seen Meet the Fockers—which is not the research we used. So, anyway, we did that with our kid.
He is slowly building a sign language vocabulary. Basically, he learned the sign for "more" before he could say anything. Now's he's talking and learning other signs. Still, that kid wore out the "more" sign like Linsey Lohan hanging out with a coke dealer