Though my idea of a walk is the standard cinematic father and son mosey down the sidewalk with some rock kicking and the occasional stumble, L is more inclined to tear ass down the street as soon as his feet leave the lawn and hit pavement. Half the time the walk is more of a chase, and what appears to be a comforting hug on film is more a grab and lift in the case of approaching traffic.

E got me over my phobia of being too far from the front door by going and actually locking it, so I agreed to roll down to the park for some swings and slides. We hit the mulch and L nearly forgot he had parents.

At first we thought the swings would be innocent enough, but after placing L in the swing in the correct direction he somehow found a way to make it weird and uncomfortable. He refused to sit up, and just drooped his limbs down like dead weight and leaned his head over the edge pointing everything straight down like a dead sack of potatoes.

Finally we turned him around in the swing so he was sitting backwards, the higher back portion of the swing under his armpits. He straightened up a bit and gave us some high fives.

As soon as we freed him of the swing’s shackles, he made a beeline for the slides. He was able to climb most of the stairs himself (under supervision), and took to the smaller slide like a fish in water.

Just as suddenly as he lit up at the idea of the park, he was done. He gave us the big adios, and tried to tear ass across the park to wherever it was he thought he was going.

Just out of frame, of course, is E giving chase.

Having been let out from work early to get home safely, I picked up L from daycare and went home to the warm house. We played in the living room for most of the afternoon, but I couldn’t resist bundling him up for a few minutes outside in what was then roughly six to seven inches of snow.

He stomped around with big stomps for a few minutes, made it all the way down to the sidewalk and back onto the front lawn, before the fun ended and he started getting cold and uncomfortable.

He at least managed to avoid the yellow snow left against the base of our trees by the neighborhood dogs, for which I am quite thankful.

My immediate thought was that she killed something in the backyard and did a little munching (my second thought was that she just finished teleporting through a wormhole in the space time continuum which, based on what an oddball she is, was less of a stretch). As it was pitch dark outside, I scoured the house for our Mag-Lite, which has seemingly disappeared somewhere into the void.

The next best solution was the 50 foot extension cord and our super-bright halogen utility lantern, which we dragged around the yard combing for patches of blood. Coming up empty, we went over her whole mouth and body with a fine toothed comb looking for any sort of injury, and found nothing.

The next step is to check for some sort of salivary gland cyst or something else in the region underneath her tongue, to see if something possibly ruptured. The verdict is unfortunately that we still have no idea what happened. We do, however, know two things now. One, Tre hates baths worse than any of our dogs and two, we need to buy more flashlights.

This is how Christmas dreams end up: stripped bare, dead on the side of the road, surrounded by scattered elements of covering, waiting to be discovered by the trash man.

Christmas Eve brought not only a whopping Texas blizzard sized half inch of snow, but also nausea and lots of vomiting for one and all. Apparently L had picked up a stomach bug when he went to the doctor for his bilateral ear infections, and gave us the ultimate Christmas present. The only one who wasn’t sick was E, we’re presuming that’s because her stomach is made of hate, and not even bacteria can live in such an environment.

One of the more fantastic things about a tree with sharp needles is that it has built-in baby deterrents. Anytime L put his hand on any of the branches, he’d automatically yank it back and walk away in disgust. Finally he realized he could at least steal a candy cane off one of the lower branches, and figured the best way to eat it was with the plastic on. That got deep-sixed with the quickness.

We finished decorating the tree and wrapping all the presents at two in the morning, as is customary last-minute fashion for our family. E suggested I snap a photo of the tree with everything laid out and peaceful, before the morning comes and L declares war on anything wrapped.

Morning finally came, and in between vomits L cautiously crept his way through the stack of presents not really knowing what to make of any of it. We helped him unwrap a few, and he again trotted around flailing his arms and throwing the wrapping paper into big piles.

He finally calmed down enough to brave the big red doggie, and giggled as we hopped the blue one around while making barking noises.

Whether or not he fully appreciated all that was Christmas, we still had a lot of fun watching him and listening to his squeals and cackles of laughter.

She dolled up L in his proper little dress shirt and bow tie, and let him run around the bedroom while she got ready to bring him down to Santa’s Workshop.

Unfortunately, L didn’t realize that when he continues to pull the caps off the toilet screws in the bathroom, each “NO” will get progressively louder, and will be eventually followed by a smack on the hand. He crumpled into a little pile on the bathroom floor to show how horrible and dreadful it was to be reprimanded.

I did not go down to see Santa with them, so unfortunately all I received are two pieces of information secondhand: Everyone loved L and his bowtie, and L hated, hated, hated Santa.

After walking around and taking in that fantastic tree smell for awhile, we took a walk through their tacky “Spray-Snow Winter Wonderland” room just for giggles.

We always have a a huge crisis of conscience when buying a real tree in Texas. Being New Yorkers, our dead parents would spin in their graves if they knew we spent more than $50 on a tree. So we walked past the $300 six foot trees up front, and asked for their Charlie Brown section. We’ve had luck doing that previously, I’m always surprised what constitutes a “reject” tree in some people’s minds.

As we turned the corner to Budget Row, we were greeted by some of the tallest, most full and beautiful trees on the lot, for a fraction of the price of the others. We asked the lot guy what could possibly be wrong with these and he said, “A lot of people don’t like them because the needles are stiff.” Anyone who has hung an ornament on a Christmas tree knows that stiffer needles keep the hooks on better, so we laughed and shelled out a comparatively miniscule amount of money. The total price wound up being 35% of what we paid for the fake the week before.

When we got home and got the tree in the house, I grabbed the Sawzall and lopped off a few of the bottom branches to give me enough trunk to get it into the base.

Though we can’t know for certain what L thinks about the tree until he starts talking, we’d like to think that the smile on his face last night meant that he knew this tree was super fantastic and the other one sucked big ass balls. After he touched it a few times and stared at it, we’re certain the “stiff needles” will probably be one deterrent to him mucking with the tree.

Then, as quickly as the day passed, it was suddenly time for bed.

After combing through websites and sale circulars, I found that Garden Ridge was having a 50% reduction in price on all their artificial trees, including their unlit models. We decided to go with an unlit tree simply due to the amount of lights we already have in the attic, we figured we could save a bit of money foregoing the prelit option.

It being a particularly quiet Sunday evening at our local neighborhood Garden Ridge, we turned L loose from the shopping cart and photographed some of the mayhem.

After having our newly purchased “reality challenged” Christmas tree sit in its box in our front room for nearly a week, I decided to clear some space and assemble the thing. I got out the base and unfurled the bottom layer.

I thought I was imagining things, but to me the bottom layer looked like complete shit. I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt, and assemble the rest of the tree.

I slid each layer into the top of the previous one, and by the time I popped the top crown into the second-highest layer, I had a 7 1/2 foot tall towering piece of garbage. I tried again to think that maybe I was just misjudging the thing. It was obvious that each branch piece consisted of a bunch of wired twig pieces that needed to be spread way out to fill in all the blank space. L by then had long been asleep so, going against my desire to throw it off the front porch, I took a small nap before he woke up.

As L and I woke up, E arrived home. She strolled through the front door, looked up and said, “What the fuck? Please tell me our Christmas tree doesn’t look like that.”

I gave her the bad news and then, to check whether I was crazy, asked her what she thought about the whole “spreading out the twig pieces” deal. She agreed it was obvious that needed to be done. But the more we looked at this poor bastard tree, the more we realized there was just not enough spreading out that could be done to even remotely make Olive Oyl here look like something resembling a standard Christmas pine.

After letting Liam walk around this horrible piece of shit and completely ruining the first glimpse he’ll have in his life of what a Christmas tree looks like, we packed it back up in the box and found the receipt. I hope he’s not yet old enough to form a solid memory of what we did to his tree, I felt like a zookeeper who removed a baby squirrel from its mother and instead let it imprint on a pelican.

Needless to say we’ll be exploring other options.

L started daycare a month ago, and was sick within two days. Since then he’s been ill twice more, each time with bilateral ear infections, vomiting, and enough dripping mucus to flypaper the kitchen at a fast food joint. This afternoon, daycare called and (big shocker) he had a 103.5 fever, was hoarse and congested.

The poor munchkin has been asleep since we got home from the pediatrician. Alternating Children’s Tylenol and Motrin has brought his fever down to a high-normal 99.1, but he’s still miserable and tired.

I suppose this is how it goes. So begins the rite of passage children embark on when beginning their exposure to other children. We can either embrace it, or buy extra steel wool to scrub him with on his way into his car seat. Either way, it will last as long as it lasts.

We walked around a bit, and found ourselves down on the other side of the block, where an eerie orange glow surrounded what appeared to be an old mosque. I took some photos, which I keep unretouched.

I had to run out for some food at lunch today, and found myself down in that part of town. I had my camera with me, and decided to stop over for a quick look at what it looks like now. I stopped at the warehouse first, the sticker is still on the door and everything looks almost identical to how it looked over three years ago.

Of course, I wandered down the street to see what had become of the mosque. It was pretty dilapidated, some portions of the buildings were crumbling, and on the building in the second photo the entire roof and side wall had caved in. I would have reproduced the photos identically, but I didn’t expect to be over that way and hadn’t looked at the old photos in awhile.

E and I originally referred to the first series of photos as the “Beirut photos”, not knowing anything about the history of the buildings. In a later conversation with my friend Wes, he related that the owner of the warehouse also owned the rest of the block including the mosque, and it was part of a film set. He sent me this article and this article.

As an aside, I also wanted to shoot some photos of an underpass, which is part of the route taken to get to the warehouse. I crept along the fence separating the top of the road from a truck yard, until I arrived at the top of the cross bridge and was staring at a set of steep stairs descending down to a walkway in the belly of the whizzing traffic lanes. I hopped down a few steps and saw some homeless people slipping in and out of the shadows of the pitch black walkway, and thought better of bringing my brand new camera down into what could end up a bad situation for both parties. At that point I realized that most of what I think is worth photographing exists in bad neighborhoods, and that I should probably stick to taking zebra pics at the zoo.