If you look at the timing of this post it was sent at about 11:00pm. However, I'm sitting in a hotel room in San Jose right now so it's actually only 8:00 to me. Of course, I've been up since 4:00am which is really 1:00am so I'm pretty sure exhaustion could cause me to start typing in tongues at any minute. Should I stray from course, blame the lag.

I've not written in a while and I've had pretty good reason. Everyone in our house has been sick for the last two weeks. Colds, ear infections, more colds, coughs, and the latest and most fun flavor: explosive diarrhea. Woohoo!

Aidan started it a couple of Fridays ago. As any parent knows, its tought to take care of a sick child for a weekend and not get sick yourself. I was spared the double-barreled, full force of the cold by taking Zicam. I was still sick but I was mostly done in about four days. Jaime faired considerably worse having just shaken her cold a couple days ago. Poor Aidan was the worst. After a week of being sick with little improvement we decided to bring him to the doctor. Predictably, he contracted an ear infection. Note: Sick kids are not fond of antibiotics, even when bubble gum flavored, when they're very sick.

I left town this morning thinking everyone was feeling better. Wrong. While Aidan feels better, the copious amounts of juice he drank while sick have resulted in a predictable yet ugly condition. Apparently, he's taken to painting the inside of his outfits with poo.

I picked a nice time for a trip.

Another conspicuous absence of posts. I'm not saying I'm sorry anymore. Instead I'll just wallow in my procrastinating ways.

I have managed to put some new pictures up on the Photo Album page. Since Aidan is now 1 year old, I've added a 1 year old album to his page. Now there are two albums in the Aidan album. One is all the photos we have of him up until his first birthday. The second will hold all the photos of him until he turns two.

Speaking of his birthday, we had his birthday party on the sixth. You may notice in some of his birthday photos that the windows were open in the house. That's right, windows open on January 6th. George Bush is right, global warming is liberal crap. Its completely normal for it to be 68 degrees in January. Anyway, with 50 people in the house the heat rose quickly and we had to crack the windows.

We went through a dozen pizzas, half a sheet cake, 7 bottles of soda, and about a gallon of ice cream. There was a lot of fun, not too much crying, and very little attention paid to new presents. It amazes me how much we spend in time and money buying kids toys when they can be perfectly happy playing with tissue paper.

This weekend we were supposed to hit another birthday party but fate intervened. Aidan, whose is about the healthiest kid I've ever seen, got sick Friday. Fortunately for us, his worst night happened to be Friday when grandma and grandpa had him. But he still wasn't feeling good at all until today and he's still pretty sick. Hopefully we have a better night tonight because, believe it or not, its not so restful to sleep with a sick one year old tossing and turning next to you.

Once again Christmas has come and gone in a blur. Its the only holiday that you prepare for months in advance but it passes just as quickly as any other day. It seems sort of wrong, like it should last a week or something. This year being Aidan's first Christmas, it promised to be a fun time.

Normally, Jaime and I switch off our Christmas Eve festivities. One year we head to her aunt's house and the next we head to my step mother's family party. This year was Jaime's year but and illness in the family canceled the party so we made a bit of a last minute change of plans and went to Pat's brother's house for Christmas Eve. Aidan had a blast running around and playing with the other kids. He stayed up way past his bedtime, got an obligatory bump on the head from a table, and got some very cool gifts he couldn't have cared less about.

Christmas day we had planned on having a low key brunch. Jaime's folks were having family over for an early dinner and then coming over to join my folks and sister with us at our house. The same illness that canceled the Christmas Eve party though canceled the Christmas Day dinner but not until after Jean had bought all the fixins'. So, we had a nice big Christmas Day dinner at our house complete with turkey and stuffing!

It was a very nice Christmas with lots of family and lots of great gifts. Aidan got his Tickle Me Elmo doll and was indeed tickled. He squealed with laughter over it until he got over excited and started to cry. He's still discovering gifts a day or two after receiving them and seems just as interested in the dogs toys as his own.

I'm off for the week and hope to have some shots together in the next couple of days to put up. Until then, hope you had a Merry Christmas!

Part of the reason I neglected the blog for a month or so was that my brain was otherwise consumed. You may remember that after ten years at the same job in Providence, I left to become the Design Director at another display company in Providence. It was a move up and I was very excited about running my own show. I've been happy here but another opportunity was presented to me. I got the chance to interview for a position at a very large, high end, audio company in MA which would reunite me with my friend Ben. It was a bit of a whirlwind experience but the short story is that I have a new job. I gave my notice at my present job late last week and my last day here will be next week.

This is a little bit of a career change as I won't be designing anymore but project managing instead. Its like going to the other side of the fence. I'll still probably be in touch with my current work mates, it will just be as a client. Its my first time working for a large corporation but I think I'm going to like it.

Its entirely likely that this blog will still be hard for me to maintain. Since leaving a job that I was bored silly at 6 months ago its amazing how much I actually work at work instead of screwing around. I will try though to be a little more regular with it.

Aidan had an eventful weekend this week. he picked out his first Christmas tree on Saturday and saw Santa for the first time. Sunday he got to meet Santa and Frosty the Snowman for the first time while playing with a bunch of other kids. He also go his first glazed donut. Of course, along with that came daddy's first experience with a son acting like a meth freak. To top it all off, Sunday Aidan turned 11 months old. He's now in his twelfth month on the big blue marble and closing in on his second year.  I added a bunch of pictures from the party on Sunday in the new 11 month gallery as well as some of the shots we took for our Christmas cards.

Although he didn't care tremendously about the tree shopping, Aidan was a huge fan of the Sunday festivities. It had all the ingredients for success: little kids, noise, confusion, music, shiny things, and sugar. How could he go wrong? He was surprisingly nonchalant about Santa. He wasn't scared of him but he didn't have much time for him either. The girl dressed in the Frosty costume got a much warmer welcome. I'm convinced he would have left the place with Frosty without a second thought.

By far the most enthusiastic response came when he spotted his big cousin Haley. She's about 3 which is the same age as his buddy and other cousin Emma. He spends hours every day with Emma and is amused by her every move. He either thought Haley was Emma or just assumed that all blond, three year old girls are endlessly fascinating. The moment he saw her he rushed her and threw his arms around her. It would have been cute once but by the third time I thought we were going to have to break out the fire hose to separate them. Poor Haley was asking "Why does he keep doing that?"

At the end of the weekend everyone in the house was exhausted and in need of a nap. Only one of us got one of those though.