Smiles and Laughter

Sariah started giving us some pretty decent smiles recently (by recently, I mean 4 weeks or so ago, which in baby terms isn’t recently at all. In fact, it’s about 1/3 of her life ago. If you extrapolated my creative “definition” of recently and applied it to my life, that would be 9 years ago. Which was about halfway through my senior year in High School. This was the year I maxed out on coolness — going skydiving and to midnight drag races and such. Ever since then it has been a downhill spiral into complete loser-ish-ness.

Geez I’ve really marched off onto a completely irrelevant tangent here. I don’t even know what I was talking about. I gotta go back and check…Oh yeah…)

She has quickly gotten very liberal with her smiles and we can pretty much get a grin out of her whenever we want. A couple of our primary methods:

1. Tickling her cheeks
2. Whistling to her
3. Placing fish hooks inside the corners of her mouth and tugging upwards

Okay, we don’t actually do number 3 on the list. In fact, it was kind of wrong for me to even suggest it. I would erase it but I’ve already published this post so there is nothing I can do now.

I love teasing smiles out of her, she’s beyond cute. Which is good for her because she has no way of earning any measurable income (aside from a decent tax-break). From a fiscal perspective, there is very little reason to keep her around. The cute smiles and tax exemption are pretty much the only thing she has going for her on the balance sheet.

Aside from the our standard methods, we have a couple alternative ways of getting a little baby grin. I turn on the Itunes, put her in her swinger/rocker and Cristina and I completely rock out around her. Generally she just stares at her “different” parents. After a minute or so she gets into it and her face lights up with that little smile.

Personally I think I am a rather phenomenal dancer. Sort of a cross between Usher and that cat from the Paula Abdul video “Opposites Attract”

Yeah, that good.

My kryptonite

I know that I haven’t put a dang thing up on the blog for a long time now. It’s actually because of my Kryptonite.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Kryptonite, it is an element from the planet Krypton (creative, isn’t it?). From Wikipedia:

Kryptonite’ is a fictional substance from the Superman radio show series (and subsequent related media, most notably the comic books). The word kryptonite is used in speech to describe someone’s or something’s weakness. The material, usually shown as having been created from the remains of Superman’s native planet of Krypton, generally has detrimental effects on Superman. The name “kryptonite” covers a variety of forms of the substance, but usually refers to the most common “green” form.

Now, I know what you are all thinking:

“Egads! Correlating ‘Ryan’ with ‘weakness’ is a blasphemy of the highest order”

Unfortunately, my devoted readers, I am slightly imperfect. You see, I love to write. I especially enjoy writing on a blog where I can track readership and occasionally interact with people via the commenting section. It’s great.

My kryptonite, however, is the obligation to write. I have learned this through having several blogs — one of which had a readership of up to several hundred people a day. When I am excited about a blog, I spend lots of time thinking of things to write about and am always eager to start a new post. Things go great for a couple months. Then everything falls apart:

It starts when I don’t feel like writing anything for a couple days. Usually I bounce back from this feeling and resume posting. Sometimes, though, I start to feel a little pressure to post. For some reason this makes me not want to post anything. A few more days and a little more pressure and I start to really resist posting anything. Then a month and a half goes by and I realize that Sariah is growing up really fast and that I am not documenting it like she deserves.

So finally I sit down and start posting again (like now). It’s an excellent cure for what I like to call post traumatic blog disorder.

So anyway, to those of you who have faithfully stopped by the site and subtly encouraged me to get back into writing — well, there’s your quick glimpse into one of my many neuroses.

Some of my other strange quirks are:

1. I have the occasional “fashion crisis” where I go through 15 different shirts and pants until I feel comfortable in my clothes for the day
2. I refuse to engage in any other meaningful activities once I have poured milk onto my cereal. The soggy cereal time window is a brief one, indeed.
3. If I can avoid it, I rarely untie my shoes. I’ll rub my heel off trying to slide into them before I’ll actually sit down, untie and retie them. Cristina got me a shoe horn so I’d stop ruining the backs of my shoes but I always lose it.
4. The moment that we have room in the family budget, I am allocating funds for a new pair of socks everyday. Nothing is more full of “win” than a new pair of socks
5. I hate, hate, hate being tucked into bed. My legs must be free to do as they please while I sleep.
6. On that note, I sleepwalk and have regularly woken up in random places in the house. One time Cristina woke up to find me standing on the bed looking for studs in the ceiling above our bed — to hang a bike rack.
7. When I have to drive, walk, or run somewhere by myself, I day dream that I am in an action sequence. I duck behind cars to avoid being hit by snipers, press random buttons in my Nissan Altima to take out nearby enemy fighter jets and have run long distances to deliver top secret messages.
8. I refuse to honk at other drivers.
9. When I am caught in an awkward situation with strangers, I will fake a yawn because I sometimes catch myself with my mouth slightly open and I’d rather look tired than look like a stunned catfish
10. I like to dance around at my house when no one but my wife and kid are around. I probably do this too much to be considered normal.

So there you go. One Kryptonite and ten things that are ridiculous — but true.

I’ll get back to Sariah now….