Happy birthday, little man

Cooper turns two today. Two years ago right now, they were about to have an emergency intervention in the labor room. It's amazing how fast things happen when something goes wrong. Cooper's heartrate started crashing, and all of a sudden it was like a swarm of nurses and doctors magically appeared in my room. Terbuteline shot, oxygen mask, intensive monitoring for the next few hours. Everything turned out okay, though, and after 10 minutes of pushing, out popped the most beautiful little creature I had ever seen. My first words: "Hello, baby."

It's hard to believe two years have gone by. He's no longer a baby. He's a little kid. Complete with "No!" and kisses for momma and pulling a couch cushion onto the floor, laying down on it, fake snoring, and then laughing and getting up and running off to do something else.

In the last week, I've seen a glimpse of his future, some combination of



and




For today, though, I can't help but think of him like this:



Happy birthday, little man. You're going to be all grown up before I even know it.

Cooper's newest trick

Jumping off of things. Steps, couches, he doesn't care. It's amazing more kids don't end up with brain damage.

It's like he is inside my head

I have this dream on a regular basis.

Student e-mails are a source of joy.

I just had a student email me saying, "I missed class on Monday. Can you tell me what I missed? Also, what is this "Reading for Wednesday" on the class website?"

Ummm, it's the reading you need to do for Wednesday. I thought the title was self-explanatory, but no.

It all balances out...hopefully

Today was a great teaching day. Lots of participation, lots of interest in the topic, lots of energy. That's good because the papers I graded over the weekend made me cranky. I think they hit every one of my pet peeves:

1. Turning in an early draft for feedback, and then not changing any of the things that I pointed out in your final draft. Thanks for wasting my time.
2. Misuse of the word bias. After I gave them all a copy of New Kid's open letter on the topic and we went over it extensively in class.
3. Lack of evidence. That's nice that you think that, but why do you think that?
4. Lack of research, which lead the to the inability to make two and two add up to four. They had the first two, but they couldn't find the other two, which made their papers add up to around 3.2.

Oh well, extensive commenting and discussion of their papers in class will hopefully result in a better second set of papers.

Why I should carry a camera

As I was driving to work today, I was following an SUV. Across the top of the rear window, in nice big letters, was emblazoned the following factoid: Fat kids are harder to kidnap.

Two thoughts about the media

1. I've been following the Jim Cramer v. Jon Stewart fight for the last week or so, and thought Stewart demolished Cramer on Thursday night. The NBC family of channels had been giving plenty of play to the story in the buildup, and having Cramer on their "news" shows, but as far as I can tell completely dropped the story on Friday after he lost. It wasn't even on Olbermann. Disappointing proof of the power of media conglomerates to determine what the news is.

2. All the voices who have been blaming the tanking stock market on Obama for the last few weeks have been conspicuously silent for the last four days as the market has rallied. You can't have it both ways. Either he's responsible for the good times, or he's not responsible for the bad. Or you can be an adult and realize that the market isn't the president's personal plaything and responds to a lot of stimuli that are not controlled by the president.