“Daddy,” he asked in the car on the way up to Douglass Loop, “can I ask for the usual?”

“Sure,” I told him, “but if the person at the ice cream shop doesn’t know you very well, they may not know what your usual is.”  Simon certainly knows what his usual is: Cookies & Cream.  In fact, it’s mine, too, and we rarely stray from it.  “You may have to explain that you mean Cookies & Cream.”

“Okay,” said Simon.  I could tell he was running the scenario through in his little five-year-old head.

Inside the shop, Simon sauntered up to the counter with that “I know I’m going to say something funny” gleam in his eye.  He had no idea.

“What would you like?” said the ice cream scooper, leaning over the counter to look down at Simon.

“Two of the usual,” he replied almost cracking himself up in the process.

The ice cream scooper looked confused.  “Um, what’s the usual?”

As matter-of-factly as he could, Simon explained, “The usual is when you know me so well that you know what I always order.”

After a few warm up shots, Simon ran towards the basket for his new lay-up move.  BOOM!  Simon was down on the floor.  “What happened?” I asked him.

“An L.A. Laker hit me,” he said, picking himself up.  And then after a short pause, “He just got thrown out of the game.”

Two or three plays later, Simon was down again.  “I bent my elbow backwards.  I need Kevin Garnett to help me.”  He went to the “locker room” (the couch), insisting that I play on without him.  We he returned a few minutes later, he told me that he could only play with one arm, and then proceeded to make a slam dunk on his little Fisher Price goal.  Impressive, but his one-armed passes were nowhere near as accurate as Rajon Rondo’s.

We were upstairs tonight getting him into his PJ’s, and since Simon is really interested in numbers these days and also likes to point out clocks, I decided to introduce him to the wild world of digital alarm clocks.

“See these numbers, Simon?  This is a clock and it tells time.  But it uses numbers instead of hands.  Can you tell me what these numbers are?”

Blank stare.  “No hands.”

“That’s right — no hands!  It uses numbers.  Look!  Eight.  Zero.  Two.  It’s eight-oh-two.”  It seemed appropriate, so I quoted one of Simon’s favorite nursery rhymes, Wee Willie Winkie.  “Are your children all in bed?  It’s after eight o’clock.”

“Eight o’clock is bedtime.”

“What?”  That wasn’t expected.

“Eight o’clock is bedtime.”

I wasn’t gonna waste this.  “It sure is.  Do you want to go to bed?”

“Uh-kay.”

A few giggles and five minutes later he was out cold.  Eight o’clock is bedtime.

What finally encouraged him to make a decision and go public with it?  This evening’s news reported that Michelle Obama appeared in Louisville today reading The Runaway Bunny to kids at Kosair Children’s Hospital.  “Ooooh!” said Simon.  It was a tough call, but I think he finally had to settle on the candidate with the most pro-Runaway Bunny agenda.

Could anything change Simon’s mind?  Maybe if Chelsea came over and helped point out all of the lights in Goodnight Moon.

Simon was in good spirits and didn’t seem out of sorts at all. We played hard, and he took some amazing naps.  We went for a walk in the bizarre 67F weather (Simon took off his socks in the stroller again) and played with Christopher over at Mama’s Hip. I even got a bit crazy and, after a day of Cheerios, bananas and Pedialyte, decided to give Simon some milk and macaroni & cheese for dinner.

Bad move.

A little after 11:00PM Jessica and I heard a squawk from Simon’s room — not that odd for him at that time of night, but it was followed shortly by some repeated coughs. We both sat up for that, and I went to investigate. Sure enough — el barfo grande…on the crib, on him, on the carpet, on me. Simon and I just went straight to the tub while Jessica tackled the barf in Simon’s bedroom. Simon handled it like a champ, though, and stopped crying by the time we got settled into the bath. He didn’t seem to be feeling sick or in any pain, so we just cleaned up and shared a little bit of ginger ale (he made really funny faces when he tasted it) before I put him back to bed.

The pediatrician’s office said that if he appeared to feel okay, wasn’t running a fever and kept down his next meals then he probably just needed to go dairy-free a bit longer. So we’re back to Cheerios, bananas and Pedialyte for a while — although I might share a bit more ginger ale with him again before bed tonight!

The holidays gave me the first real downtime since the crash, so last week I built a new server with RAID 1 disk-mirroring, installed Ubuntu Server on it and lugged it over to IgLou for colocation. Today I dug out an old laptop disk that had a blog database dump from April and managed to get it installed into an upgraded version of WordPress on the new server. A few minutes later, I had exported Jessica’s new blog and imported it into the rebuilt one. Apart from a six-month gap, some clean-up and a lot of missing pictures, we’re back in business.

In the next week or so, I’ll start rebuilding May-October 2007 from blog entries I pulled out of Google’s cache the night of the crash.

Thanks for sticking with us through the mess. The new URL should be here to stay no matter what, so be sure to bookmark it.

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[Editor's Note: It must mean something terrible. He absolutely demanded the keyboard from me and then pounded away at it like Jack Kerouac on an Benzedrine bender. Now he's hitting himself in the face and crying. I'm gonna go try to put him down and then go out and buy a new keyboard.]

But for whatever reason Jessica couldn’t fall asleep tonight and just happened to check on Ian and Christine’s Photo Gallery — and there she was!

We don’t know anything but the name yet. It’s late in San Francisco by now, too, so we’ll just have to wait until tomorrow for details. But congratulations Ian and Christine! Congratulations Harriette! Congratulations everybody! And welcome Alise! We can’t wait to see you in May.

I mean, I was up from 3:00 – 4:00 AM this morning dancing and bouncing and singing song after song after song trying to get a totally wired, mildly cranky, somewhat vomitous baby back to sleep, but does that ever get photographed? Noooooooooo…. But just let a naked, hairy Dad slack at his morning baby care duties for 10 minutes, and out comes the camera. Sheesh!