It used to be that I was quite the xanga blogger and had quite the following- now, I’m not sure if anyone will even be reading this, haha!  Just a general update, if there are any old friends/bloggers that still read or get this.  I turned thirty one last month- my son is five years old now!  He is speech impaired (basically, really really long delay) with apraxia: he can understand fine, but he cannot get his muscles to respond as naturally as others can.  So learning to talk is slow- he’s still at one year old level, but his intelligence is far, far beyond that.  He has begun expressing it through his playing of “ooh ooh, aah aah”, or Donkey Kong Returns on the Nintendo Wii (a sequel of Donkey Kong Country, a big series on the Super Nintendo my sis and I loved).  I hope to get ahold of a means to video tape him, as I want to send a clip of him to Ellen- I really think that, with a good video, he’d end up going on the show.  She likes ‘talented kids’, and he is amazing- you watch this adorable, blonde haired blue eyed boy who can’t talk much, but instead grins and sways his way through some of the most complex levels in the game.  He’s getting better than me in some places, and is as good as me in most!!  (that’s saying a lot- I’m no master gamer, but I’ve been gaming since I was a kid, and he just started seriously doing it a month or two ago with this game).  Seeing him get better and better visibly has been a delight, and it is a comfort, as it shows a venue to express his creativity and intelligence is there.  Previously, it was sometimes hard to gauge where he was really at.

And before you knock video games- would you believe he’s gotten visibly better at simple problem solving since he started playing?  Figuring out puzzles and such (and MAN he is better at it than I am, secret entrances… enemies that are on fire, that if you blow on them, they blow ‘out’ and you can kill them, etc…) has really increased his own reasoning skills.

I’m working at Publix supermarkets still, went from Cashier to Aprons clerk (cooking) to cashier again, by choice each time, and here I stand.

If anyone still reads this an is interested, I can share some photos, even videos, of Conor   I have a webcam and so it’s easy to get vids of the lil guy!  I hope my old friends on here are well.

-Patrick