Kaeden Shannon Paul Foster

Blog for January 8, 2010

On Monday, January 4, our grandson was born. He was 8 pounds exactly stretched beautifully on a 21-inch frame. Our wonderful daughter Laurie-Ann had but two hours of hard labour – not bad for a first child. Not bad at all. Shannon, our son-in-law, was a tower of strength throughout the birth. He came running to tell us, his smile a mile wide as he stated that our grandson was born at 7:06a.m. His name will be Kaeden Shannon Paul Foster.
Dianne and I first saw him in Laurie’s hospital room: Dianne sometime that morning; I didn’t see my grandson until after 5p.m. When I held him I thought of what Diana, the lovely lady who works the Aramark food business at the Faculty of Education. She said when you hold him for the first time; you will never forget the feeling. She was right. Kaeden was like holding a burning log he produced so many BTUs. He rarely opened his eyes, but Shannon says they are blue. Blue is good.
Laurie said she didn’t feel so good; although I thought she looked just fine, if a little tired and haggard looking. She is attempting to breast feed, but between her and the baby, they were still trying to work out the details, both of them being rookies so to speak. Dianne and I left shortly after 6p.m. We were both pretty tired but elated too. We were, finally, grandparents. Laurie and Shannon are both 37 years old. They have been married for five years; we were beginning to think we would never see a grandchild.
It’s been quite a while actually since anyone in either of our families has had a child. Cameron, the son of Jimmy (Dianne’s brother) and Ann was born almost 20 years ago. That’s an awful long time between babies. Apparently my nephew Jeff (son of my sister Derryl and her husband Mike) and his new bride (newly married in October of this past year) want to start a family right away. Good for them.
The next morning Laurie and Shannon brought Kaeden home. Laurie basically kept him in her arms all day, even when he was sleeping. Thus she got no sleep. The next day she put Kaeden in his rocker/bassinette and he slept like a real trooper. Last night, however, was not a good one. He was fussy and Laurie attended to his needs perhaps a little too quickly. Again she had a rough night. I saw her this morning; she did not look good at all. Fortunately, Kaeden had a wonderful afternoon of sleep (12-4) and therefore Laurie did too. She has to make sure she begins to recover from the after affects of birth. She has to be strong and alert for baby Kaeden.
Listen to me; I’m sounding just like an interfering grandparent. By the way, I want to be called grampa; I’m not sure what Dianne wants to be called (granny?). But I digress. I am most looking forward to watching my grandson grow up. I fully expect to be involved in everything he does. We will be very active grandparents, especially when Laurie goes back to school in September. Dianne and I will be babysitting our beloved little fellow. Well, actually, Dianne will be babysitting most days; I’ll still be at Lakehead University, God willing to start my tenth year at the old Bora Laskin Building. However, I fully expect to be involved on my days off and when I’m home from my classes.
I’m also really looking forward to having Kaeden at camp this summer. I know he won’t understand where he is yet, but I want to begin acclimatizing him to what I hope to be his camp some day. I know his parents really aren’t interested, but who knows, maybe our grandson will take to fishing and camping like Dianne and I have. I realize we are many years away from that decision yet, but it still is nice to think and dream about it.
It will be interesting to see what kind of sports my grandson will be involved in. Now that it’s a boy, the male sports immediately come to mind: hockey, baseball, etc. I know Laurie is quite adamant about not allowing her son to get involved in contact sports, but we’ll see. Golf is certainly a game that he might well excel at.
To be continued.

It's been awhile

Sunday, January 3, 2010

It’s been awhile since I wrote anything to put on my blog, but I suppose it’s a New Year’s resolution come a few days early. I see already that Microsoft Word is annoying me. They are trying to tell me that ‘it’s’ is used incorrectly. It’s NOT! Alas, some things never change. However, I do not want to waste my time talking about the many problems with Word. I want to get back into the writing game, and the only way I know how to do that is WRITE! Already I’m beginning to annoy myself – using CAPS and exclamation marks. Give it a rest, Ed.
I’m still a big reader of blogs that comment at length on the completely dysfunctional American political system; I’ve been doing this for years now, and the unfortunate thing is that no matter how much sense these bloggers make, it has virtually no influence whatsoever on how America conducts its daily political business. I have a few theories about why this is so. Who knows? Someone might actually agree with me.
The Republican Party, despite being out of power, still wields tremendous influence, far outstripping their supposed inability to win office in any significant numbers. Why? They dominate all aspects of the American media. How do they do this? Mainly by working an egregiously compliant press to join them in positioning the Democratic Party as weak and ineffectual. And it works.
Despite the impressive and persuasive writing on the part of many in the blogosphere, the American public generally and hopelessly stupidly takes their political cues from serial liars and ass kissers of the first rank on the TV and the major newspapers and magazines. The term IOIYAR is so thoroughly appropriate, and the bloggers cannot make a dent of any size or shape to reach the vast majority of the American people who seem to be very much at ease with their incredible lack of awareness about anything that affects them deeply – things like health care and joblessness.
The fact that virtual everyone is predicting that Republicans will gain seats in the elections of 2010 pretty well tells you all you have to know about their thinking and lack of awareness. Which brings me to a significant, I think, point: what the hell is wrong with Americans? I do not know of another country that has a citizenry that is so ignorant about the goings on in their government. When you have so many people who are utterly unaware of what is being done in their name by their government, and they don’t seem to care. The American people yawned and snoozed through eight years of the worst administration ever in the history of the republic, and only the bloggers and a few, very few other journalists who have made any attempt at all to bring to light the many nefarious law-breaking that went on unimpeded during the Bush administration and continues, sadly to say, during the first year of the Obama administration.
If I were a blogger who has spent as much time as the liberal bloggers have in trying to bring attention to the perilous plight of America, I would be frustrated to the extreme. No matter how cogent their arguments, no matter how persuasive their writing, the Republicans simply ignore all the facts thrown in their face and scream inanities like ‘socialism,’ ‘Nazism,’ and all sorts of other ridiculous commentary, and the mainstream media gives these fools a national platform to spout their invective and venom with little or no consequences for their hatred and gross stupidity. The thing is that the Republicans don’t care. They have hides as thick as Naugahyde and they have absolutely no shame. They lie and cheat with impunity, and the mainstream media gives them a free pass every time. Nice work if you can get it that’s for sure.
I’m coming to the end of my first blog in a long, long time. I know it blows big time, but I have to start somewhere and it might well be here. Yes, I’m going to publish this drivel on my blog to show myself and the world how bad things can be and yet believe I am capable of much more.