Hidden Stories

This is your second cousin Joe Young and his wife Dina.  We just recently went to their wedding.  It was a beautiful ceremony and a wonderful celebration of two people who are very clearly in love.  I am sure that you will, at the time you read this, have some wonderful memories of them and probably lots of fun adventures with their children.

But I'm not writing this post just to talk about some of the wonderful people you'll have in your life.

I'm writing instead about something that I was reminded of at this wedding and in the picture above.  Underneath that canopy at the back of the picture, there is a man that you can barely see.  His name is Jeff Clark.  Obviously, you wouldn't even know that he was in the picture if I hadn't pointed it out just now.

What this picture doesn't tell you is that Jeff Clark is Joe's stepdad.  He came into Joe's life (marrying his mother) when Joe was pretty young and ended up playing a pretty big part in Joe's life.  On this wedding day, I don't think it would have been possible for Jeff to be prouder.  I watched him almost break down in tears on multiple occasions as he stood witness to the marriage of a young man who is a son to him in every way but biology.  It brought me to tears myself.

I hope that you can take a little lesson from this, Liam.  Looking at the surface of a place, a person, or a situation, you can never really know the whole story.  There is always more going on behind the scenes that we can't understand unless we consciously take the time to.

So, when you're faced with a situation where someone makes you upset or does something that you disagree with, take a moment to reflect and wonder what pieces of the picture you're not seeing.  There is probably something that you don't know that is influencing their reasoning and making their actions seem completely reasonable to them.

Love you lots little guy!

Dad

Another Road Trip... and love.

Liam,

I am heading off today on another road trip for work.  I don't like leaving you and your mom, but it's for a good purpose.  This time I am going to Chicago to run some training sessions.  I've got 15 Ford executives who signed up to watch me in action tomorrow!  Belatedly, wish me luck!

But this post isn't about the road trip itself.

This post is about what you can do when you love someone.

Some day, you'll fall in love with someone.  And some day, you'll fall in love with someone who loves you, too.

When you do, and when that person decides to make the plunge and spend the rest of their life with you, you will experience ups and downs.  Not every day is paradise, though when it's right more often than not they are.

Always remember to take the time to make little gestures to let that person know how much you care about them. It can be easy to take someone special for granted, but life is just so much better when you force yourself not to.  Remember that we all have insecurities and that we can all get a little positive bump from even the smallest signs that the person we love still feels that way about us.

For example, I am going to be gone for a few days, so I left a bunch of little notes for your mom.  They're all just little things, but she'll find them from time to time while I'm gone and they'll remind her how much I would rather be home continuing to share my life with her.

So remember that!  And make surethe person you love knows how much you care!

Bronchiolitis is scary...

Hi weebs!

So, we had a scary little surprise with you last week.

You got sick.  Fortunately, you decided to get sick the night before you had a doctor's appointment.  It kept your mom up most of the night because you were having a hard time breathing and she could hear it with her stethoscope.

When we took you in, they diagnosed you with Bronchiolitis.  They prescribed you some breathing treatments.  Fortunately, you kind of like them!

We even had to take you in to the emergency room the night after the doctor's appointment when things took a turn for the worse.  After some deep suction (which you didn't like), things took a turn for the better and you're mostly out of the woods now.  They scared us to death, though, by warning us that things could get worse at any moment.

I am so grateful to have a job right now that allowed me to take time off and just stay at home and make sure you were safe and that there were no surprises.

I'm just sharing this because some day you'll probably be a Dad.  When you are, your own little baby will probably get sick and you'll have some scary days and nights.

When you do, just remember that you're not alone.  We went through it, too, and you made it through with some extra care and diligence.  I love you, Liam!

Ramen... a cooking adventure...

Weebs!

Your mom and I just had a great weekend to help put some of the memories of the bad week behind us.  And your trend of continuing adventures moves on!

As I'm sure you know, your mom and I love cooking.  It's even better when it's cooking together.  Hopefully, you've had a great big share of cooking adventures with us and you have quite the expansive palette when it comes to trying new foods.

This weekend, we tried out a new thing.  Ramen!  Now, you may know real Ramen from us.  I imagine we'll be making this particular recipe for a long time to come.  Hopefully, you're not too disappointed the first time you try Ramen at a friend's house and get something like this:

For, you see, Ramen is actually quite the complex Japanese dish.  Your mom and I had both had some experience with it before this weekend, but we'd neither actually made the dish or even tried it at a proper Japanese restaurant.

Those little facts didn't stop us from breaking out the old interwebs to find a recipe and then get to work making it.  The first two Asian markets that we stopped at didn't have the ingredients.  Fortunately, as we left the second market, a nice lady had a third one to recommend to us.  She was, apparently, surprised that people who looked like us were shopping at an Asian market.  And her tip paid off, with me finding these hard-to-find ingredients at Lee's market:

On a side note, we may still be using those Bonito flakes when you read this.  It's a ridiculously big restaurant-style wholesale bag, but the only way we could find it.

With these goodies in hand, we headed home and set to work cooking.  Well, actually, your mom did most of the cooking for this one.  I was busy simultaneously cooking Alton Brown's meat sauce for other uses.

In the end, she created this:

And it was delicious!  But, of course, you probably already know that... because something tells me that it's going to be a fairly regular staple of your diet.

Liam, whether you like cooking or not, I hope that you will find someone to be with in your life who you share something with the way that your mom and I share cooking.  No matter what it is and no matter who he or she is, it's just amazing to be able to create something special with the person you love.