My first born son arrived on November 8, 1975, a very memorable moment for me. I was 22 years old and now a father … wow what a great moment for me. I felt so terrible for my wife, I wanted to be doing something more than just standing around and observing. I wanted to participate, but ... that is my regret. At least for the next two pregnancies, I was able to go to childbirth classes with Sandee so that I could do more. And since she had become involved with La Leche League (an organization promoting and supporting breastfeeding mothers) I decided to be more involved and supportive of her decision in that.

When we brought Ryan home from the hospital, we placed him in a basanette (is this spelled correctly?) in close proximity to our sofa. As various family members came to the house to examine results of what Sandee and I had made, our little dog, Pepper leaped up onto the sofa and then onto the arm of the sofa and peered over the edge to get a better look at what brought all of these people to the house.

The first time we found out that Ryan had an allergy, we had taken him to the local Chinese restaurant, the Golden Pheasant, where he sat at 3 months old in a high chair. When he broke out with a series of blotchy red marks around his mouth, we thought at the time that it was merely the red dye in the paper napkins in use. On subsequent visits there, we finally discovered that it was due to a milk allergy and not a red dye reaction as presupposed. The only thing that he had this time, was mashed potatoes, so it had to be from the milk in the potatoes.

Ryan seemed to have a voracious learning appetite. When he was a mere two and a half years old, I took some railroad board (poster board) and cut it into small rectangles approximately 2 x 4 in size. I wrote a capital and a lower case letter for each of the characters of the alphabet, laminated them then bound them all together with a GBC comb binding so that he could flip through this learning "tool". It did not take long for him to learning the entire alphabet characters.

One of our printing customers noticed him (two year old, mind you) sitting on a stack of paper in the print shop, flipping through the book and calling out the names of the letters. The customer was quite impressed with his abilities.

I guess that there is good and bad to this type of kid. When he was three he had learned about the "silent" E, from watching either an Electric Company, or Sesame Street episode on the TV, and came to me with his drawn out discovery. He had pulled a large parent sheet ( 23 x 35 inches) of book paper from the shelf and had scrawled his word.

"Look, Daddy, the word phone", he proclaimed.

I glanced down to see that he spelled the word phone: F - O - N - E. I said to him, "Wow that's great, Ryan, you even have the silent "E" at the end".

"Yeah, I saw it on [whatever the name of the show was]", he proudly exclaimed.

"Well, you did a great job, but there is just one thing. The word phone starts with a "P" and "H" together."

"No", he interrupted me, "F".

"I know that it sounds like it starts with an "F", but it really starts with "PH".

"NO!", he stated. "F".

This was starting to get rough, how do you use logic and reasoning here? OK, I had an idea. I said, "Ryan, the English language is really weird. When you put the "P" and the "H" together, the two of them make an "F" sound. The word phone has the "P" and "H" together side-by-side to make that "F" sound."

"NO, F", he shouted.

"Yes, even the word elephant has a "P" and an "H" side by side to make the "F" sound. Here, I will show you", I said while grabbing a marker. I carefully printed the word elephant on his piece of paper, then underscored the "p" and "h" in the word.

"You see, son. Here the "p" and "h" together make the"F" sound in this word", I so eloquently reasoned (yeah, right).

"No", he repeated. "F".

This went on for the longest time, so to prevent extreme boring reading here, I have eliminated much of the dialog here.

"Well, I am sorry, son, but that is the truth, and you are going to just have to accept it". And I walked away, frustrated as all get out, feeling that I hadn't really won an argument with a three year old.

I came back about an hour later to check on him, and found that my lengthy argument pretty much ended in a "draw", because there, on that large sheet of white book paper, that little three year had scrawled the spelling of his word: F - P - H - O- N- E.

You see, if I had actually convinced this kid of the correct spelling, it would have begun with the correct letters, but with the first letter still being an "F", it let me know that he was merely humouring me by placing the "P" and "H" in the word.

We were watching TV in the living room of our home on Norwich Avenue in Fresno (around 1984, I think). Jenna and Nathan were sitting in front of the TV on the floor. Their position was like the typical child – they would kneel on the floor then sit back on their heels. Over the course of time their feet would scootch (this is my special word) outward away from their buttocks until their buttocks would be on the floor. So many a child can be seen in this “seated” position that you would think that this is obviously comfortable for the child. Not so. After sitting through episodes of Sesame Street, Electric Company and Mr. Rogers, Jenna turns away from watching the TV to look at me.

“Daddy my foot is buzzing”, she states ever so frankly.

“Your foot must have fallen asleep”, I replied, not thinking whether or not they had even known what was taking place with the circulation in her foot.

“It’s just snoring”, stated my five year old son Nathan.