robohara.com

I was just informed that robohara.com has been nominated as one of the best family blogs by 2009 Oklahoma Blog Awards. This tells me two things: one, people actually reading this blog, and two, there must not be very many “family blogs” in Oklahoma. I don’t know who threw my name in the hat, but thank you. This is definitely as case where just being nominated is an honor.

Your reward is the following story.

My son Mason was born on December 12th, 2001. I suppose you could say that is the day my wife and I started our own family. (You can’t have a family blog without a family, right?)

After a long week of false labor pains (for Susan, not me), Mason’s birth was scheduled for that December day. Now up until that time, I associated hospitals with being bored, and being hungry. I solved the food problem by bringing along a backpack full of snacks I picked up at Sam’s. I literally brought enough cereal bars, Pop Tarts and candy bars to last a month. In anticipation of the boredom, I brought along my laptop, a stack of CDs, my Game Boy Advance, a few books and magazines, and about 200 DVDs. As I’ve mentioned before, the only gadget I used during our stay was my laptop, and that was only to post pictures of my newborn son on the web five minutes after he was born. Priorities, yo.

Now something you may not know about me is, when I get nervous, I tend to get funny (er, funnIER!) I almost get slap-happy at times. And the longer this whole “labor thing” seemed to take, the sillier I got. Susan, on the other hand, does not get silly, and did not appreciate my silliness as she was “supposedly” experiencing the greatest pain of her life. This explains why she would not take my picture while she was having contractions and I was walking around the room wearing a hospital glove on my head, doing my rooster impersonation. What a party pooper!

Skipping forward about six hours, it was finally time to “push”. Fortunately in Lamaze class, our instructor taught us (clueless husbands) what to do. Our job was to say “breathe” and “push” a lot (on cue). So with the doctor and a couple of nurses at our side, we began telling my wife when to breath and when to push.

“Push,” I said, calmly. “Push!” I said again. What I did not realize was, not only was I saying “push,” but I was pushing, too.

Just as my son was about to be born, I realized I was about to poop my pants.

Susan’s room had a bathroom in it, but I couldn’t, you know, “go” there, not with the doctor and nurses in there. So I left the room. Assuring family members that everything was okay, I ducked into a dark room across the hall from ours, snuck into the restroom, and did my business quickly (and probably loudly).

When I was finished I came out of the bathroom, flipped on the light and noticed the woman (who had previously been sleeping) in the bed. Yeah. I accidentally went in some random lady’s room and woke her up by taking a dump in her bathroom. I never heard anything else about it — I’m hoping she chalked it up to a medicinally-induced hallucination.

Fortunately, I was able to make it back to the room before anything important had transpired. A few minutes later, Susan and I were the proud parents of a new baby boy. That day, Susan learned to ignore me when I get silly, and I learned not to say “push” unless you really mean it.

“You did what?”

For the second year in a row, Mason decided to go with a Nintendo-themed Valentine’s Day box for school. Last year, Mason and I made this Nintendo Wii box:

That’s his box on the right, and a real Wii on the left for comparison. Covering a box with white paper turned out to be a pretty good idea, as it lets you fill in all the details with a black marker. All we really had to add was a piece of licorice for a Wiimote strap which, if I remember correctly, had either been pulled off or eaten (probably both) before Mason got to school.

This year Mason wanted to make a Nintendo DS. His first effort (which involved a shoe box and half a roll of masking tape) didn’t look very DS-like, so yesterday Susan wrangled up a couple of boxes for us, and last night Mason and I got to work on his super-sized DS.

We started with two boxes without lids, like a box that cans of soda would come in. We cut slits in the side so the box would fold over on itself, backwards (like Pac-Man). We then cut up the second box and used those parts (and a lot of masking tape) to complete the boxes. The point of all this was, I wanted the “hinge” to be made out of cardboard, not masking tape. When we were finished we had two completely enclosed boxes, connected by a cardboard hinge.

Here’s the box with the first coat of blue spray paint applied. We ended up doing three coats, one gray and two blue. On the left are a couple of print outs from some Pokemon game Mason likes. Our laser printer only prints black and white, so Mason added some color to them with markers. Durign this time he also drew all the necessary DS buttons and cut them out.

Here is the finished box, next to Morgan’s (infamously dead) Nintendo DS for a size comparison. Our DS folds up just like a real one, thanks to the cardboard hinge. As you can see, Mason added all the buttons he wanted. We also added speaker holes to the top half using an awl. The only thing we did after this picture was taken was cut a slot in the front (where the GBA slot is on a real DS) where Valentines go. I’m not sure everything is glued down great, but it only has to last a couple of days.

The only cost involved was the spray paint (of which we now have lots left over), and the longest part of the project was waiting for the paint to dry.