Panic! Fear! Run for the goddamn hills my son and don't look back. No matter how good or blameless you are, you'll never be safe from the bastards who try to run you down. No matter how careful, conscientious or prepared you are, you cannot escape for ever the dreadful sound of trampling hooves, the cold breath upon your neck, or the sound of the Scythe as it snips off the tips of the hairs that stand erect on your head. No matter how hard you try, no matter how strenuously you endeavour to remain on the side of the good there are no guarantees that your number will not come up.

What began months ago as referring to the Boober as "skinny" quickly devolved into a frantic search for the cause of this skinniness. At first we attributed his slight frame to the result of having suffered several concurrent (if not at times, overlapping) colds over the winter months. In a day-care setting, either home or factory-farm, it is impossible to guard against ever becoming ill. Nothing short of seclusion or an N95 mask can truly guard against the possibility of picking up some ailment, and by God, we are not the type of people to worry ourselves over a few air-born bugs. We are, by way of fact, the type of people that will allow our 10 month-old to sample the ash-dirt mix in public campgrounds. His pediatrician, however, thought there might be something more ominous behind his extravagant weight loss, and because we have such great faith in his pediatrician, we too began to wonder at how he was transformed from a child comfortably at the 75th percentile for weight, to one nudging just barely above the 25th. I'd like to say that I've long held to the belief that his weight suffered the harsh effects or chronic winter illness, but not being an expert of anything practical, could not gainsay the good doctor with any argument more poignant than "because!"

No one likes to hear that their child might be ill in some chronic and permanent way. It is still worse to discover that one of those ailments might be Cystic Fibrosis. How did we get from some as-to-yet unexplained weight loss to CF? In the murky world of early childhood development not all bowel movements are created equal. The line which separates healthy bowel movements for those of questionable frequency is so slight: 1 - 2 is normal, and 3 - 4 is not normal. We long gave up the practice of tracking the number and types of Rowan's poops. Once we'd gotten past the very early stages of newborn stomach flora development we thought no more of checking. We'd always wondered, awed, at how alternately large, small, wet, dry, amorphous, rabbit-like, his poops appeared, but we attributed it to nothing more than a continually developing digestive system. We also supposed that, based on his diet, there would simply be very meal-specific appearances to his output - it appeared to be no different than when an adult consumes a large number of boiled beets. We examined his behaviour, his physical growth (other than weight), his ability to manoeuvre dexterously, and his cognitive development, and decided that if weight was the only X-factor in an otherwise supreme growth effort, then how could it be possible something was wrong?

Fear comes in many forms. We never expected it to come in the form of feces. The first test result we received regarded the percentage of fat in his poop. A high percentage of fat (anything above 5%) indicates a fat absorption problem. While the idea that you could eat a whole pound of fat, but not have it sashay its way to your hips sounds like to type of affliction with which anyone would love to be cursed. Yet you must understand that there are several, crucial, vitamins that are fat soluble, and only enter the blood-stream carried by fat; a person who poorly absorbs fat, will also be prey to poor absorption of vitamins, and this would have deleterious affects on growth. In an adult who has already developed, this is, perhaps less of a concern, but for an infant, who is still on a steep growth ramp, this is very troubling. Rowan's first fat globule poop test returned 20% fat, which is 4 times the safe amount. The nurse who called to tell us we might want to re-test his poop was uncomfortable - you could hear in her voice a kind of sad worry that she was delivering terrible, fatal, news. You could just hear whispered the words, "Cystic Fibrosis", each time she paused to find an alternate word, but we knew already what they were testing for, and each time she hesitated, I filled in the gap mentally. What a strange thing to be afraid to say the already-known, as if to say it would be to make it manifest, when in reality, all the testing in world would not change the outcome - either you are afflicted with a disease, or not. Being wholly ignorant of that bus bearing down on you won't change the outcome one way or the other. Still, we humans tend to be very superstitious, especially when it comes to tender moments of sympathy and sorrow, so to say it would have been to violate that understanding, that silence that itself screams. I acted as if I noticed nothing, and perhaps she believed me.

We since had the test re-done and it came back negative. Our boy, it seems, has very average poop. There's been no time in his short life that I've praying for complete mediocrity, but this was it. The lab to which we took the first sample ought to have rejected it because it was stale poop. Only poop that is no more than 4 hours old is fresh enough for this test, and our poop sample was over a day old, most of it in the warm ambient air of the house.  Why did they accept it? I can't say. Perhaps they are just not educated on this one thing. Whatever the reason, it caused us great stress and worry for a week while we gathered a second sample and waited for the results.

We are now (mostly) free and clear, but what does that really mean? We move, as elsewhere in life, from moment to moment, and crisis to crisis, where happiness and misery are interwoven in such terribly complex and beautiful patterns. It's better than being alone ...

The Things I Never Knew ...

Having two children is, so far as I can tell at this early stage, not so much different from having one. With Bronson being a measly 11 days old it ought to be difficult to judge, but it will be many months before he requires any more anxious attention than he does now. Unlike Rowan, he cannot get about to do such things as stick forks in outlets, leap off of upturned waste-paper baskets, chew twigs of dubious lineage, eat chocolate eggs still covered in foil, or pull down cups full of hot tea. Bronson is still in that phase whereby the greatest worry is that he might sit in his poop too long and irritate his bum-bum - something that, while unpleasant, is not likely to send my heart into bursts of arrhythmia.

Being a parent, so far as my little experience has taught me, is 10 parts patience, 5 parts planning, 10 parts ignorance and 50 parts providence. What I have learned about myself is that I am not as patient as I always flattered myself to be, and for that I am a little disappointed. It seems a life-time of doing it "my way" has poorly prepared me to do it "another way", which is to say that I like my floors to be clean, whereas Rowan likes to decorate the floor with bits of his dinner, which the dogs like to alternately lick and grind in to the tile. I have learned that poop, while not always cute, is also not always not so cute. What you would never do for anyone else, you will do for your children, and you will do so with zombie-like acceptance: stoic yet slightly ecstatic. Stoicism is an important philosophy adopt as a parent because not everything that your child does, or that happens to your child, can be dealt with passionately. There are times when a distanced approach is called for because detachment allows you to assess the issues clinically and combat them in the same way. Too much passion, ill placed, is like fighting in a wild rage: when you hit something you may do it terrifically, but that presumes that you will actually hit something, and that something you hit will be the right thing. When the outcome of something serious hinges, not only on your confronting it, but with how you confront it, clarity of mind is far more effective than pitch of passion. This, of course, does not preclude passion, but insists on its use in only certain circumstances. As with so much else, knowing where to judiciously apply force is more important than applying that force.

I never knew that having a child would be like grafting your younger self to another creature. While I want each son to grow in his way, I also want to be certain that he grows in a way congruent with my view of the world. This is not the same as saying that I want my children to be a facsimile of the person I would have liked to be, but to suggest that I would like them to embody the principles which I now hold dear, in an attempt to better the world as I see it ought to be bettered. I am happy for them to go off and manifest their own destinies so long as more than a vestige of my ethics is cured into the foundation of their drives and desires. They will be a reflection of the person I've been as much as a reflection of the people they are, for you cannot escape your history any more than you can escape your genetics. We are all bound, as by a string, to the past as surely as the waves lapping upon the shore are bound to the ripples that preceded them out in the deepest oceans. Cause-and-effect dominate, not only our physics, but our philosophy, and our philosophy, whether conscious or unconscious, dominates our realities; no choice is truly random, but influenced by a host of phenomena, and our perceptions of those phenomena, based on the teachings in our youth, and those teachings are imparted to us partly by our parents, partly by our peers, partly by the acquaintances with whom we brush elbows, and partly by the random mechanics of the world. It is the totality of everything which unconsciously fuels our great engines of perception, thought, and action.

The Tinkle Bot Arrives ...

"Tinkle Bot" is the name of my second son. To be fair, it's not what my wife and I Christened him, or what we will Christen him when he's Christened, but when the time comes - and it will - he will be officially known as Bronson Jack Daniel Bejjani. Unlike his older brother, Bronson has this uncanny ability to either maneuver his wee-wee outside the protective barrier of his diaper, or to simply overwhelm its holding capacity by repeatedly peeing voluminous quantities until the figurative dyke bursts and soaks into his jammies or day-clothes, hence "Tinkle Bot". A "Bot" or "Robot" is a purpose built machine designed to do one thing, and to do it well; that's Bronson!