On babies, inappropriate words and the true meaning of Christmas.

I sat down to write a piece on the Fox News "War on Christmas" fake issue that they hit us with every year at this time, and how if you want to talk about the REAL war on Christmas, it's the usurping of the birth of Christ aspect of it with trees, decorations, Santa Claus and ever greater levels of avarice. The birth of a man whose life was all about giving selflessly and living simply, and we celebrate it by being ever more ostentations in the gifts we give and in the gifts we expect to receive.

It is honestly a perfect example of neoconservative hypocrisy, a fake issue designed to pull at the emotions and rile up the base, while completely avoiding anything REAL (because if they actually decried the commercialization and greed-ification of Christmas, they'd drive away those members of their core constituency whose livelihood relies on exactly that commercialization).

That's what I wanted to write about, but instead, I'm going to talk about Liam the younger.

It seems he's reached the age where he'll randomly choose one word out of a sentence and repeat it. A fact which we discovered last night while shopping, when Janet said something about the crap in the store, and Liam came out with "crap". Just great.

But the amazing thing is that when I looked at Janet and said "Did he just say 'crap'?", she said "I think so" and he said "I did."

Followed by "crap" again.

Several more times.

Ah well, I knew all of his words wouldn't be as fun as last week, when while sitting on the floor playing, he looked at his sister sitting next to him, turned around to look at me and said "Darby's there". Looked back to see that she'd gotten up, turned back to me and said "she moved".

He's growing up.

I just didn't expect my life with Liam to be so full of, well, crap. :-)

Liam, the elder.