Hula Hoop Summit

When Jonah said he was going to go outside to hula hoop with Michelle, we naturally assumed he meant our Hoover neighbor. No. Turns out Jonah had a hula hoop summit with FLOTUS. He asked her a lot of questions - about strategies for building a wider public consensus around the public option, about the perverse incentives introduced into Wall Street decision making when bonuses are poorly linked to performance metrics, and why Sasha likes Babo's Bird better than Ice Bat. Jeez! Everybody knows Ice Bat is the coolest.

Diapers in space

Like a lot of us, Jonah has a pretty narrow window on the world. In his case, though, because the window is on a rocket ship, things are moving by pretty fast. That's probably true for a lot of you too. First year Hooverites are probably scratching their heads over the fact that they have to study for mid-terms already, even though the quarter just started. In the U. of C. universe that's just the way things go.

But back to Jonah. I have been trying for years to get him interested in space travel. When I was a kid I loved space travel, and I wanted to pass that on to him. I explained to him that space is full of wonderful things and mind-boggling phenomena. And because space is incapable of self-consciousness, the only way for its properties and immenseness to be mapped out and appreciated is for us to do it. Since we are made up of space dust - we are physical depositories of some of the matter created in the big bang - we can, in a way, be the instrument for the universe to know itself. Usually, when I talk like this, Jonah just stares at me.

When Jonah learned that astronauts wear diapers, he had a whole new view of things. Like a lot of 3 year olds, Jonah is at that point where he is leaving diapers behind. And like a lot of 3 year olds, his steps into this new diaper-less world are halting and unsteady. Much like Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon were. But in a short time, Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were leaping from crater to crater, feeling freed of Earth's gravity. I tried to use this as a metaphor, to point out to Jonah that he, too, will soon be leaping freely, relieved of the added weight of his diaper. But, being the smart guy he is, he said: "But Daddy, they were wearing diapers." Or as he insists on calling them now, Maximum Absorption Garments.