Little Man, now quickly approaching his third birthday, bears the behavioral stretch marks of a baby turning into a boy: he eats with silverware but still occasionally paints himself with poo; he blows bubbles in his milk but can handily clean it up when it overflows the rim of his glass; he'll throw down UFC-style with any of us, but as soon as someone says "ow!" he hastens to offer "kissits" to the injured party.

That same duality presented itself the other night when, after we'd put him to bed, he walked out to the top of the stairs and cried. Having torn the cover off a favorite Golden book, he was inconsolable until Daddy reattached it with packing tape. He said thanks and went back to bed. Then, twenty minutes later, we heard him yelling again. His daddy got up, rounded the corner and prepared to go upstairs and have The Bedtime Talk with our son. When he returned to the living room, though, he was beaming with pride and looked as though he might be fighting back tears.

Mister Nygren had sneezed a few moments prior; Little Man had heard it and, in his barely-still-conscious state, stumbled back to the landing to cry out, "Bessyou, Dad! Dad? Bessyou, Daddy!"

He just wanted to bless his Daddy... and, in more ways than he knew, he had. 

Interviewer: What if anything would you like to say to the families of the victims?

Broadnax: (stares at the camera for a moment) F*ck 'em. Straight up.

In a jailhouse interview with Fox news, nineteen-year-old James Broadnax confesses to killing Matt and Steven. (NOTE: Footage is uncensored; discretion is advised.) The unspeakable irony, as Mister Nygren learned at the funeral yesterday, was that Matt and Steven were only at the studio so late because they were putting the finishing touches on a song they'd recorded together... called "We All Die Before Our Time."

In their public statements, the grieving families have expressed pity towards Broadnax and his cousin (who was present but didn't pull the trigger). I'd like to say that pity was my first or even overwhelming second response, but... I'd be lying. I wanted justice. Not even the I-hope-you-get-life-without-parole kind of justice, I'm ashamed to admit. More of the blind-outrage variety that causes mobs of otherwise sane people to do unjust things in the name of justice. Realizing that carrying out that sort of thing would make me no less cold-blooded than the murderer himself, though, I had to start praying that God would show James Broadnax the kind of mercy that I wanted Him to show me.

Broadnax tells the interviewer that his life has been hell, and that he intends to die, whether at his own hand or the state's. "I don't want [a] life [sentence]," he says flatly. It bears mentioning, though,  that at the end of the video -- mere moments after the chilling retort quoted above -- the stone-cold-killer facade crumbles. Broadnax appears to be fighting back tears as he slams down the receiver, rises abruptly from his chair and exits the visitation booth.

Watching him, I am finally overcome with pity as I realize that he, too, died before his time...

Yesterday as we sat eating our after-school snack, my six-year-old roommate -- to be identified hereafter as Shortcake -- made a puzzled face and asked, "How does your brain go to the bathroom?"

As much as that girl's brain eats, I can understand her concern.

At home, Shortcake and I practice addition and subtraction of three digit numbers as well as exercises in grouping ("five groups of eight is forty, right?" she asks excitedly), a concept she will later come to understand as multiplication. At school, she gets a paper dotted with puppies and smiley faces and has to count to see how many of each there are. Her reading assignments are three-page "books" that contain huge pictures and fewer than twelve [typically monosyllabic] words. When she finishes those, she leaves the kitchen table and goes back to the couch to continue reading Narnia.

It's giving me flashbacks to the day in kindergarten when one of the other teachers was reading us a mystery book where the heroes had to crack an alphabet code. "Do any of you know how many letters there are in the alphabet?" she asked us, obviously not expecting an answer. I shot my hand up and replied, "Twenty-six." Her eyes widened. "How did you know that, sweetie?" I smiled politely. "I've already read this book."

So I've been racking my brain for ways to keep her intellectually stimulated, and then it hit me: she needs to be able to do what I do when my brain has to go to the bathroom.

Heaven help me... I think she needs a blog.