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January 12, 2005 - Wednesday, 4:30 p.m.

Went to lunch with L today. We were going to eat Italian and then shifted to Chinese at the last moment. I�m about �chinesed� out on food. However, it was a nice visit. L�s finances are a mess and I�m going to try to help her get organized. Hopefully I�ll be able to set up something that she�ll manage to follow. We talked a lot about that. We talked about the boys too.

It�s interesting to watch your kids grow and change. I come out of a family where most of the men in my life liked babies and kids.

In my world, men love babies and kids. My father was always comfortable with babies and kids, even more so then my mother, when they got married. That�s just the way I thought men were, until I got married. Gary wasn�t a baby person. He didn�t like to hold the boys when they were babies. By the time Curt was born he�d finally gotten comfortable enough to hold a baby, but he missed that with Justin and Philip. As my boys and my sisters� boys have grown up I�ve seen the difference. My boys never were too comfortable with babies and kids� really Curtis was the only one (note... he was the only one held much by his own dad). Most all of my sisters� boys like babies and kids and are always holding them or playing with them. I always loved living in a world where men were into kids and wondered what it would be like for my boys that seemed so distant.

When I went to Chicago and brought L home she lived with me for about a year. G was only about 3 at the time. My boys were a little stand-offish. But G decided that she liked Philip and she was all over him; crawling on his lap, hugging him, kissing him. Eventually he got more and more comfortable with it. G is now 7 and she continues to adore Philip, and he is really good with her. He seems to be very comfortable with babysitting her, and just having her around. In that same time my sister�s boys have come to adore him. Always asking if he is going to be present at family get-togethers. Justin started to change after he got married. Moon adores babies and kids and it�s rubbing off on him. These two boys had an advantage that Gary never got. Kids in their faces, a forced interaction with kids, until they were comfortable. I can see now that they�ll all make great parents. They�ll be far more comfortable with babies then their father ever was. It�s good to see.