It's fairly amazing that young Mini-Me moves as fast as he does. Watching him decide that he wanted to be chased and head down the hallway at a full toddler sprint; arms a flailing, legs seemingly detached from the hips, feet thudding down on the floor with each step; I wondered how Aidan actually moves so quickly when all the functioning body parts don't really seem to be in concert with each other. What keeps him from continually falling on his face? How is it that one so seemingly uncoordinated is able to move so fast (and with such apparent glee)?

Summer Vacation
This years summer boating vacation started off with a bang – three out of four family members having colds, the water conditions being horrible for crossing the straight and dense fog – Aidan didn’t seem to care, he seemed to be treating it as if the entire ordeal was one long theme park ride, walking/bouncing around down below, climbing up on the main stateroom bed and flopping around on the pillows for each plunging nose dive the boat took as it lurched from one five foot wave to the next. He thought it was all great fun. Ella, well she slept through all the excitement.

Over all, the vacation was a success. Nobody was inured, Aidan’s parents didn’t throw the other overboard, and Aidan came back with a ‘Tiva Tan’ showing that he did spend a fair amount of time out in the sunshine walking around the docs in his little toddler Tiva’s.

Poor little Aidan though, he so badly wanted to play with all the older kids on the docks – all running around with their shrimp nets, catching a variety of sea creatures that dared to venture too close to the dock. Aidan, wearing his water skiing type life jacket, with I attached to the ‘handle’ strap behind the neck, would move as quickly as possible trying to keep up with the other kids – with I continually hunched over, keeping hold of the life jacket strap trying to keep up with Aidan. One of our fellow boaters was kind enough to donate a toddler sized shrimp net which floated when dropped – and it was dropped a lot so this feature was certainly well used. Aidan thought it great fun to dip the net into the water, play with it for a while, drop it in the water, then look at me and say ‘help’…. After about the 15th time, I finally caught on.

Aidan also visited a number of pools available to marina guests. Hopefully Aidan learns soon that he can not breath under water and that, as he can’t swim yet, walking to deeper water is not a good idea. Aidan didn’t seem to mind swallowing half the pool water as he soon found that he could navigate around the edge of the pool, hanging on to the poolside and seemed irritated each time I attempted to assist him when he was looking like he was starting to lose his grip on the side of the pool – apparently he was well in control of the situation and I was only getting in the way. I guess I should start to get used to that.


Aidan is picking up words left and right these days, I’ve lost count as to how many he actually seems to have a near command and understanding of. He’s added Car, Airplane, Notebook, Ear, Nose, Eye, Shirt, Pants, Boat, Fish, Net, Juice, Ta (Australian used for ‘thank you’ and Thank You kept coming out as Ga-Ga and didn’t seem to have any chance of migrating to the more understood pronunciation. However, after chatting with an Australian staff member at Roche Harbor, Aidan picked up on ‘Ta’ immediately.