VivaCity

It’s absolutely mind-blowing to watch your children grow and develop and see your own traits emerging in them before your eyes. I hope, along the lines of genetic therapy, the ob/gyn’s of the future can prepare some sort of checklist that allows parents to choose the qualities (I use this term loosely) that their children possess and toss out the ones that might be bothersome.

For instance, my poor dear Julian may never sit himself up completely. He tries his damndest, a Herculean effort each time, but he only ever gets as far as the point where his thighs come into view, then flops back, disgusted. This is my fault, of course, since he’s inherited both my thighs and my loathing of them. He’s going to be really pissed when he discovers he also has my cankles, which are of course the absence of any sort of shapely ankle whatsoever, just a sort of running of the calf directly into the foot. Poor kid. It’s probably a positive thing we never had girls…Cankles are the sort of torture only Mother Nature could invent for the female psyche.

Spencer is the beneficiary of his father’s gift (I also use this term loosely) of gab. Some day, when the two of them, you know, speak the same language, I can only imagine the marathon conversations that will ensue. I may finally get some reading done.

And that Warrior of Teenage Wasteland, Alden, has CLEARLY inherited his father’s love of practical jokes. I am absolutely awash with sympathy for our pitiful mailman, who, due to the tedium of summer, has been subject to everything from a gorilla-costumed hand thrust out of the mail slot to a “Just Married” sign taped to the back of his little truck. He even found the latter to be quite cute and funny, that is until he got halfway down the street and realized the joke wasn’t complete without the customary aluminum cans on a string.

And so our bloodline continues, proud bearer of the Receding Hairline, the Goofy Gene, and of course that damned mutated Cankle Chromosome. If we start breeding with supermodels immediately, we could have shapely ankles somewhere around the year 2095.