Stronger than bone.

Post Super Bowl and pre Super Tuesday, I wanted to make certain that I take a moment to talk about my Super Scout. We're all thrilled when the 'Big Game' is as close as yesterday's was (well, most of us anyway...boo hoo Pats fans) and Barack Obama appears poised to make significant strides in tomorrow's contests nationwide...but my boy has handled the first real adversity to come his way so extraordinarily, I couldn't be more proud.

A little less than a month ago, Scout broke his femur (the big bone connected to the hip bone) after falling. Poor little guy, right? That cry of pain was unlike any sound I've ever heard. Horrible, horrible day beyond horrible days.

To describe this as a traumatic event for our family does not even begin to do that evening justice. We're still pretty new to this parenting thing and without question learning on the job, but I could have never imagined that pain could hurt so...without getting a scratch myself. Our child's suffering FAR AND AWAY eclipsed any mild discomforts Wendy Lu or I had ever mistaken for real pain in our pasts. While I would have in an instant happily had my legs broken to take that pain away from him, that simply was not to be a choice we would be given.

This is your child, the one thing in this world you value above all others. The largest bone in his body is broken and he hurts...truly hurts...for the first time in his young life.

While this shock to the system for my wife and I came with an abrupt and unwelcome force, I never would have expected how Scout would respond. Aside from his obvious disdain for nurses, a skill he most certainly has honed since his first week protesting the providers of Kiev's Isida Hospital, the kid is just a trooper. Nothing phases him. From the day we brought him back home in the cumbersome cast (which completely limits his mobility by not only immobilizing his left leg, but also riding almost up to his chest and halfway down his right leg) he's apparently been of the mindset, "It's cool. Just keep me engaged." And we have. Moving him around, reading with him, playing with fire truck after fire truck...and he's happy.

For the record, when I say that "We've kept him engaged," Wendy Lu is by and large that 'we'. Thanks to this pesky ongoing need for currency in exchange for goods & services, I'm out of the house for 10 hours a day during the week. But no surprises here on her part, as she's proven time and again that the mantle of 'Mother' is not just given, but earned each and every day.

If it were me laid up in that cast for weeks on end...well, let's just say that I would not be pleasant to be around. Waking a wolverine would be wiser than spending any time at all around me when I'm in a foul mood. And yet, my son is positively perky despite his fiberglass jailer. There's a lesson in that for me.

In just a few short weeks, Scout will be freed of his anchor, free to forget this time as he grows bigger, faster and stronger. Never remembering just how brave he was and how he taught his father so much at such a young age.

I'll never forget.

i used to fly like peter pan.