Toren can walk! I mentioned a few posts back that he was walking between Debi and I. Now, he’s just simply walking:
The video above shows a bunch of his moves. He walks, sits, stands, crawls, cruises, bends over to pick stuff up, etc. He’s getting mobile!!!
Apparently he walks quite a bit at daycare by himself, which makes sense since no one there will hold his hand while he walks, which we’ve been doing for months. One day this past week Debi and I were in the kitchen preparing breakfast while Toren played with the door of the dishwasher. I stepped out of the kitchen for just a second, and when I came back, he had walked over to the refrigerator to play with his alphabet magnets. As I walked back into the kitchen and saw him at the refrigerator instead of where I left him, by the dishwasher, he looked up at me and smiled.
So, he’s still in the “Are you proud of me for walking?” stage, but he’s now walking pretty well. He still stumbles and falls on occasion, but he can pick himself right back up and try again. He still, occasionally, wants to hold one of our hands, but he’s doing that less and less.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been talking with Leonora LaPeter Anton at the St. Petersburg Times about the pill mill/pain management center that was behind my house. Her story hit the paper today: Pill mill’s demise brings relief to neighbors. Here’s the picture from that story:
me in the St. Petersburg Times
Apparently my picture is in the print edition as well.
Oh, and Channel 8 here locally interviewed me for a brief story as well that aired on the 24th.
I’ve had several people jokingly tell me I’m famous from all the attention this has been getting. I blew it off as I highly doubted anyone would really think of me as famous. Friday kind of drove home how widespread the attention has been. I was walking Toren over to a nearby Chinese restaurant to pick up some take out food for dinner. As I was leaving the restaurant, a car pulled up to a stop sign as we were crossing the street. The driver was probably in his late 60s. He rolled down his window and said, “Hey, are you the guy from TV?” Stunned, I sputtered out, “Yeah, I guess.” He then said, “That is so awesome! I’m so happy you did what you did. I live around here and hated that place. I’m so glad to see they’re gone. Thank you! Oh, and your son is really adorable.” He then drove off.
I’ve had a number of people from work mention they saw the news coverage and even had a nurse at the ENT place where I get my allergy shots thank me for standing up to this place. Apparently people do watch the news!
Despite the attention, I’m reminded of a line from one of my favorite documentaries, The UP Series, which is a multi-part documentary that tracks the lives of 10 or so British kids, starting when they were 7 in 1964, all the way through today. In that series, one of the people who is tracked becomes a college professor. And in one of the later episodes, he says, “My goal in life is to be more famous for my research than for being in this film.” That’s exactly how I feel about this pain management clinic. Yes, I’m glad it was shut down, but I never wanted that to be my claim to fame. Hopefully my research will eventually get more press than this.
