It's cold, icy and slippery. So
av and I got out of the house for a couple hours by engaging in one of our (okay, his) favorite activities -- hitting up local the Barnes & Noble "Thomas the Tank Engine" table for him to play on with the other kids. It's an interesting observation in parenting when we can see how the kids interact, but moreso how the parents interact in potential conflict management.
We had a good time. We also stopped at Old Navy to get sweatpants. (2 for $10. Not bad.) But that's not the point of the story.
Nope. When I was buckling him back into his car seat for the trip back home, I did my usually count-off of his arms, making sure they're both there. When I do this, I usually get #1 right, but I can never seem to come up with the next number. Usually it's "One arm, and... seven arms!" Or "One arm, and... 538,465 arms!" Av will often correct me and quickly identify that he has
two arms. So smart...
Anyway, today I decided to switch things up. "One arm, and...
zero arms!" He corrected me, saying that he had two arms. But then he became contemplative and
threw out an idea...
"What if this one is
zero arms and this one is
one arm?"
Which made me proud in a nerd sort of way. As any of us who belong to the nerd club can tell you, the proper way to count is
not 1, 2, 3, 4, etc... No -- we start with
zero. If you're dealing with network routers, your ports on a four-port card are usually 0, 1, 2 and 3. In many places on this planet (aside from North America), the ground floor of a building is floor 0. (Okay -- in some places in North America as well. The ground floor of buildings on the University of Maryland campus, for instance, are 0 floors.) What's the initial value of any integer in programming? Zero!
I was so proud. I love him. I love my young, nerd son.
Obligatory pondering: Lionel Richie was a true nerd, the song by the Commodores would have been
Zero, Once, Two Time a Lady.
days
