Another 5:30 morning

I don't know why, but Nathan's woken up at 5:30 three times this week. He thinks it's great, because he then has time to play on the computer before school. I had been trying to wake up that early myself - but I certainly don't do it naturally like he does. If he continues to make a habit out of this, I'm going to start taking him to before school care so I can *gulp* go to the gym before work.

Nathan's had a cough for over 2 weeks now. No fever. At first is was just a dry cough that responded to OTC meds. But last Friday it turned 'wet' and he sounded congested, so we went to the doctor. She said it was allergies since he wasn't running a fever, and gave us sudafed to take for 3 days, then claritin for the next month or so. I'm thinking it's the wrong diagonis - the sudefed helps, claritin doesn't do diddly. I usually don't pay attention to medical hysteria, but with the H1N1, and a friend's 12 year old son has whooping cough that has morphed into something much worse, I'm totally willing to camp out at the doctor's office if that's what it takes to knock this out.

The Cub Scouts marched in the Liberty County Veteran's day parade last Saturday. A reporter from the local paper wanted to interview one of the older boys about what it means to honors veterans. Nathan was asked, but once we explained that veterans were soldiers like his daddy, he started crying and moved to behind some of the parked cars so other people wouldn't see him cry. Not massive wailing or sobs, just a few tears and lots of snot. It took about 10 minutes for him to pull himself together. We had another episode on Sunday night. He was fine when he went upstairs to take a shower, but when he came down, he was in the withdrawn, "I-don't-want-to-talk-about-it" mood. Haven't had any problems since.

We've skyped almost every day with Eric. He's been getting up at 3:30 am his time, which makes it 7:30 p.m. our time. Nathan becomes a complete goofball when he's using the video cam, trying to turn on every video effect and moving the camera around. Which only freezes the video. Goober.

Eric looks good. He goes to bed around 8 his time. The worst hours for soldiers is after work when they have nothing to do and they're bored. The bitchy, petty stuff comes out then. He says there's only so much card games he can take, and he doesn't want to get caught up in stupid drama, so he'd rather go to bed early. At least with his early wake up time, he can talk to us, and then get some good solo rehearsal time in.

Now he just needs to come up with some Christmas rock and rock songs.