William is growing at such a rapid pace, becoming a little boy right before my eyes. He has picked up a bunch of vocabulary, seemingly on a daily basis. Some of it is only vaguely recognizable by anyone other than me, but William and I have an understanding. He says stuff, and points at stuff, and I can sometimes figure out what he’s trying to say.

The most recent one is “doctor.” He’s taken quite a liking to photo albums, and one in particular has a picture of him with the doctor who delivered him. He says “doctor” when we open the album. I’m not sure if he recognizes that the little bundle of cloth with a tiny pink face peeking out is actually him or not though.

As Jason mentioned, we went to the batting cages yesterday. I tried out his new bat, and while it’s a good bat, I think his old bat is better for me. I felt like I had better control over the ball with it, and I felt like I made more solid contact. As I aspire to be a contact hitter :) that’s more important to me than more distance. Anyway, while we were at the cages, a local radio station was on location, handing out helium balloons, so I got one for William and tied it around his wrist. He chased it a bit, but otherwise pretty much ignored it.

Oh, and I think it speaks volumes that over 3 million Canadians tuned in to see game 1 of the Stanley Cup Finals, but only 1 million Americans (and only 16,000 Tampa locals!) did. I don’t understand why the NHL feels this great desire to be accepted by the American public. Certainly there are American hockey hotbeds, but expansion to places like Tampa, Phoenix, Anaheim and San Jose clearly hasn’t caught on. I’d be willing to bet that more people tuned in to see the finals in Saskatoon (population slightly more than 200,000) than Tampa Bay. That’s probably the case if you count the people at the rink too. It’s all about following the money though, and even though Americans have demonstrated that they don’t care about hockey (and won’t spend money on it) the NHL continues to follow their collective noses South. While it’s certainly true that the current NHL cannot survive in places like Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Halifax and Quebec City, to me, that’s an indication of something severely wrong with the league. When large numbers of NHL players grew up in towns that were 500kms+ from the nearest NHL city, something isn’t right. [Edit - Erin’s put up some more current pictures on William’s site]

Simpson’s quote of the day: “On this cable system we receive over one million channels from the furthest reaches of the galaxy.” - Kodos (or was it Kang?)