Stories to embarrass Aiden... 2: fewer pain sensors

I had been talking up our trip to California for months, getting the boys all excited about going to the beach, going to Legoland, playing outside in the sunshine. The weather in Seoul was still bordering on winter and the kids where itching to hit the playground.

So they suffered through the long flight from Seoul to Tokyo and then Tokyo to LA. We rested in LA for a few hours then commenced our 6 hour drive to the Bay Area. We arrived to: RAIN.

Then we had a few hectic days of greeting friends and getting the kids measured for tuxes and other wedding preparations. All this time I kept promising them: “The sun will come out soon and we’ll go to the playground! This is California, after all.” Still more RAIN.

By this time, the kids were going nuts, dragged from one “let’s meet mommy and daddy’s old friends” meal to another. Finally, the sun came out for a few hours and we sprinted to the playground.

Aiden was like the tazmanian devil, throwing himself down slides and leaping off jungle gyms. He’s usually a pretty mellow kid, as 5-year-olds go, but he was on fire. It was like he had spent the last month in solitary confinement. One father of a toddler asked me, “uhh... is he always like this?”

One serious (and, I think, frightened) mommy’s comment: “I think that perhaps he has fewer pain sensors than most people.”