Nick part#1

My son Nick was born when I was only 19 1/2. It was really awesome. Jen and I were really excited and very nervous. We just wanted a healthy baby and we were planning on doing our best and loving him like crazy. We were very, very happy. He was the perfect baby. He slept through the night at one month old.

He has been a gift to us. Never got into trouble. He was always a good kid. He always got really good grades. The worse thing he ever did was when he set off a model rocket engine in his room. He had a giant glass jar and he thought it would just spin in the jar. It built up too much pressure and busted the bottom out. We had just finished having lunch on a Sunday afternoon and Nick went to his room like he always did. That's when it happened. We heard glass break followed by those words that every parent dreads. "UH OH!" I went running into his room, asking if he was all right and trying to assess the situation at the same time. I really couldn't see too much. His whole room was filled with smoke! Wall to wall and floor to ceiling. He got his window open and I grabbed his chinchilla and hamster cages. I opened every window in the place. I got every fan we had and ran them on high. Nick was okay. We didn't know that a small class C rocket would put out quite so much smoke.
He would also build all kinds of things. He still does. He would see something and try to replicate it. When he was 4 or 5, he saw a laser one some show and He pulled the wiring out of an old guitar I had built. I asked him why he ripped out the wiring. He told me that he really need the wires and I was home to take him to the store. We used to go to the "trash truck" store a lot. That what called Home Depot. The backup alarms on the forklifts made him think of the trash truck.
When he was in kindergarten, he had a really bad kidney infection and was hospitalized for two weeks. We found out later that he didn't use the bathroom at school. He thought that if he did, he would miss out on riding the bikes. He has been fairly healthy every since, but that was a very scary time for us.