At about this time last year, I went to bed, kissed my wife good night, and wished her a happy due date. Five minutes later, her water broke.

Our little boy Mathias turns one today.

My first father’s day was pleasant and relatively low-key. Lisa and Mathias were off visiting one of her friends in the morning while I worked on an application for one of the Carlson School’s international seminars. In the afternoon we wandered down to Lake Calhoun for lunch and ice cream at the Tin Fish, which provided decent food at the cost of an unreasonable wait. Mathias, despite missing his afternoon nap, remained chipper for most of the afternoon, too, making it a nice day in general.

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Mathias has been going through some pretty big changes lately. After a couple of extremely long nights, his top two front teeth made their way through his gums last week, an event strangely timed with his new habit of flipping over in his crib. It’s great that he’s finally figured out how to turn onto his stomach without much effort, although for a few days it was a bit of a problem as he’d turn over, decide he didn’t want to be on his stomach, fail at getting back on his side, and subsequently flip the fuck out. He eventually learned to fall asleep on his tummy, though, and with that brought a new, and much welcomed habit: Sleeping through the night!

It’s difficult to state how great of a development sleeping through the night is… Both Lisa and I have benefited, although admittedly more Lisa than me.

I’m planning on dropping his bed in his crib this week. He’s close to standing on his own–he’s already pulled himself up on a few of his more sturdy toys–so it’s only a matter of time before he tries standing in his crib. If he managed to do that, it wouldn’t take much for him to flip himself over the side.

I don’t know what else to say, the little guy is amazing. It blows my mind that he’ll be one year old in a week!

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The next few weeks will be plenty busy. As of this week I’m back in school for the summer session, taking a class on corporate venturing. We’ll be heading down to Madison on the weekend of the fourth for a joint dedication ceremony with Dwight and Michele’s daughter, Nora, and also have a weekend date (for the opening of WALL-E) mixed in as well. That may not sound like much, but, you know, there’s a baby to take care of.

And with that, I still have some work to do on my seminar application, so this will have to be it for now. (Like with most things in life, I waited until the last minute to complete it. Deadline for submission is, uh, tomorrow.) More later.

You know the typical warm-fuzzy TV show or movie that features the little baby saying his first word? The first word, with lots of clarity around what it was and when it happened? Yeah, it doesn’t work that way. At least, it hasn’t worked that way with Mathias. He’s been quite proficient at pumping out the baby babble for some time now, including “da da da da” and “ma ma ma ma,” but assuming he knows what those sounds mean has always required a bit of a leap of faith on the part of Lisa and I.

As of today, there seems to be sufficient evidence that he has grasped “da da,” “ma ma” and a new one, “a da.” “A da,” which translates into adult-speak as “all done,” appears to count as his first multi-word statement as well. After weeks of “all done” from Lisa at the end of each of Mathias’ meals, Mathias has started dropping “a da” when he’s done eating.

Tonight I came home just a few minutes before Mathias was to go down for the night. Lisa, hearing me enter, asked Mathias “Do you want to see da da?” The response was clear and distinct, even from outside his room and down the hall: “DA DA!” And, true enough, he was looking for me as Lisa carried him out of his room.

Growing up, I never imagined myself as a parent. And now here I am, having little things like this melt my heart.

• Flickr set of first-hand photos from the tragedy up in Hugo

I wouldn’t call it a waste of time, but Cloverfield proved to be rather disappointing. Since I’ve been in a bullet-point mood lately, let’s break it down thusly:

• Acting: Okay.
• Big monster: Eh. (Spoiler.) Shoot out his fucking breathing sacks and get it over with already.
• Small monsters: Kinda scary at first, but cease to be as soon as you think “oh, they kind of look like crabs.” Mmmm, crabs.
• NYC hipster body count: High. (Spoiler.) It would have been nice of them to kill off Hud a bit earlier, though. Like at the beginning of the fucking movie.
• Gratuitous references to 9/11: Too many to count.
• Incidences of military personnel saying really cliché things: Numerous.
• Likeliness of monster taking a Godzilla-like place in American culture: Almost none, thank god. And if it does, I’m going to have to bust some fucking heads.
• J.J. Abrams: In serious need of a tire iron to the side of the skull before he tries to top himself. Who knows, if he suffers some in the process, maybe his art will get a bit better.

After watching Cloverfield, I find myself concerned that he’s going to screw up the new Star Trek movie, and I don’t even care about that franchise. Still, I’d have to rate Cloverfield a 5 out of 10, as it was moderately entertaining upon first viewing.

But what about a second viewing? I don’t even want to go there.

(I pretended today was Sunday. It sure felt like one.)

Number of sections consumed: 4 (out of 10)

Hours spent: 2.5

NYT Magazine opened (Y/N): N

Articles worthy of passing along:

• Chinese Are Left to Ask Why Schools Crumbled - About all the schools that fell, while neighboring buildings remained standing.
• Rendering Justice, With One Eye on Re-election - Short story on the peculiar American habit of electing judges, with a focus on a particularly underhanded campaign in Wisconsin.
• A Conflict’s Buffer Zone: Rocks, and Inches - A border standoff between the small African countries of Eritrea and Djibouti has soldiers from both sides sitting inches away from each other.
• Senate Race in Minnesota Shows Power of Bloggers
• Opinion: Misreading the Arab Media - Why the U.S. government should be working to engage the Arab media.

Well, this is a severely dated subject now, but I wanted to mention that MinneBar was really impressive this year. My session-fu may have been a bit off with a couple of my session selections, but I did learn plenty, and met some cool folks along the way. Rich Hoeg’s session on Connectbeam and other enterprise social networking tools stood out, and will likely influence a few things I’ll be attempting at work over the coming year. The Lightning Round sessions were great, too: One of the sites highlighed, scribbls.com, is seriously causing me to consider getting a graphics tablet.

(I have a small group of links I picked up over the course of MinneBar over on del.icio.us.)

Challenges facing the Twin Cities tech community, both external and self-imposed, turned out to be a running theme of MinneBar this year. There were lots of questions and conversations about where the talent is going (NYC and SF, even though the opportunities may be better here), whether money is really only available on the coasts (no, but it seems that way), and what the area needs to do to get its entrepreneurial legs back (one option, covered in the State of the State session: stop being so damn timid). It’ll be interesting to see how the local industry is fairing the same time next year. While the view from my place of employment may not be as dim as it is with some other companies in the area, the challenges mentioned of finding quality talent are exceedingly familiar.

Anyway, it was a great time. I’m glad I attended, and look forward to next year.

As is probably quite obvious, I haven’t really been in the mood for writing as of late. To be fair, the mix is roughly 40% apathy, 60% preoccupation.

Lisa’s first Mother’s Day was spent in Madison. Not an optimal time for her to visit, but between MinneBar on the 10th, a weird work event for me on the 12th, and a bunch of time for her working online the following week, it was clear we wouldn’t be able to see each other much until this weekend anyway. As such, we decided to defer Mother’s Day to some undefined future date, and just let the weekend pass.

I made the most of my open Sunday. Instead of relaxing–which probably been the best thing for me to do considering I don’t get much down time these days–I painted our bedroom and engaged in a marathon 16-hour spring cleaning session. When done, the air conditioners were in, the office was walkable for the first time in months, my closet had regained its organizational logic.

This weekend was a bit more laid back. Aside from the graduation party in St. Paul, it was mostly made up of playing with the baby, hitting some rummage sales in Richfield (an endeavor alternately bargain-filled and scary), and, of course, more cleaning.

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Also, I went for my first legitimate walk in months this evening. Up next weekend: Get the bikes out.

• A guide to today’s primaries in North Carolina and Indiana, including a link to Keith Olberman’s excellent dissection of Hillary Clinton’s metrics for success.  (Via Stephen Hero’s Twitter stream.)

If you’re looking for 30 minutes of amusement but have two hours to spend, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story may be just the movie for you. I’d give it the arguably-generous rating of 6/10 only because when Walk Hard is on, it can be brilliant. An early Sun Records parody sticks out in particular, but it’s a high bar the movie only reaches a few more times over its, uh, 120 minutes.