My son turned 4 today...

Hard to believe that about this time four years ago I was laying in the hospital bed my (now ex-) wife had temporarily vacated and holding my newborn son and giving him his first taste of hockey as the Habs and the Devils skated to a 1-1 tie.

In four short years he's gone from not being able to sit up to not being able to sit still. Oh baby, does time fly by.

Last night before bed he was playing in his room and working on his latest "invention". I walked into his bedroom to tell him it was time to get ready for bed and I nearly tripped over a contraption connected by shoe lace and a belt and two Fisher Price buildings.

"Whoa, what is this?" I asked Collin as I regained my balance.
"It's the Hydromatic Looker 3000!" Collin answered without hesitation.
"Sounds interesting Collin... but what does it do?" This I had to hear.
"It looks for things you lost!" Collin responded in a tone that implied I should have already known the function of this machine just by the name. And in hindsight a Hydromatic Looker does seem pretty self explanatory.

Why would he invent such a machine? Flashback two hours prior, and Collin was playing with my video camera. In the process of filming a documentary on how stuffed animals won't move without assistance, he misplaced the lens cap to my camera.

After he and I had a short discussion about how important it is to take care of things you borrow from other people, and unable to remember where he put the lens cap, he decided he would let science work on his behalf apparently.

I thought I was a smart kid at his age because I could read and operate an Atari 2600. My boy reads, laughed when I tried showing him an Atari 2600 game, sends e-mail on our Nintendo Wii, and now apparently is dabbling in simple machines.

Did the "Hydromatic Looker 3000" find my lens cap? Not directly. I told Collin to dismantle his creation and put everything back where it goes. While putting the pieces of his hard work back in drawers and his closet he ended up finding my lens cap. I love how things like that work out.

When I laid him down for bed tonight and bent over to kiss him good night, he says, "shhhhhh, do you hear that? My brain is growing!"

It sure is, buddy. And your brain has many years of growing still ahead of it. I'm looking forward to being a part of every moment of it.