Yes, that’s my boy on the cover. And yes, I have given a lot of thought to this. I’ve thought about the Craig DeMarcos of the world, who once joked that the only way to get on the cover of the Arcadia News is to be a kid. Two months later we put the prince of Arcadia, his wife and two pooches on the cover. Here’s the thing—children move newspapers just like great restaurants bring in lots of diners—it’s all in the packaging, baby. Plus, I don’t know if my boy is going to get much cuter than this, and since I’m going to limit him to one cover appearance in his lifetime, we might as well cash in on it now.

Plus, the Bruns boy on the cover will be one whole year old about the time you read this. And if you’ve read my column for the past year, you know he hasn’t exactly been a supermodel since the stork dropped him off (a little food, a little water and then we all sit around and admire his beauty). No, we’ve come to know him as C-man around our house, which is short for Carter-man sometimes, but it can also mean Colic-man.

Colic is an evil disease created by terrorists who hate our freedom. The C-man currently takes Prevacid for his severe gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD): he took twice the amount that a 200-pound man would need to ingest if he were suffering from GERD, up until two months ago—now he’s whittled his Prevacid dependence down to a more manageable single adult dosage.

When you’re a baby with reflux, there is nothing you can do to help your parents pinpoint your pain. Except scream—you can totally scream for 6-8 hours a day, if you are so inclined. Sure, you’re only awake for 6 to 8 hours a day, so it’s probably not the best use of your time, but what else is there to do anyway? Hell, let ‘er rip.

“When does the screaming stop?” we hollered at the doctor over our shrieking two-week old.

“Every baby is different!” yelled the gastroenterologist at Phoenix Children’s Hospital, “he might be fine in a few weeks or it may take longer!”

Turns out, the magic number for the C-man is about 48. Weeks. 48 weeks of battleship-steel piercing screams.

So, really, congratulations little guy for making it a year! For a while, it looked like you might get stamped out like polio or something—it was sketchy at times. Someone screaming in your face for a couple thousand hours makes you think things you normally wouldn’t.

I’ve been thinking of getting the C-man some kind of exotic animal for his first birthday, and carry on the tradition each year. Creating a sort of savage bio-system in the backyard that he’ll learn to care for along the way. Kicking off the collection with an aardvark works well, so we can teach the boy some responsibility and take care of the ant problem in the backyard at the same time. This way, we can watch aardvarks cruise the yard and annihilate the ant population, all from the comfort of the living room, behind the 1/4” thick safety-tempered glass.

Surely the aardvarks will get bored and start to reproduce, which introduces the likelihood that we will have to institute some kind of animal control system. Maybe we’ll just ramp up and introduce wolverines to the system for his second birthday. A cornucopia of venomous snakes for the third birthday, flesh-eating gorillas for the fourth; et cetera. It’ll be something we can build together: our own (illegal) wildlife park in Arcadia.

Happy birthday little buddy—here’s your aardvark.