I’m probably an average parent who does average parent stuff.  Like noticing small actions or personality traits displayed by my 13 week old sons and then projecting those to speculate exactly what they’ll be like as adults.

I think most parents of newborns do this.  And it’s probably because when you have kids that are only a few months old, they’re kind of…boring.  More or less, they’re just rocks that drool.  They’re not giving you much to work with, so why not take the smallest thing they might do and blow it completely out of proportion?

Over the past few days, Charles has been incredibly cranky, so my wife thought he might have started teething.  When she called the doctor, he said that if she couldn’t feel any nubs poking though the gums, then he wasn’t teething.  My wife got off the phone, walked over to Charles and felt his gums.  Then she looked at me and proclaimed, “He’s not teething.  He’s just an asshole.”

And there you have it.  We’ve already got one of these kids nailed.  Five days of fussiness has sealed Charles’s fate.

But the news isn’t all bad for Charles.  Because he has the ability to focus for a full two minutes on an educational video displayed on my wife’s iPad, we’re convinced that he’s got an unmatched IQ.  He could very well be a mix of Einstein, Hawking and Jobs, solving the world’s economic issues and racial unrest while developing a much more reliable Flux Capacitor for efficient time travel that won’t leave us having to go back to 1885 just to make sure we’re not erased from existence.  If only he wasn’t… an asshole.

Figuring out who he’ll be in the future required I combine both his aptitude for brilliance and the fact that he’s a douchebag. Here are the results.

Charles is going to become Dr. Hathaway from the classic 1985 film, Real Genius.  I’d love for him to be Chris Knight, as played by Val Kilmer, but wouldn’t we all.  It could be worse.  Hathaway had a well-paid gig, was a snappy dresser and wielded a good deal of power until his downfall.  Charles will simply have to not underestimate a scrappy bunch of madcap science nerds in the future to avoid total calamity.

Arthur, by comparison, has been having a great few days.  This seems to be his “Camelot” week.  Very little crying.  Content to hang out in his swing watching the world, or in most cases, the dog go by.  He’s a charming, careless dreamer.  Hey!  Maybe HE’S Chris Knight from Real Genius!

But then I realized that Arthur doesn’t lock in to his learning video as well, so he might not be a genius.  Just as well.  My boys shouldn’t be each other’s foil.  So, we’ve got a charming careless dreamer with marginal smarts.  This makes future Charles…

Could be a lot worse.  He’s the only President that didn’t age horribly while holding office.  We all want our kids to be happy, and this guy was always smiling, even during Katrina.

So there you have it.  These are the people my children are destined to become after studying them for the past few days.  Of course, that’s just based off of this week.  Next week things could change, and I’m willing to pigeonhole them into becoming entirely different people.  If it’s a good week, I might decide they’ll become this guy.

Of course, it’s just as likely they do things that force me to peg them differently.

There are so many possibilities when you’re this bored.