The kids got an extra birthday surprise when the #snowpocalypse began. We got a total of about 22 inches of snow, for which they were very grateful. We stayed inside on Saturday to just enjoy some time playing games and resting.

With everything being closed and canceled, including church, we decided to go outside and have some fun. Sledding was a bit rough to start with in all the powder, but it got better quickly. Then I began the process of digging out the cars, and digging in one snow car. We shall see how long the plows leave it alone. The kids don’t know it yet, but I started carving out the inside of the snow car to make them a fort. School is canceled tomorrow so I need to do something with them.

Good news. The surgery is done and went very well. The tubes are in
place and everything looked great to the doctor. He said he drained a
lot of fluid out of Andrew’s left ear. Thanks much for all your
prayers. He was calm and composed the whole time. I’m thankful that
everything went so smoothly.

Thanks for your e-mails and praying for us. We appreciate all of you!

with love,

Camille, for all of us.

Please pray that the doctors will be able to successfully insert the tubes and that Drew will not experience any complications during or after the procedure. Pray that Andrew will not be frightened by all that is happening. He gets a very serious look on his face as I describe what will happen on Thursday. It is a quick turnaround (three days) from when we saw the ENT until the surgery, so I don’t feel like I have had a lot of time to prepare him and ease him into the prospect of the surgery. But I’ve explained that the doctors will help fix his ears so that he can hear better and speak more clearly. He seems to like that idea.

We are optimistic as the doctor was able to schedule us so quickly and everything literally fell into place. It really felt like God opened these doors for Andrew to be seen, evaluated and diagnosed within a week by multiple doctors and educators. We have been concerned with his language delay and are hopeful that this procedure will alleviate some of the difficulty he has had in speaking clearly.

Thanks for praying for us! We’ll keep you posted on how things turn out.

• one princess bed for $20 (original price $250)
• extra boxes $0
• one set of MrMcGroovy’s rivets $30
• no cuts from the boxcutter $major medical bill
• two ecstatic kids, priceless

• Anne graduated from Preschool today. She had two excellent teachers this year and is sad to be done. Makes me wonder if she will be like Jason in Foxtrot. She was very beautiful in the dress her Grandma got her.
• We have been house hunting and found what we hope will be our next accommodations. We put in an offer which was accepted, but contingent on the sellers closing on another house. It has been a while since we bought a house, but amazingly enough, I think the process is even longer in Maryland compared to NewYork.
• Anne got pneumonia today. Very sad. So she will be taking antibiotics for a little while. No clue where she got it from and we hope that no other kids get/got it.
• I started another blog revolving around my coding for the MMORPG I play. Knowing me, I will probably update that one more than this..
• We are getting plugged into our church. I have been periodically helping lead the home group we go to. We love our home group, and we have felt warmly accepted into the community. I managed to get out skiing once with some of them. I think I will miss winter down here.
• Work continues to go well. Just hired someone to work under me and in the process of hiring another (in case anyone wants to send me a resume). I am really enjoying the Zend Framework but unfortunately I had to drop the smarty templates as they were killing the speed. Our hardware has killer I/O but awful CPU speed.
• On my daily commute I have been reading a very good book: As For Me and My House. I wish I had read it while in grad school. I know it would have helped me better understand myself and the stresses I place upon Camille. Better late than never. It is written in a very poetic style (not my style) which took a bit to get used to. While at home, I have been reading Fit Bodies Fat Minds. Another highly recommended read. It is not poetic and more my reading style.
• We have not gone to the movies in a while now. I think the last movie we saw was Children of Men. We did rent some interesting films though. An Inconvenient Truth, Who Killed the Electric Car, and Thank You For Smoking. They raise interesting questions, especially for a stats minded person like myself. The first 2 are more of the documentary type. The last one can get you thinking about how media and sophistry pervade and sway our culture.

So, hopefully Camille will post here soon to give everyone an update on some of the other important things going on in our lives.

We are now all settled in Maryland. I drove up to Ithaca and brought Camille and the kids back down at the end of October. I am so glad we are all together again. I’ll try to have Camille give a larger update about how things are soon.

We drove back up to Ithaca for Christmas and New Years. It was good to see my parents again, and all our NewLife friends. We managed to get some good fossil hunting in as well, as the temperatures were not ‘normal’. Anne and Drew are becoming good hunters, with Anne scoring a few trilobites herself at the Portland Point quarry.

Today, being MLKJ Day, I had the day off. Woohoo! Being in the DC area is great! It was a normal temperature for January 15th, 72F with a 50 percent chance for rain. So we made the best of it and went to the Chesapeake to hunt for Miocene fossils. We managed to score a small amount of fossilized shark and skate teeth. It was warm enough for me to put on my Tevas and walk around in the water to better hunt. Pretty fun! Plus, having Drew periodically say, “Shark eat me” was great.

Sometimes Anne hangs out with a neighbor friend whose mom is a big-hearted lover of all living things. So one day as Anne and her friend were taking a look at a large ant in our driveway, the mom explains how the ant fits into the whole scheme of life–Andrew runs up stomps on the bug and shouts “Dead!”

Bad karma or just a future as an exterminator?

He likes to take it to bed with him, take it to the car, roll it while he’s walking around. And woe unto the unfortunate soul who comes between Drew and his sushi mat. There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Strange kid. Must have gotten that from his dad.