Category Archives: Kids

Early Snow

Child 1:

It’s snowing, it’s snowing, it’s snowing!

Child 2:

I wish there was more snow.

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New Home

Well, everything went pretty smoothly. We moved in a couple weeks ago to our new townhouse. 2 weeks ago we painted the kids rooms and let them air out. Anne’s is now a very pretty light purple color. Drew’s is a good solid blue. They both are very excited about having their own rooms. We also managed to get the tail end of the Pier-1 Kids closing sales and got some head/foot boards for the kids at over 90% off. Total score. Hopefully I’ll be able to put them together in the next couple weeks. Camille also convinced me to go to Ikea. Neither of us had ever been and, man, what a place. They certainly do not make it easy to exit! Thankfully they have a child care place so the kids were not utterly bored. It reminded us of the home store version of Wegmans.

Big Spring Update

Here is the run down for the past couple months:

  • 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.

2007: A New Beginning

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

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.

Odd Man Out

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I never realized how my child’s life could so powerfully bring up emotions and memories from my own childhood.

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Pinata Criminals

The next generation of world criminals just arrived in my neighbors yard. The kids were giggling away on the swings and such, and then I heard the first telltale THUMP.

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