Sophia has finally hit the age where everything is of great importance to her. Holidays have become huge events with weeks of anticipation beforehand. As of today, November 18th, she has Christmas fever and is greatly anticipating the arrival of Santa.

She did however have a great time for Halloween. I made sure to teach her how to be a polite little ladybug (Phoebe was a pirate and as such did not need to show the same level of decorum as a dainty ladybug). Here’s Phoebe perfecting her AAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!! replete with a clenched fist swinging in front of her chest to punctuate the exclamation.

In the run up to the actual day of Halloween we were able to participate in one of the most crowded events I’ve ever witnessed. The fire department of our nearby town has a complete miniature town where sponsors were able to erect Hobbit sized businesses so curious young citizens could practice obeying traffic laws in power wheels with an entire town sized to their own dimensions. This town is called safety town.

Safety town opens to the public to allow trick or treaters to trick or treat in safety… or at least in a crowded miasma of more corporate sponsored candy giving in the hopes that we might sign up for junk mail on a whim. I am not opposed to the practice as it was a pretty good time. The wait was about an hour but the fine gentlemen of our local police and fire departments were doing their organizations a fine service by chatting with the little ones and even letting them climb on the fire trucks and figure out how to ring the bells on the front bumpers of the fire trucks (Sophia figured out how to ring the bell and finally had to be asked to quit because it was too loud).

I have to report a devastating loss at safety town. I lost one of Phoebe’s blankets while we were there. If you were not aware each of my children has some attachment to a blanket. Sophia is not as attached as Phoebe is but even Sophia becomes concerned if her blanket is not with her at night. Phoebe however, is very very attached to the feel of her blankets.

She slowly finds a “corner” and holds it in one of her hands as she rests her thumb in her mouth and rubs either her cheek or her nose with the corner. While at safety town I had draped her blanket over my shoulder. In the commotion of taking 1 photograph (it was pretty dark by then so I only got 1) and shuffling our children around I dropped the blanket and didn’t realize I had dropped it for quite a while. Sadly her blanket was gone. It has been replaced by other blankets and happily Phoebe is able to swap them out… provided the blanket has a corner.

The following week Halloween actually arrived and we carved pumpkins. I then took the little ones out to go around the block and trick or treat. They did very well. They were polite (except for Phoebe who was able to announce the she was a PIRATE!! and yell AAAAAARRRRRRR after saying trick or treat at nearly every house. I believe this is actually polite for a pirate to announce themselves before shouting AAAARRRRRR). They got plenty of candy and they both discovered a love of Chocolate.

Tags: family,Halloween,pictures
Categories: BJ, Weekly Family Update
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As you may have noticed there was only a single update to our family site in the month of October. This is really sad since we actually filled up every weekend with some sort of activity. Admittedly we had some downtime in the middle of the month due to my bringing H1N1 home and spreading it around after our trip to the State Fair.

Heather is working on a catch up post to fill in the October gap. I could lay blame on Heather as she has read EVERY SINGLE book in the Harry Potter series during the month of October… but I can’t do that without also laying the blame on myself. Sickness, school, and work have kept me busy. I’ll also admit that I’ve been a little preoccupied due to the release of Forza Motorsport 3.

Other items of note in the month of October. My youngest sister turned 18 and my mother celebrated the 24th anniversary of her 29th birthday. After we catch up we still have a lot of things to cover, like:

• Writing letters to Santa
• A visit from the Browns
• Our usable garage
• Why I’m so awesome at driving cars in a videogame
• The marshmellow test, and many other things

Tags: family,fun,games
Categories: BJ, BJ's Life
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Phoebe is 2 years old now. She is changing rapidly. Words, sentences, questions, phrases, and the ever present squeal still endlessly flow from her little mouth. Any new word or phrase she experiences will inevitably be repeated until she is satisfied that she can recreate it. Sometimes the process is labored for her but in the end she ends up saying something.

She’s a joy to be around. It’s the exultant squeal of delight from Phoebe that makes me love coming home after a day at work. I’ll let Heather post about her Birthday party since her perspective of the day was different than mine (I spent most of my time making BBQ chicken). I just wanted to wish Phoebe a happy birthday.

Tags: birthday,family
Categories: Phoebe
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There’s an indoor hamster habitrail for children in Lewsiville called going bonker. It’s a wonderous place that is seemingly infinitely fun for children while smelling like feet. I’m not sure I can convey the enormity of the multi-tiered play area without pictures.

Cousins joined us a couple of weeks ago while they were in town. I joined the family during lunch to partake of the odors of childhood ecstacy… which as I had mentioned previously smell like feet. Yes, I did crawl around in there. Sophia got stuck once and began to cry so I had to fly through the winding snarl of padded plastic like a bumbling overweight gorilla. Thankfully there are no pictures of this incident.

Tags: family,going bonkers,portly primates
Categories: BJ, Weekly Family Update
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I’ve had an account at Last.fm for more than 3 years now.

Almost all the music I listen to is tracked at last.fm. You can see recent songs that I’ve listened to in the sidebar.

The problem is that all music listened to on our home theater computer is also tracked by last.fm. One of last.fm’s features is the ability to listen to a stream of music that reflects the listeners musical taste. So Celtic Black Metal (death metal with a tin whistle) then backyardigans… maybe some underground hip-hop that is immediately followed by a Dora the Explorer song. From Raffi to death metal, my last.fm account is a reflection of my family and how we listen to music.

This opt in broadcasting of our personal lives gives everyone an opportunity to see aspects of people that would normally be hidden. Take every usenet post, blog post, forum post, twitter, song, purchase, picture, or video that’s been taken of my life and you would quickly find more information about me than is contained in a biography of a famous person from even 2 decades ago. None of this information is particularly useful or interesting, but it does make me wonder how my daughters’ lives will look through this profusion of information. They both have upwards of 1000 pictures already. When they are old enough to begin to contribute and shape their own exposure to the outside world, how much more will be captured?

Tags: family,information
Categories: BJ, Philosophy etc
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I know this is a little late. I just wanted to wish my wife a wonderful late birthday. I bought her a car. Seriously.

2006 Honda Pilot.

It replaces her 1991 Honda Accord.

There are so many things that we haven’t posted in the last month that it’s going to take a while for us to catch up.

I just did a full reinstall on my main server/workstation in the office so I won’t have any new photos up until Lightroom, Photoshop, and Noise Ninja get installed.

Please be patient and we’ll have some wonderful stories to tell.

You also might want to tell Heather to post here instead of Facebook.

Tags: birthday,family,new car
Categories: BJ
1 Comment »

I’ve finally gone through the photos from the last 3 weeks. They’re in the process of being uploaded right now.

We have a few posts that we need to make. We’ve been falling behind. I blame facebook and Heather’s famous 5 page e-mails. Heather will blame Warhammer and laziness. We will meet in the middle and blame the government and large corporations. Hugs and kisses all around.

Tags: family,laziness,photos
Categories: BJ
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The big announcement for the week is that Phoebe is walking! BJ and I worked with her a little bit with her walking in between us to gain confidence and she is doing wonderfully. By the end of the week she was standing up on her own, no furniture or anything for support and then will take a few steps. She has taken to wanting to climb too. She gets up and down from the girls’ little wooden rocking chair and attempts to climb from the bath.

Phoebe has learned to give and take things from someone’s hand. She is so funny when we are doing it with a toy because she is so forceful and quick when she puts it in your hand. I think she thinks it is more a game than me simply handing her something.

The girls and I spent another afternoon in the pool. I was pregnant last summer and only swam once (hmmm, maybe twice) so I think I am making up for it this summer with swimming every week. Sophia sure doesn’t mind.

As BJ already put in a previous post—Sophia got locked in the van and the fire department was called. I have never locked my kids in the car before and go figure it was in a car I am not used to driving. I will say no more on it other than I was terribly embarrassed and felt so stupid, even though one of the EMT’s assured me it was their second call like this that day.

I attempted to cut Sophia’s bangs this week. I see no sense in driving to a hair place (with the way gas prices are) to pay 15 bucks or whatever for them to cut only bangs on this child! I was able to cut them once before and they turned out okay. Not so this time. She was moving too much and the first cut was too short. Well of course I had to base all my other cuts off that first one for it to look even remotely even. All of it being too short. I only told my closest friends the truth but if anyone has asked at church or random places I have blamed it on Sophia getting into the scissors and me fixing it. BJ and I agree we are growing her hair all out and will clip her front hair back.

We took Sophia to see the new Pixar movie Wall E. She did okay for about half the movie and then got squirmy. It was an amazing movie–Pixar can do no wrong! If you haven’t seen it yet–take kleenex! I can’t wait to have it on DVD.

BJ finds all sorts of random crap on the web and on YouTube. He chose to show me a clip in particular from YouTube one night. Sophia was still up and seeing me sitting next to daddy watching something on the laptop was too tempting for her. She joined us and watched the video clip as well. It was okay for her to watch–it is an animation with no cussing. It is called Charlie the Unicorn. OMG! This child will NOT stop asking to “watch Charlie.” This thing is like 3 minutes long but she has fallen in love with it. We discovered there was a second video with bananas and she loves that one just as much. She asks for it every day and asks to watch it again and again after just having seen it. It is hilarious and totally worth checking out on YouTube (BJ Note: I’ll embed it in another post).

Sophia, my little shadow, pointed out something to her daddy one day this week. She was jumping on our bed and looked over on his side of the floor and saw his big pile of dirty clothes. She said “oh no a mess! Clean clothes, pick up.” I laughed and told her they were daddy’s and HE would need to pick them up. I told her she should tell him that. She bounced off the bed and ran into where BJ was in the living room and yelled “Clean up clothes daddy!” I told BJ, when he came into the room being led by Sophia holding his hand, that she pointed it out first and that if a 2 year old can see they need picking up maybe he should learn from her example.

One morning I was out back with Sophia while she jumped on her trampoline. I heard this noise coming from our drain that comes off the roof and leads down to the ground. It sounded like something was falling inside and I was hearing a few bangs and scraping sounds and then a few more bangs. I was thoroughly freaking out not knowing what was coming out of the drain and not wanting to find out. Sophia did not notice a thing so I took advantage of her ignorance and went inside to watch her from the kitchen. She kept asking me to come outside and I told her it was too hot. I’m so lame. She eventually came inside and hours later I got up the courage to look around the drain out back to see if anything had come out. I was completely speechless when I saw what was sitting less than a foot away from the drain opening—-a baby bunny maybe the size of a lemon. I ran inside to get BJ and he of course took pictures. After much discussion (and putting my desire aside to adopt this cute baby bunny who I was sure had no mommy now) we decided to give it one day to see if the mama would come get it. Considering we don’t know how the ‘wild rabbit’ world works and maybe the mama left there until she could come back. BJ called it our “gutter bunny”. We truly enjoyed checking up on it all of the rest of that day and were sad to see it gone the next day.

Tags: family,Heather,Weekly Family Update,youtube
Categories: Heather, Weekly Family Update
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