Taking it Easy

From Family Stuff

I’ve been taking a break from work since Monday last week, but it’s off to work again for me next week. These two weeks have gone by far too quickly.

The goal has been to take it easy and relieve some of the stress work was inflicting on me. I’ve had a good time hanging out with Rochelle and Sophie during the day (driving them crazy) and I have felt a little less stressed out. My lower stress levels have helped me feel a little better prepared to meet the challenges of parenting, and I think everyone has benefited a little from having me around more (or, at least, I’d like to think so).

Sophie has been getting cuter and cuter, and Micah is growing and learning every day. We haven’t done anything terribly exciting, but that’s the point of taking a break, right?

We did find a cool Lego store not far from where we live, and we took Sophie out there last week and we intend to take Micah soon. We’ll probably have pictures of that for next month.

Oh, and we have the kids’ Halloween costumes pretty much done. Sophie’s can be seen in our web album, but Micah’s is a surprise for next month.

Don’t forget to check both our Family Web Album and our YouTube Page. I’m currently uploading the last of five new videos and there are 19 new photos (starting with this one). At the YouTube channel, just click on the Uploads tab (between All and Favorites) and check out the top five videos in the list.

How the Kids Are

Micah

Micah news… What to say? We’ve been working on his lying. It turns out he lies to us a lot. We’ve always suspected it, and we’ve been aware of several (if not most) of the lies, but the problem began to become chronic. So, I had a definitive talk with him touching on: Satan is the father of all lies, even small lies can turn into big problems, and we need to know the truth because parents and teachers can’t help him if we are supplied with false information about his state of health or how an accident occurred (the whole thing started when he lied to me about how many days it had been since his last bowel movement – it had been long enough ago that he had convinced himself that his body magically no longer had the need to poop).

The talk seemed to go well, and I gave him a chance to come clean on any lies he had been perpetuating (the talk took place in the bathroom where I had him sitting on the toilet and, eventually, he pooped). Since the talk, I have noticed an effort to be more honest with us, but it’s a small effort.

It turns out that many of his lies are not intentional attempts at masking the truth, but are in fact the result of his complete lack of ability to portray sequential events even close to the way they actually happened. I think this ability was damaged as a result of his unbridled use of invented “facts” to support his cases in the past (I believe many lawyers and politicians suffer from a similar cognitive anomaly). We’re working on it, but it’s been rough.

I have seen some improvement over the last week, and I believe there is plenty of hope for him.

On a more positive note, Micah and I have begun reading through a book you may have heard of: “The Dangerous Book for Boys.” It’s full of fun stories, information, ideas, games and miscellaneous boy stuff. Some of the material is definitely targeted at boys a little older than Micah, but it won’t hurt to look through it now and let him have a solo go at the book when he’s older.

Sophie

Sophie’s big thing has been picky eating. The only things she’ll readily eat could be counted on your fingers. Late in September, though, I made a discovery that might help ensure she eats more rounded meals.

We’ve known for a while that she loves ketchup enough to try almost anything with it, but we had only used it for things like eggs and a few vegetables in the past. Most of the time we would squirt some on her plate and let her dunk her food in the ketchup.

This time I squirted a little on her plate and pretended to dunk some of her food in it. Then, I slipped the food in her mouth and she quickly devoured it. I did this with stuffing (which she was refusing to try) and green beans (which she always detests). Soon, over half of her dinner was gone and we hadn’t even touched the ketchup.

She was enjoying the food so much, that I just had to break the news to her. “You know, Sophie, I haven’t actually put ketchup on any of your food.” I saw her brow furl while she contemplated the meaning of what I told her, but it didn’t slow her down any.

Eventually she decided to eat just the ketchup with her fork, at which point she stopped eating the rest of her food. By then she had eaten plenty of dinner though, so we just watched and smiled.

The next night after dinner she turned to me and said, “I need a bath.” So, she got one.

Also, she finally settled on what to call her pacifier. For a long time she would just point and say, “peeeeeeeees.” Now, it’s: “Bau-bau.”

Most recently (just yesterday, in fact), she got tired of us denying her the use of her “bau-bau” during waking hours. Generally, if she is laying down getting ready to fall asleep, and she asks for it, we’ll give it to her. However, she often asks for it outside of sleeping time, and we say no (or ask her if she wants to take a nap – she generally says no to the nap).

Yesterday she started doing a horrible fake cry (even she can’t keep a straight face or keep from half smiling) and whining with the cries, “bau-bau.” It really sounds pretty sad, but it’s no Hollywood performance. She tried this three or four times throughout the day, and each time her performance was met with laughter from us – and no pacifier.

Finally, I can’t get off the subject of Sophie without telling you about her obsession with checking the mail and going to the playground.

She asks, frequently, to go check the mail. Starting at eight in the morning all the way until the mailman comes in the late afternoon, she asks, “mee-oo?”

Taking her to the playground is the most fun I can hope to have in a day. She runs around, asking for help into the swings (she likes the little kid style swings, but also loves to ride the big kid swing on her belly) and climbing around the other equipment. One of her favorite things to do is go down slides. Spiral slides are her favorite because the descent is slower and more controlled, but when she’s feeling adventurous she’ll have you wait to catch her at the bottom of a long straight one and she’ll zip down into your arms. She has so much fun, and she loves exploring.

Until Later

Thanks for reading and please feel free to leave a comment for us below if you enjoyed one of the stories or if you have any questions. Leaving comments is free, you don’t need to have an account or anything, and we’d love to hear from you!

From Family Stuff

Big News

From Happy Baby

Sophie’s not a little baby any more!

Actually, I’m afraid I have two items of less than happy news. First, it seems that I am unable to post on or as close to the fifteenth of the month as I would like (which is alright with everyone but me, I’m sure) so I’m going to have to simply keep with my original promise of posting at least once a month.

As for the second item of unfortunate news, I haven’t got much to report or post this month. We haven’t done anything interesting, we haven’t taken any photos, and there were no significant events to speak of.

Unless you consider winning a million dollars significant!

We didn’t, but somebody did. And we watched them. It wasn’t that exciting though.

There’s just one little update for a few of you who may have known, Rochelle is fine, they didn’t find anything terribly wrong with her. For those of you who didn’t know she was being checked out by medical professionals, it wasn’t a big deal and like I said: everything is fine.

How the Kids Are

Micah

Micah has been doing pretty well in the first grade. He’s got a pretty good teacher, and so far we haven’t had any major reports from her. In case you were wondering (because I know you’re dying to know), Micah is still obsessed with Pokémon.

I always feel a little bad about writing so much about Sophie and not telling much about Micah. For one, there’s rarely much to tell about Micah. He spends most of his time playing outside, playing in his room, or reading. When he’s not doing one of those things, he’s asking to play video games or getting himself into trouble. It’s not that he’s a bad kid, he just lacks a frontal cortex (or doesn’t know how to use it well, we’re waiting for our CAT scanner to arrive in the mail so we can perform some tests).

I do have one quick story to tell about him though, and it should give you an idea of how he’s doing.

The other day he was playing outside. It’s not uncommon for him to burst in through the front door fairly frequently when he’s playing outside because he’s always got something to tell us (if you’ve spoken with him recently you know he never stops talking, even while alone). One time he exploded into the house and yelled out that he had been playing with some bug he found and that he didn’t know what it was. Being the infinitely wise and all-knowing parents that we are, our brains exchanged a series of parental communications and Rochelle was chosen (by way of a telepathic drawing-of-straws that she lost) as the one who would voice the only reasonable thing to say in that situation, “please stay away from bugs, especially if you don’t know what they are.”

As he often does, he yelled out, “OK,” before she finished what she was saying and started to run back outside.

Micah, like so many other intelligent children, believes he can sight-read life. When he was very young and learning to read (several years before his peers) he began developing a terrible habit of sight-reading that extended to words he had never seen before. I believe this behavior is a normal part of the process of learning to read, and we corrected it by having him slow down and sound out each letter or syllable of the words he was assuming he knew.

He now reads very well, extremely fast for his age, and he does so with a sight-reading accuracy that puts many adults to shame. He really is quite intelligent. However, this strength is also his greatest crutch – he has applied the sight-reading approach to life. He perceives the world according to the first clues he has, and rarely listens to the instructions of adults. He believes he has heard it all, so when we say anything he doesn’t listen – instead he guesses what we probably said based on the situation.

So, when his mother told him something that could potentially mean the difference between life and death (taking into account possible allergies to stings and unlikely but potentially deadly encounters with rare poisonous or venomous creatures), he blurted out the required acknowledgement that we had said something without actually listening to what we said.

I realized this and called him back. “Micah, what did your mother just tell you?”

He stuttered a little and eventually answered that he didn’t know.

So, we sent him to his room. This listening issue has been ongoing for a very long time now, and he knows that he has to be prepared to tell us what we told him at all times (and even that doesn’t ensure he’ll remember it long enough to do it).

Later, I went up to his room to address the issue. I knew that I couldn’t simply repeat what Rochelle had said, because he would forget it. So, I gave him a detailed and simple lesson on the animal kingdom, focusing on predators, prey and defense mechanisms and how we fit into the mix.

It was super effective, he explained the whole thing to Rochelle later that day, and it seems to have truly impacted him. Now the idea of not touching strange bugs is in the front of his mind while playing outside. Mission accomplished (this time).

Sophie

Every day I come home from work it seems like she has to recite everything that happened while I was away. She sure is talking a lot, and we all wish we could understand what she is saying a little better.

Sometimes, we can understand her just fine. She has all kinds of cute little phrases and words she uses regularly and with ease. Occasionally she’ll surprise us with something we didn’t know she could say.

For example, the other day I was opening a Fruit Roll-Up for her and she got excited and started counting, “one, two, three, four.” This was strange in two ways. First, we never count to her in any specific context (like when she’s in trouble, or when we are waiting for something exciting). We only count with her on random occasions when there are things to count. Secondly, she said (very clearly), “one, two, three, four…” whereas she normally only says, “two, two, two, two.”

Yes, “two” is the only number (until then) that she had ever said. She uses it well – two shoes, two eyes, two crackers, etc. She also uses it to mean other more abstract versions of two – again, more, seconds (of food), etc. However, when she was hungry and became really excited about getting a Fruit Roll-Up, she decided to pass the time counting up to four using never-before-heard-spoken-aloud numbers. I was floored, and (of course) there were no witnesses, so Rochelle still wants to hear it for herself.

Then, today she randomly blurted out, “seven!” in the middle of one of her normal “two, two, two,” counting runs.

She is as cute as ever though, and loves to play. She frequently finds reasons to sing out, “weeeeeeeeeeee.” Sometimes it’s while doing things mom doesn’t approve of, but other times it’s completely random and it’s just plain cute.

She has a couple of favorite songs that I have burned onto a CD in the car. The first one is a drum-intensive beat that only lasts around a minute or two, but it causes her to keep the beat (fairly accurately) on her knees. The second one is the Weird Al version of Micheal Jackson’s “Beat It,” called “Eat It.” Sophie absolutely loves this song, and she sings along with parts of it. Specifically, the background singers often interject with, “woooo” or, “ooooh” after various statements in the lyrics, and Sophie echoes them frequently (sometimes before they even do it).

It always makes us smile to hear her sing along with that song.

Until Later

So, again, I apologize to all of you who faithfully checked back recently expecting an update. Thank you for your love and interest.

Trip to NYC

From NYC

First of all, allow me to apologize for posting so late. When we originally began posting here, I intended on posting every month around the 15th. Nearly two weeks have passed since then, but if we hadn’t waited to post you would have had to wait more than a week for these fun pictures (click the link to see all four pictures we took in NYC).

I’m adding a new feature to this site: Section Headers!

The Trip to NYC

As you can see, we went to New York City on Friday to visit my brother, Eric. He had been living up in Boston for a while, but now he is moving out west to California. Since California is a lot further away than Boston we decided to try and meet up before he leaves, halfway between Boston and the D.C. area where we are living – New York.

A quick side note:

Meet Karen.

For any of you who aren’t aware, before coming back east from Arizona (see our posts related to our grand adventure across the US) we purchased a Garmin Nüvi GPS unit. We didn’t realize it at the time, but that GPS unit would soon become a fifth member of our family. For much of the trip out here we played around with the different voices it can use to talk to us and we finally settled on a nice sounding woman from Australia named Karen. Her Australian English is nice on the ears and she is much more pleasant than the Arabic woman who sounded like she was mad at me all the time. So, now that you know our newest family member, Karen, I’ll continue with the story.

We left around eight in the morning on Friday after plotting a course with Karen using an address Eric provided us in downtown Manhattan. Karen was thinking we only had about a two or three and a half hour drive.

Especially headed into New York, we knew that traffic would be an issue, but Karen gets traffic updates via FM radio transmissions as we approach cities and she adjusts our course to avoid really bad jams. Around 11:30 our she was telling us we would arrive at our destination in an hour, but suddenly her cool, Australian voice chimed, “Severe traffic ahead. Recalculating.” At that point we knew she had finished downloading the traffic information for where we were headed.

I always like hearing that she is re-plotting a course that won’t land us in a long traffic jam, and she usually picks routes that don’t add too much to our travel time (she only recalculates when the traffic delay is longer than the workaround). She took a long time recalculating though.

Finally, several minutes later, she finished her calculations. The new arrival time had changed from 12:30 to 5:30 PM! Checking the map, she revealed a new course that took us nearly two hours north of NY City (we were approaching from the south, obviously), then we would be hooking back down to come in from the north. Since we had planned on leaving New York by six in the evening, the new arrival time was unacceptable.

Watching Karen react to NYC traffic was like watching a bloodhound track a skunk. When it got close enough to realize what it was smelling, it freaked out and looked for a way to get there without getting too close to the business end.

We negotiated with Karen for a while, finally deciding to tell her it was OK to use toll roads. Once she had that option, she found us a route that let us arrive around 2:30.

From NYC

Cruising NYC

Once we arrived, we met up with Eric and his girlfriend, Lindsey, and went to a little Chinese place for a late lunch. Then, with a couple more hours before we wanted to leave, we wandered around a while looking for the Nintendo World Store. We finally found it and it was awesome (especially since just about every one of us loves Nintendo in one way or another).

They had a really cool museum showcasing just about every major product and prototype Nintendo has ever unveiled (OK, maybe not EVERY major one), including an early prototype of the original Nintendo Entertainment Center (NES).

Sophie LOVES Mario (not as much as Tinkerbell though) and enjoyed walking around pointing at all of the Mario dolls, shirts and games saying, “Mario.”

As we walked around it rained a little, but Sophie really enjoyed it, laughing and squealing every time a drop hit her face. Micah just wanted to splash in all of the puddles, but his Uncle Eric came up with the fun idea of making it a game. Depending on the size of the puddle, Eric would give Micah points for jumping OVER the puddle, and take points away for getting IN the puddle. It worked perfectly.

Our meandering around took us through Times Square (the first picture above) and the Rockefeller Center. When we walked past the area where the Today Show is filmed, Micah exclaimed, “The Today Show!?! I’m in HEAVEN!”

Back in California Micah and Rochelle used to watch the Today Show on occasion while I was at work, but it’s been months. Recently, though, Rochelle asked Micah if would like to go to New York, and his first thought was voiced in his response: “Yeah, because I want to be on the Today Show!” Unfortunately, they weren’t filming when we walked by.

We ended up leaving for home a little later than we had planned, but the trip was a lot of fun. We all enjoyed Eric and Lindsey spending time with us and we look forward to visiting New York again in the future. Next time we’ll try to have more time to really look around though.

Office Picnic

Saturday, as if Friday wasn’t a big enough day, we had a big work get-together picnic thing for our families to meet. There was a little kiddie pool and playground that Sophie and Micah enjoyed thoroughly, and the weather was pretty good (though a storm system was coming and hit pretty hard last night).

Sophie really liked playing on the playground equipment – she loved going down the slide all by herself (it was her first time doing it without a lap to sit in).

How the Kids Are

Micah

Micah goes back to school tomorrow in the first grade. He is still obsessed with Pokémon and rarely talks about anything else, so there isn’t a whole lot to report about him. If you ever want to get an earful of Pokémon, just give us a call and ask for Micah.

Sophie

Sophie is getting cuter, smarter and bigger every day. Here’s a cell phone video of an old trick we had been trying to get on camera for a while:

These days her biggest efforts have been in vocabulary. She really wants to sound just like us. The most recent thing we noticed has to do with when we give her a choice. We’ll tell her, “you can have apple juice or milk. Which one do you want?” and she will really think about it, looking around and saying, “hummmmm…” Of course I think everything she does is super cute, but it’s not just me. She’s cute.

Oh, and she says, “mine,” now. A lot. She doesn’t do it to everything, but ocasionally she’ll grab something and say, “mine!” Most of the time it really is hers, so she even seems to understand the concept.

Also, now that she is a year and a half old, she goes all by herself to the nursery at church. The first time we left her in there alone for the full two hours I worried a little that she would cry. The nursery leaders reported that she didn’t cry even once. She loves it and has a great time. When we pick her up she’s excited to see us, but dropping her off is easy and she doesn’t even ask for us while she’s there. She plays nicely with the other kids and loves the toys they have. I’m very proud of how well she handles nursery – she is the only kid her age that doesn’t cry at all in there.

I’ll wrap up by reminescing about Sophie’s ever growing Tinkerbell obsession. She loves and watches frequenly the Tinkerbell movie and we recently puchased some new Tinkerbell shoes for her (visible in the photo of us at Nintendo World). The shoes were a stroke of golden luck – she loves shoes and she loves Tinkerbell. It’s perfect.

There is just one more thing I guess I should tell you. Sophie must be in pants or have something covering her diaper at all times now days. We used to let her run around the house in her diaper alone, but then she started removing it. That’s right, she takes her own diaper off. Not just when it’s full either, sometimes it’s clean, she just doesn’t want it on any more.

Until Later

So, again, I appologize to all of you who faithfully checked back recently expecting an update. I was late and I’m sorry. I hope this long entry has been enough to make up for the lost time. With any luck, you’ll see an update around the middle of next month, even though it’s only a few weeks away.

Family Birthday Party

From Family Stuff

Brownies and ice cream make this baby very happy.

In fact, anything with sugar can put a smile (or some other goofy look) on her face.

This was the scene after dinner last Wednesday (8 July 2009) just moments before we unveiled a present for each child and something special for mom. We chose to celebrate everyone’s birthday together this year since I was away at training from the sixth of January until the end of April, missing every birthday in our family calendar and our wedding anniversary.

To celebrate we ate brownies with ice cream and then went up to each bedroom where a present was waiting.

In Sophie’s room she found a Barbie tricycle (I don’t have photos, but there is a video on our YouTube channel). For the last several months we had noticed how she enjoyed playing on other children’s tricycles, so we found an inexpensive (yet girly) one on Amazon and had it shipped (free shipping) just in time for the joint birthday party. In fact, her gift was the last one we secured.

Then we all treked into Micah’s room where he found something waiting on his bed that he had been dying to have for a long time. Many moons ago LeapFrog created a video game system aimed at helping children Micah’s age learn things like math and spelling. It’s called the Didj. At major retailers (like Target) this toy is on display and turned on in the toy section. Every time we went there Micah would ask to play on it. One day, Rochelle was on Amazon looking at sale items (thinking about Micah’s upcoming birthday, I’m sure) and she found the Didj on sale for almost half off, so she got it and had been holding on to it for several months until last week. Micah was so floored that he had one sitting on his bed, that he was nearly speechless (something unheard of for anyone who has spent any time around Micah). Again, I didn’t take photos, but you can watch a video of the reaction here.

Finally, we all followed Mommy as she searched for the hidden present in our room. Once she found it, we went down to the living room to hear her try it out. For as long as I’ve known her, Rochelle has wanted to learn to play the guitar. We finally got her an affordable system for learning to play the guitar. She is putting a lot of effort in, and someday I’ll post of video of her playing a song on the guitar. On our YouTube channel you can watch video of the search in our room and the unboxing downstairs.

Also on our YouTube channel you can see new videos of Sophie and some of the cute things she’s been doing lately. I’ll embed a short one below, and a longer one can be seen here.

Thank you for stopping by. Remember to watch this site (or subscribe) for updates about once a month. Any time you come by remember to check the links for updates to our photo albums, YouTube channel or anything else. We love you all and appreciate the interest you take in our little family.

Coming Soon

Sometime in the near future this will be a place for family and friends to come to read news just about the family (without having to listen to me ramble on about nerdy things that have nothing to do with our family life).

Until then, I’ve always had a link on my main page that filters out everything but the family articles, so if you’re interested in reading just those, click here.