Not Terrence's Favorite Place

Terrence was due for his annual checkup at the vet, so this morning I packed up the dogs in my car (Natalie was due for a shot too) and we went to the vet.  Here Terrence tolerates his exam like the good dog that he is.

They See Me Strollin'. They Hatin'.

With two kids, it's certainly an option to have two separate strollers.  But since I work during the days, Meghan sometimes likes to take Joshua and Clara for a walk, even if sometimes it's just a short trip to the mailbox.  To allow her to take both kids at the same time, we bought a Britax stroller, which can be set to several different configurations for multiple kids.  Here we are in our fancy stroller as we took an evening walk tonight.

A Little Builder

Joshua has had some megablocks (sort of like large legos for toddlers) for quite awhile, but he has never really built with them. He liked putting them into containers and taking them out again. But today, for the first time, he realized he could stack them and build some towers. It was exciting to see him make that connection. He gets a little frustrated when he can't do exactly what he wants the first time, but he is getting it. I think we will get him a larger set since he just has a few blocks now.

Bye-Bye, Napper

Pack 'N Plays are great because they are so versatile.  The modern versions allow you to start your newborn in a napper, and then when they get too big for that, or when they start to roll too much, you can take out the napper and they can sleep in the bassinet, which is actually just an elevated platform to allow you to reach them more easily than if they were on the bottom of it.  Once they can pull up on things (such as the side of a Pack 'N Play, for example), you can (and should) then take out the bassinet and move the platform to the bottom.  Today Clara graduated to stage two, which became necessary because she likes to roll so much now.  Here she is in her upgraded configuration.

I Work at Starbucks

Today I had a meeting in Madison, Wisconsin, which was done around lunchtime.  Our next meeting was a dinner meeting in Milwaukee, so my sales rep and I drove to Milwaukee and then had some time to kill.  Needing a place to work, we stopped at everyone's favorite temporary office, Starbucks.  We spent the next four hours there, enjoying their free Wi-Fi and their not-so-free caffeinated beverages.  Here I am in front of my office-for-a-day.

4 Month Appointment

Today we took Clara to the doctor for her four-month exam. She is meeting all her milestones. She could be doing better on weight as she is still at 1% on the growth chart and has not yet hit 10 lbs, though she is close. She has gone up to 13% in height, though, so that's good progress. Here she is with one of the nurses. She really is not a vaccination fan, so shortly after this was taken she was pretty unhappy.

Four Months (and one day)

Yesterday Clara turned four months old, but we had too much going on yesterday to take her picture, so we delayed it by one day until today.  The changes in her development weren't as great since last month as it was the previous month.  She still is very smiley and happy for the most part.  She rolls quite a bit more often now, but usually not very far.  She can't quite grab things on her own, but she's happy to hold things in her hands if she accidentally grabs them or if someone puts them in her hand.  She has eaten better this month, as we finally broke past the ceiling of four ounces per feeding with occasional fives and sixes and even one seven ouncer.  Since that's still a little on the low side, we supplement her liquid formula with some powder formula to give her some extra calories.  But she's still doing very well overall.  Her next pediatrician checkup is soon, so we'll have updated weights and percentiles then.

Blockfest

Twice a year, the Olathe School District hosts an event called Blockfest in which kids can come and play with different types of blocks and learn different skills related to them.  It's held in a big room with six different stations, each with a different kind of block (wooden planks, small cubes, big foam blocks, etc.).  We thought this would be fun for Joshua, so I took him.  His favorite way to play with stackable things has always been to knock them down, and that was the case today as well.  Here we are at the end of the session when many other kids had already left, and Joshua was helping to "clean up" by doing the opposite of cleaning up.

Fun with Crayons

Joshua really loves the crayons he got for Christmas, but he doesn't yet like to color. He will occasionally make a few scribbles on the paper, but he really isn't very excited about it. Instead he just loves taking them out, putting them on the paper, and then putting them back in the box. He likes to do that several times in a row. And then he gets a little bored and tries to throw them instead and then we put them away because they have to stay on the table for him to be allowed to continue playing with them. But he really enjoys this routine and asks for the crayons almost every day. Sadly, this photo was taken shortly before Natalie ate the tip off the brown crayon. This now makes Joshua upset every time he sees it. But he cheers right up once he focuses on the other colors. I like to think he learned a valuable lesson about keeping the crayons off the floor and taking care of his personal property, but I am pretty sure he actually learned nothing.

Miniature Welcoming Committee

Before we had kids, I would always look forward to seeing Meghan when I got home from my trips.  Now that we have Joshua and Clara, I get to look forward to seeing all three of my favorite people when I get home.  It's really exciting when everyone is so happy to see me (even little Clara who has big smiles for me), and I'm so happy to see them.  Here I arrived home from the airport and had already hugged Joshua who squealed and ran toward me, though he then got distracted by something outside, but I then got to hold Clara for awhile.  It's one of those moments of parenthood that provide pure joy and fulfillment.  

Two Girls Playing

Today Clara was playing with her pink bunny on her blanket when Natalie decided to bring her own pink octopus onto the blanket and play too. It was cute to see them playing together (in a very parallel way).

All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go

This morning I had a super early 6:20 AM flight.  I was going to fly through Detroit on my way to Chicago.  Unfortunately my flight to Detroit was delayed, so I was not going to make the second leg of the flight.  Normally I would just reschedule and find another flight.  But this week is Spring Break for many people, so nearly every flight was booked on every airline.  The next flight out left at 1:30, which meant I was going to miss my meeting in Chicago for today.  I still need to be there tomorrow, so I decided to drive back to the office, do the demo remotely, and then take an evening flight to Chicago so I could be there for my meetings tomorrow.  Here I am in the office in my suit, even though I now have no in-person customer meetings today.

Moral of the Story: Just use Lost & Found

Story time: So there once was a couple in the Milwaukee airport.  They noticed a camera had been left by someone.  Instead of turning it into the lost and found, as you might think someone would do in that situation, they decided to try to figure out who the owner was just based on the pictures.  They noticed some pictures of a particular court proceeding at the Sedgwick County Courthouse in Wichita, KS, and one of the pictures was of the nameplate of a judge.  So they mailed the camera to that judge.  The judge received the camera and looked at the pictures, and he recognized an adoption lawyer.  The judge contacted the adoption lawyer who then contacted the adoption agency.  The adoption agency didn't know anyone who had adopted from Milwaukee (they assumed the camera owner must have lived there), so they had to look at the pictures.  Seeing the pictures, they remembered us and contacted us to let us know they had my camera, and then sent it to me.  So fortunately I now have my camera back after trying everything to find it (including calling the Milwaukee airport lost and found, who didn't have it, and now I know why).  So I also have all the pictures, which meant I was able to just now update the three posts which didn't originally have pictures because they were on the camera.

The Intersection of Nerd Humor and Baby Apparel

I'm sort of nerdy, and I see that as a good thing, and I'm kind of proud of it.  One of my friends, a fellow nerd, showed me an awesome baby shirt online.  I knew that I had to have it for Joshua.  So I got it for him, and although it's not Meghan's favorite shirt for him, I'm always excited on the rare occasions that he wears it.  It says "I TCP/IP but mostly IP".  If you don't get it, ask me sometime, and I'll explain.  But just be warned that if you're not interested in networking protocols, you probably won't be amused.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

This year we had a fun St. Patrick's Day. It was nice that it was on a Saturday. Well, the morning didn't start out super great since Jason and Joshua watched K-State lose in the NCAA tournament. But after that, we ate cream of asparagus soup for lunch, wore our green clothes, and ate Irish stew, colcannon, and mint-chocolate-chip ice cream for dinner.

Fueling March Madness

Yesterday I took some time off in the middle of the day to watch the K-State game, but today Nick, Jason, and I planned to get together after work to watch the evening games at Fuel.  We witnessed history as two 2-seeds lost in the opening round, including Big 12 defectors/traitors Missouri.  It was a really fun night and it was a great way to watch the tournament, with all of the games showing on separate big screen TVs right in front of us.

Puerto Rico is a U.S. Territory

K-State made the NCAA tournament as a No. 8 seed, and today was the opening game of the tournament.  We were matched up against No. 9 Southern Miss.  K-State played fairly well and won the game, while Southern Mississippi's band proved to be both racist and stupid.  Nick, Tony, and I met at a bar in Overland Park to watch the game together.  Here we are after our victory, falling victims to the red-eye reduction double flash trick from Meghan's camera.

Substitute Chef

Meghan is a phenomenal cook.  I am not.  As a result, she does the vast majority of the cooking in our house.  I do all the cleanup and provide all the unsolicited appreciative comments.  Tonight Meghan was planning to cook for us, but she wasn't feeling well.  So I dusted off what few cooking skills I have, and I made us a tuna casserole.  It wasn't the most complicated meal ever, but it was still a pretty good accomplishment for me.  And it even tasted really good too.  Maybe I'll take a shot at cooking a little more often. 

Two Guys Burgers and Fries

I'm not traveling for work this week, so I thought it'd be a good time to get together with our guys group.  Unfortunately two of them couldn't be there, so it was just me, Nathan, and Jeremy.  The weather was beautiful, so we decided to go somewhere where we could eat outside, and Five Guys fit the bill.  The burgers, while not exactly healthy, were delicious as always.

Wild Instincts of an Indoor Cat

As a cat, Alex spends most of his life being aloof with occasional bouts of extreme neediness for affection.  This lifestyle seems to make him happy.  There are many things he doesn't care about, but one of his all-time favorite things in life is when we make up the bed after having washed the sheets.  Somehow no matter where he is in the house, he realizes when this is happening, and he always shows up.  He loves getting under the sheet, and we usually entertain (antagonize?) him by moving a hand around from the top of the sheet, and he attacks from underneath as if it were a mouse or some small prey.  I think he feels like a tough cat in the wild.  Here he is in hunting mode, ready to attack the next thing that pokes down from above.

Preventing Climbing

Joshua loves climbing anything and everything.  Recently when our Parents as Teachers educator was here, she told us that in 30 years of her work, she's never seen a child his age who likes to climb as much as he does.  While we have most pieces of furniture in the house anchored to the wall, such as the dresser in his room, I originally only had the bottom row of drawers child-proofed.  When he started to climb, he would use the middle and top rows of drawers, since they weren't latched.  So today I put a stop to that plan by installing the child-proofing latches on the other four drawers.  Here I show my completed work while Joshua appears to already be plotting a way to circumvent this new limitation.

Good-Bye Lawrence, Hello Olathe

Julie and Andrew recently purchased their first house.  Today was their scheduled moving day to move their household goods from their apartment in Lawrence to their new house in Olathe.  The moving crew consisted of me, Andrew, Julie, Kirk, Joanna, Matt, Abby, and Julie's friend Rachel.  It was a long day, but we got them moved, and Meghan and I are really excited that they live so close to us now.  Oh, and we also learned a valuable lesson: it's worth the extra money to pay for U-Haul.  With Budget, it's not that you get what you pay for, it's that you get less than you pay for.   

Concurrent Food Consumption

When we just had Joshua, it wasn't too hard to organize our evenings.  The addition of Clara has made things a little more tricky, as she needs to eat at certain times that we can't really control.  Ideally those don't overlap with when we need to eat, but sometimes they do.  And when that happens, we have to improvise.  Fortunately, I've become proficient with feeding her with one hand, which is really useful for times like tonight when she needs to eat at the same time I want to eat.  Rather that starve for awhile, I decided to eat while feeding her, which actually worked out fairly well.

On Track

Today we had Parents-As-Teachers. Our home educator, Elizabeth, did an evaluation of Clara today. She is meeting all her milestones and is very social and verbal (which we knew - she is a little chatterbox).

A Fun Jungle Gym

Because Joshua climbs so much now, his drawers are temporarily removed from his dresser to prevent him from injuring himself since we found him sitting in the top drawer a couple times. We plan to add locks to them soon. In the meantime, this does not stop him from using the dresser itself as a ladder or from sitting in his lowest drawers. He really enjoys climbing furniture more than any of his toys at this point.

Spending Time With Grandma

Today Peg came and hung out with the kids as I was not feeling too well. It was really nice to have her help and the kids always enjoy it when she is here.

Starting Early: A Novel Concept

I have a big demo coming up on Friday, and it's going to take a lot of preparation.  I realized my traditional strategy of waiting until the last minute wasn't going to work very well, so I decided to start preparing early by doing some work during the evening tonight.  Here Clara and I get to work as Natalie arrives to lend her expertise to our team.

Sitting

Today we put Clara in the Bumbo for the first time. She isn't strong enough to sit in there too long, but she seemed to enjoy the different view it provided.

Aidan with an A

Our friends Mike and Jenny recently had their first baby, Aidan.  They live in Minnesota but have many family and friends in Kansas.  They knew they wouldn't be able to stop by and see everyone during their short trip back to this area, so Mike's parents hosted an open house in their home as a celebration for little Aidan joining the family.  I knew Mike and Jenny in high school, as they were from Lansing, and Mike's parents still live there.  So today Meghan and I made a trip back to my old stomping grounds so we could go to the party and meet baby Aidan.  He was a very cute baby, and the open house was really nicely done with lots of good food (best sausage wontons ever!).

An Old Toy

Lately I have been feeling like Clara is bored with laying down all the time. So even though she is too young to enjoy bouncing, I thought she might enjoy the new perspective of the exersaucer, especially because she loves toys. The smallest setting is really short so she is tall enough. She did like it a fair amount, but her little arms were too short to reach the toys so we might have to wait a bit for her to really enjoy it. Joshua, however, was extremely excited to see it again. He can climb in and out on his own and enjoys bouncing as hard as he can in it, just like he did when he was a baby. (Hopefully it's pretty sturdy because he's a lot stronger and heavier now than he was then.)

Like a Baby Goat

Joshua's climbing has really gotten to a whole new level in the past few days. He has been able to get to a few different previously inaccessible places. I turned my head for just a few moments today and when I turned around, Joshua was on our dining room table. And yes, it is a pub-height table. He is definitely keeping us on ours toes lately.