Happy Valentines Day!

Howdy, y'all!  We had a pretty great week.  There was Valentines day, and a doctor visit, and car smashing, and a visit from a friend!  It was a bountiful week of good times!  Just look at these happy faces, and the proximity!  I'm really glad that they all get along so well and are great friends!  And, in picture you can't even hear them fight, it's wonderful!

On Monday Monica was backing out of the garage and might have accidentally clipped the side mirror on the garage door.  I say might, because no one saw it happen, we just saw the result.  the base of the mirror where the motor is also popped out of it's holding, and it looked like broken clips to me, so I tried to tape the mirror into a useful position... but it's pretty useless right now.

On Valentines day Winry helped make breakfast!  She loves to cook sausage for us in the morning.

We had some special pastries that we'd gotten a while back from Ballerina Farm.  Side note, don't know if I've ever mentioned this, but Brooke's dream job is to be a ballerina farmer.  Anyway, Monica ordered meat from them, and it also came with some pastries, so we baked them up and I'd honestly just order a package of pastries from them next time.  I'm not saying the meat isn't good, I'm saying the pastries are that good.  Winry's face backs me up on this one.

The girls both got heart hair for the day, and I really like how it turned out!

Also on Valentines day, I had an eye doctor appointment.  I met with a double vision specialist, and it was awesome.  They ran through some tests, etc. and were pretty quickly able to tell me that my left eye was drifting and the exact muscle/nerve on my eye that was the problem.  They used prisms to figure out how far off things were, and that came out to... 18 degrees!  So for the most part I'm able to correct for one of my eyes wanting to look 18 degrees above the other, but not always now.  She said I've probably had this problem my whole life, or else she doesn't think I'd be able to cope with it so well.  I got some blood work done earlier this week and it all came back looking good, and I'm heading in for an MRI this Thursday.  Assuming nothing shows up there then when I go back to the eye doctor I'll start doing physical therapy, and I'll probably also get some new glasses with prism lenses for when I really need to be able to see, but am having double vision (like driving, that's been... an adventure at times lately.  Sometimes you just gotta close one eye.).  Anyway, it was a great appointment, and nice to have a path forward.

Wednesday at Winry's dance they did a practice dance for parents.  They only had a few kids there because there was a big snow storm so they made up a dance and then invited the parents to come in and watch.

The weather finally warmed up a bit this past week, which means we were able to play outside.  The backyard is half covered in a sheet of ice, so the front is a better place to play currently.  The girls were playing with the hula hoop and rolling it to each other.

On Friday Brooke only had a half day of school, and I went to pick her up as it was an off Friday.  When we were walking back to the car Abby (her best friend) was there with us!  It's the first time we've ended up right together on the walk back to the car.  Anyway, she and Abby were marching all the way back.

After Grayson's nap, we tried to all go swimming as a family.  There was a pretty long line to get into the pool, so we ended up playing out on the playground instead.  I was NOT properly dressed for the occasion, but really, who was?  We all had a good time none the less.  At the park they also had this baby and me swing type thing, and I gave it a try with Grayson.

Saturday morning we headed to the pool right when it opened to make sure we got in this time.  I tried the water slide to see if I thought the girls would like it, and after I told them about it they were unsure if they wanted to go.  Maybe next time.  Grayson had fun playing in the shallow end for the first little bit, but eventually his pool play turned into walking around between the pools and water slide while I followed him.

Grayson, always the team player, wanted to clean his room!  Once he was fully mitted-up, he... rubbed some stuff.  Hopefully the dusting mitts were picking things up, and not really dusty and putting things down.

I took Winry to basketball in the afternoon.  She had a great time as always, and Brooke and I actually stood to the side of the bleachers and Brooke practiced dribbling a basketball.  At basketball they played dribble freeze tag, and Winry always found herself in a very unusual position to be frozen in.  I also took a video of most of their scrimmage at the end.  Winry's team ended up winning, with a final score of 4-0 I believe.  I'd say the game was highlighted by defensive effort.

Saturday afternoon Aurelia came to visit!  Her family was in town and so she stopped by to play with the girls.  They had a great time together, and it's always exciting when she comes by!

Saturday afternoon Monica finished painting the hall.  As part of that, we took off the air intake vent that had gotten painted gross yellow (real color name) when the walls were painted, and repainted it white.  Well, this morning (Sunday) we hadn't put the vent cover back up.  It's done drying now, and we probably would have been okay putting it up last night as well.  Anyway, we had an open hole in the wall...

and you know what's coming next, and it wasn't even the kids!  Monica asked me to get my hair gel, so I brought it down to her, but then Grayson went upstairs, so she headed up to do his hair, but didn't realize I took the gel down.  I threw it up to her... and threw it straight into the wall!!  Fortunately I could reach, and was able to get the gel back out.

Brooke was reading stories to Grayson this morning once they were both ready for church.  After a few stories, Grayson decided that Brooke needed a blanket, or two... or all of them from his bed.  Also, as I'm looking at this I'm realizing he also pulled out some of the extra sheets from his book case in his closet...  Brooke was able to just stay warm.

Grayson has been really good at taking the sacrament by himself lately.  Today... he did okay.  He climbed up on the bench to pick a water cup, but then decided he needed to climb back down to the floor before drinking it, and managed to dump half of it on my leg.  Honestly, it was just hilarious.  I think most weeks I get wet when he gets the water, but this week was a bit more than usual.

Alrighty, that wraps up the week!  Things are going well for us, and I hope everyone else out there is doing well too.

A Race, A Trip, and Crazy Kids

Hello lovely people!  I was hoping to write last week, but I was traveling back from a test trip, and that just makes for a rather busy day, so I didn't quite get to writing the blog.  But that's okay, I've got two weeks of news now!  We'll kick things off with yesterday, at the Love 'em or Leave 'em valentines day race!  I think it's been 2 years since I've run in the town's races, and it was SO great to be back!  Monica and the kids all played on the playground while I was out racing, but came over to cheer me on to the finish line!  I think everyone had a great time.  After Monica was telling me she loved being there because it's so fun to see all the positivity everyone has for each other.  Hopefully she'll be able to come out and run again soon!  I managed to get 2nd in my age group, and 6th overall in the race.  To be honest, from my training recently, I had no right to be running as fast as I was, so I'm really happy with how I did, and I'm REALLY feeling it today!

Rolling back two weeks, the kids wanted their play tent out, so it came out for a few days.  At nights we'd stick it up on the couch so we could run Dobby to vacuum the floors, and in the morning the girls would just sit in it on the couch and hang out!

On Tuesdays Monica volunteers in Brooke's class, and Grayson needed a nap.  So I put him down and then kept an eye on him with the video monitor.  It's really nice to have, or else I wouldn't have been able to work until he was asleep.  Anyway, he's usually good about not coming out of his room, and while sometimes he'll open his door, he usually never leaves the doorway.  On this occasion, he went just outside of his door and laid down.  I slid my phone around the corner to get a video in hopes he wouldn't notice right away.  He did finally see my phone, and I wish I hadn't stopped the video right away because he got up and ran straight back into his room!

I reminded him it was nap time and closed his door again, but he poked back out.  Eventually he fell asleep, and this is how I found him once he was asleep.  His monitor can see out the door, so I knew where he was and what was going on the whole time.

Thursday afternoon I left for San Bernardino.  Not a terrible place to head this time of year.  It was in the 60's and 70's and felt rather nice there.  Of course I was there for work.  We went to the proton facility at Loma Linda University Hospital.  The trick with protons is that they make everything radioactive, and then it scatters in all directions, so we ran a cable up to our part, and tried to shield all our equipment so it wouldn't break.  That's a very special kind of plastic, and we had it 4 to 6 inches deep all around our test equipment.  We believe we still took one or two radiation events to our control board, but it definitely helped a lot.

Before the trip one of my coworkers mentioned that right by the facility was the worlds largest paper cup.  I went online to look up where and found myself on roadsideamerica.com.  Turns out that paper cup isn't San Bernardino's only claim to fame, they also have the original McDonalds location, which is now a museum.  Here I am on the outside.

Inside was a LOT of happy meal toy displays.  They had some other memorabilia as well, but a lot of the space was happy meal toys, which makes sense.  I took a picture of the 90's toys as I can actually remember getting a bunch of these as a kid.  It was really fun to walk through.

Afterwards I headed to the worlds largest paper cup.  Ah yes, I also had a choice between rental cars when we arrived, and it was either a Camry, or a Mustang.  I had quite a bit of fun driving around!  Also, it makes the paper cup much more interesting.

There was also a basketball hoop at the hotel, so I checked out a basketball and played for about an hour after getting back from my sight seeing.  Oh yeah, bit of background.  We went to the facility around 3:30 on Friday to set up and then run our test, and finished about 6 in the morning.  I stayed up for breakfast at the hotel at 7, and then slept until 11 or 12.  I don't mind only getting 4 hours of sleep on a day like Saturday as it helped me switch back to not staying up till 6 in the morning.  So from noon on I had Saturday to myself.

Sunday morning it was time to head to the airport and come back home.  I had to hop up on the hood and get a picture to match the one from when I got the Charger two-ish years ago.

At work they had this little guy on display.  This is the box I helped with on my one and only flight program I worked at SEAKR.  This box was on the Artemis I mission that just went around the moon.  Yes, my hardware that I designed was put onto a rocket, flew around the moon, crashed back into the ocean, was removed from the capsule and sent back to SEAKR!  It was nice to see it again!  We had two boxes on the first flight, and one was returned to do some tests on to make sure the other one will survive it's second flight.  It's cool to know the stuff I work on goes to space, but I think it's a pretty rare opportunity to actually get to see your work again after it's done it's mission in space!

I was trying to put the laundry away this past week, and Jelly just had to help out.  She kept climbing into the drawers that I'd open to put clothes in.  This one I particularly appreciated, since she laid down and was trying to climb out the back of the drawer.

This past week both of the girls had their 100th day of school.  Since the preschoolers don't have to wear uniforms, they dress up like old people for school that day.  Here's Winry ready to go to school!

And here's Winry with her teacher.  Great news, when Monica went to pick her up they told her that all day long when they went anywhere they always had to wait for Winry because she was hobbling along so slowly!

Somewhere in the past week we came into possession of these glasses.  They worked their way home from school, I believe with Winry.  Anyway, all the kids took a turn wearing them, and they were pretty great!

And now we're back to the race.  The town took some pictures, but they aren't all on facebook yet.  So hopefully tomorrow I'll get their picture of me running.  I don't know that I even noticed them taking a picture at the starting line before we started running.

And here we are enjoying our pancake breakfast after.  I really like the pancake breakfast.  I mean, I'd do a race without one, but it's probably what keeps the kids going the whole time, knowing that once I finish we'll get pancakes and sausage!

When we got home from the race Monica took Winry to basketball.  I asked Grayson if he'd take a nap, but he wasn't ready, so I gave him the tablet to watch the Hungry Caterpillar and earned myself six and a half minutes to shower.  I made it out just in time.

After that Grayson really wanted to play outside, and it was a pretty warm day so we went out.  Jelly was watching us from the door, so I got her harness and she came out too.  She was out wandering the yard for about an hour before she headed back inside.  I really like this picture because I like her paw print in the snow.  You can see it in the full size picture, it's harder to see in this smaller inline picture though.

And Grayson had a great time with all the toys.  We had to pull a bunch of balls up out of the ice and snow, and he spent quite a while swinging a basketball and soccer ball.  Eventually we did head in, and Grayson went down for a nap.

And that's a wrap.  We started secret valentines this past week.  This year it's mostly been little bits of candy getting left out for people.  The kids have really been enjoying it again this year too.  I think that's everything I have for now.  I hope everyone has a wonderful week!

Peek a Boo!

Hello hello!  I think the biggest news for this week was mentioned last week, and that's that Grayson transitioned from a crib to a bed.  He's been doing an amazing job with it too.  He's stayed in his room every time until we come get him, though he does open his door sometimes.  It's usually just to throw out a toy, and then he closes it back up.  He's transitioning nicely, and after skipping his nap the first 2 days, I'm pretty sure he's napped every day since.  He's also really enjoyed getting into Jelly's cat tower, and loves to climb through it.  Poor Jelly, with nowhere to sleep!

On Monday Monica took Grayson and Winry to story time at the library.  As you can see, Grayson may have been a bit tired from skipping his nap the 2 days before.  He's not usually so subdued for these types of events.

Here's Jelly, enjoying one of the few moments of respite that she could on her cat tower this past week.

On Thursday Monica headed off for a weekend with her writers group.  I haven't actually heard much about it yet, but she had a great time.  They stayed pretty close by at one of the girls in-law's house, so the party came to us.  Here's a picture of them all at breakfast one morning.

On Friday I headed to the grocery store with Winry and Buc-ee... I mean Grayson!  I decided to switch up dinner and I needed to get a few things to make homemade pizza.  The kids wanted to trick or treat things, so Winry carried our grocery bag, and I'd hand everything to Grayson who'd put it in after she asked for it.  We had a GREAT trip.

I think this is my favorite monitor picture from the past week.  This is Grayson in his bed reading books.  The first few days when we'd put him in he'd wander around his room.  We got a video monitor that you can move remotely so that we could follow him and keep an eye on him.  Now he mostly just climbs into his bed and lays there.

Saturday Winry had basketball, and I had all the kids.  Grayson actually stayed in the gym and let me watch for about the first half.  We spent the next 20ish minutes walking up and down the hall, then a little while playing with the drinking fountain, and the final 10 minutes me holding him in the corner of the gym getting screamed at because he wanted to play with the drinking fountain (or rather, because he was really tired).  I was able to catch some of what Winry did during the second half through the doorway, but I missed her making a basket, and my attempt to record her scrimmage is filled with screaming from Grayson...

And that afternoon? Right back into his home!  He just loves it in there.  What a crazy kid!

Nothing else too crazy happened this past week.  No electric box or car fires in the middle of the night or anything.  I'm not complaining though, I'd rather things be smooth, especially when I've got all the kids by myself!

Bed Upgrade

Oh boy, this looks like trouble!  Grayson upgraded to a bed yesterday.  Grayson had been waking up a lot at night recently (and I mean a LOT), and we were trying to figure out things we could do to help him sleep better.  One thought was to put him in a bed he can just get out of... that makes sense, right?  Seems like it worked last night as he slept all night long.  It probably didn't hurt that he took advantage of being able to get out to NOT take a nap yesterday, and instead just played around in his room.  He was good for both his nap and bedtime though, so hopefully this helps him sleep better.

Monica uses this app called one second every day.  The idea behind it is you fill in every day with a picture or one second video clip, and then you get a month video each month.  She's been making them for quite a while, and when I saw the one for December today I wanted to share it, so here it is!

Grayson loves to climb all over me when he gets the chance.  I think one of his favorite games to play is I just lay on the floor.  He loves a good leg hole to slip through as well.  Just calming down for bed.

Sunday night my sisters were still here, and we were up playing games.  We were trying to make the most of their last night here, and while we were playing I commented that I could see some flashing lights off a neighbors window, and thought maybe someone got pulled over or something.  We heard some booms and figured it was random fireworks, cause that does happen in our neighborhood, and then about a half hour later, right after a loud boom, the power went out...  Upon further investigation it turns out a car coming down the main road went off into the power box.  Our neighbor said they actually took out a power line too, and a few cars got caught in the power line.  Oh, and then the car and power box caught fire.  All in all, a big mess.  Fortunately for us, since it was all on the other side of the street our power was just out while they figured out what all to turn off so they could put out the fire.  There's a tent over the box now and they've been working on it all week, so I'm guessing the fire really messed things up in the end.

My sisters left on Monday afternoon, and fortunately that was a no school day.  The kids had a wonderful time playing in the morning.  My sisters brought stuff out to do foot soaks, and all the kids loved that.  I really like Grayson in his footies using a stool.  The important thing is that he's having fun with his sisters and aunts.

On Tuesday my mom had surgery to replace the battery in her pacemaker.  Well, when they got in, they looked up the serial number and it turns out her pacemaker was recalled... so they ended up replacing the whole thing!  I'm glad that her pacemaker never had issues, or that she never had an issue where it was needed!  She's doing well and recovering great.

Friday was an off day for me, and I took Winry to the museum in the morning.  I don't remember why, but I know we talked about it way back in like December and picked this day.  We had a good time, and with it just being the two of us we got to do basically everything.  In the picture below there was a thing were you collected "fuel" balls and then you filled the tank, pushed a button and a fire turned on.  Winry enjoyed it so we did it a few times.

Brooke really wanted to go play in the snow, so as soon as she got home from school we headed into the backyard.  We just sledded and snow skated, but we all had a great time till we headed in for dinner.

Both the girls really like the snow skate, and Brooke told me that she wants her own or a snowboard for her birthday.  Hopefully we remember that far out.

Saturday morning we went to a new-ish pastry shop in town called Poulette.  Brooke has really been wanting to go.  We got probably more stuff than we should have, and then devoured it all.  It was all very good.

As mentioned, Grayson got a new bed on Saturday.  We took out the crib and put in the house bed I made for Brooke all those years back.  This is the first time in almost 8 years that we haven't had a crib set up in this room.  That's pretty crazy.

Winry had team pictures at basketball.  She continues to love it.  This past week they worked on defense for the first time, plus all the things they've worked on in the past.  During the scrimmage Winry even got the ball and took a shot!

Here's Grayson after he fell asleep last night.  He basically chose to sleep so that he might fall out of his bed at any moment...  Everything still worked out.

That's everything for now.  Have a wonderful week.