Snowed In

Well, the big highlight of this week was probably the huge snow storm that came in on Saturday.  Monica's sister, Michelle, came out to visit and was supposed to head home Saturday, but almost all flights got cancelled... fortunately they were able to get a flight today (Sunday), so they didn't have to live out of suit cases too much longer than they planned!

Earlier this week we finally got Brooke's Easter picture.

So there's that :).  Work was pretty good this week.  I got a lot of stuff done, and things were pretty busy.  For mutual on Tuesday night we did a Duty to God night.  We invited the parents of all the boys and we went over the Duty to God program, and what you have to do for it and stuff.  It was great, and I hope the boys enjoyed it and got excited.

Brooke got to spend some quality time with Andy this week.  They started off a little distanced.

But soon Andy was ready to read to Brooke!!

And then they were best buds.

Monica was grateful to have someone here to spend time with while I was gone all day.  While here they went to the park and the zoo, and probably many other things I didn't hear about.  But then on Saturday came the snow!!  We were stuck inside most all day.  Brooke enjoyed riding on dad's shoulders for the first time!

We borrowed child sized snow clothes from the next door neighbors.  They were a little large for Andy, but he was thrilled to get the chance to go out in the snow...

After some playing in the snow Brooke was just soooo tired! So we let her take a little nap.

Here is some aftermath from the snow storm.  There was about a foot of snow on top of the fence.

This weekend was also Stake Conference.  Our visiting authority got stuck in Vail on Friday night and the roads were closed... Fortunately they were able to get in by Saturday night.  The snow was bad enough that they broadcast the conference online, so we watched from home.

Today Michelle was able to get a flight out that wasn't cancelled, and I got her out to the airport safely.  Brooke was very playful today and was enjoying quality time with her giraffe, Sir Jeffers.

I think that's most of the significant stuff that occurred this week.  Things are going well here and it should be back into the 70's later this week, so the snow won't last long.  Hope everyone is doing great!!

Double Feature

Sorry I missed last week, I just wasn't home enough to blog what with General Conference and all... ;)

Over the last two weeks Brooke has become quite the great sitter!  She enjoys sitting up even.  Since she should be starting solids in the next few months we've also started giving her spoons to play with.  She loves to put them in her mouth, but we have to be careful to watch her cause if she grabs them too far down she'll shove them all the way in and gag herself.

As per our General Conference tradition, Monica made cinnamon rolls for breakfast Saturday morning.  It was a great breakfast after a 12 mile run!

And here's Brooke chewing on a spoon.  She was quite... squirmy and not content throughout conference which was quite the distraction.

Also, as it's starting to warm up we've gotten our popsicle molds back out.  We made some from orange juice:

and a smoothie!

Monica and I headed out for a date this last Saturday.  We went to the local bowling ally!  Neither of us has been in a very long time, and it was fun to get back out there.  We took a bowling class together in college, and had a lot of fun there.  We enjoyed it so much we think we'll have to go back again soon!

Brooke even got into the bowling spirit (though her ball has a few more holes in it...)!!!

In other, non-picture worthy news, work has been super crazy the last two weeks.  An FPGA I was working on needed to be done quite suddenly.  I'd been working away on updates without a real deadline to finish everything up by.  Well, on Monday I was given that deadline... and it was Monday (luckily that's the Monday a week later, as I have 2 Mondays included in this post).  Well there were a whole slew of issues to work through, but in the end I got it figured out... just in time to find a bug in the code, which basically meant I had to restart my last week of work.  Fortunately, things went faster the second time around and the design is good to go.

There's still plenty of other work to do between now and flight testing of our deliverable hardware, but I'd say this FPGA build was my last big challenge between now and then.  It's my only remaining task I currently have that putting time into does not necessarily mean progress, so I'm glad to have it out of the way.

Also, this past Saturday I called up Jarom, an old friend who served in my mission, and we chatted in Mongolian for about an hour.  I had some resolutions to work on Mongolian this year, and I finally got around to the call I was supposed to be doing at least monthly...  It was a lot of fun and he got to meet Brooke digitally.

Home has also been very busy lately.  We've been doing a lot of spring cleaning.  Once we put up the shelves in the garage it was time to sort through stuff before loading up the shelves.  I went through all my stuff and was able to consolidate into a few less boxes.  We've also been tidying up in the house and fixing various things.

We went over to Home Depot's spring black friday sale and got an extendable 22 foot ladder.  They're usually $240, but were on sale for 100, what a steal!  With that we were finally able to fix our light way up above the stairs!

I also spent time chopping wood in the back yard trying to clear our wood pile.  We'd been saving wood to burn in our little fire pit, but we don't use it enough for the amount of wood we accumulated, and we think something might have started living in the pile over the winter... so it was time to chop it up and get ride of what we didn't need.  I definitely didn't finish as there was a LOT of wood out there.

I think that's most of what's been going on around here as of late.  Brooke is doing great and growing up so fast!  We're all doing wonderful and hope you are too!

Happy Easter!

Howdy all!  What an adventuresome week!  Brooke has been doing great and growing well, she even rolled over for the first time this week!  She's rolled over twice so far (that we know of).  I've been home every time, but she only does it when I'm not looking.  The first time I was upstairs, the second time I was looking away, and when I looked back she was on her back not her belly...  Thanks Brooke.

She's also learned to grab my nose.

Here we see Monica using Brooke as a claw like in those quarter machines you can never win.  Turns out that Brooke is better at grabbing with her feet than those claws.

Wednesday the big snow storm hit.  On Tuesday my program manager sent an email that said if we wanted to work form home the next day he understood because it was supposed to be so snowy, so I figured if it had snowed much in the morning I'd just work from home.  Well, as I was running that morning it was snowing some, but wasn't really sticking anywhere.  By the time I was ready to head to work there was a little snow all over, so I thought "hey, I'm allowed to work from home, maybe I'll just work from home!"  I hopped on my computer to check my email and WORK WAS CANCELED!!  It then proceeded to dump at least 18 inches on us, and it was very windy.  Most of the roofs ended up with very little snow on them, unless somehow protected from the wind, and the tops of trees were low on snow while the bottoms were caked in it!

Here's a picture out of our front door.  You can see that the snow stuck onto the side of our house.

And here is our front porch, with snow stuck to all sides of everything.

And this is one of our window wells.

I was pretty surprised in the morning that work was canceled, but I wasn't gonna complain.  But throughout the day it became pretty apparent that it was not a good idea to drive anywhere.  They never plowed the road outside our house and the freeways were shut down unless you had chains on your tires.  Basically there was just more snow than snow removal could keep up with.

While I was home Brooke and I decided to split a bowl of cereal.

The plow came by once overnight after the storm ended and on Thursday morning the middle of our street was plowed.  Unfortunately this turned the 18 inches of snow, which was already higher than the ground clearance of any of our cars, into at least 2 feet of packed snow which I did not want to ram a car through, so I worked from home Thursday.  All in all it made for a rather interesting week!

Last night we dyed Easter eggs.  Here we are in the process... pretty far in the process.

Gotta protect my shell parts from dye!  That's how you make the really cool eggs at least.  Our "magic stick" of wax didn't work super great.  We'd draw stuff on eggs, and then half of what we thought we drew would get dyed anyway...

Look at that blue egg!?

Here is a close up of some of the eggs.

We have some pictures with all the eggs completed, but we just took them so I'll save them for next week.  We still need to take Brooke's Easter pictures, so I'll keep some egg pictures to go with those.

This morning we hid eggs for each other to find.  It was quite fun.  Fun enough that the discussion did come up of having mini fake-easters throughout the year.  Here's my Easter basket.

And Monica with her's.

It's been a good Easter so far, and Monica's making a super great dinner!  Things are definitely good over here!

Happy St. Pi-trick's Day

Happy Pi Day and St. Patrick's Day everyone!!  What a jam packed week!  It's not every week you get 2 holidays.  First up was Pi Day.  Monica made little key lime pies in our muffin tin, and I thought those look like Brooke size pies!  So I cut her a slice and we gave it to her... long enough to take pictures, then I ate it :).

Outside the holidays it was a pretty normal week of FHE, mutual, and math tutoring.  Of course Thursday started March Madness, and my brackets are doing quite well this year.  I'm not sure when I got good at lucky guessing, but this is 2 years in a row that I've been at the top.  I guess I'm just in the prime of my life right now.

On Thursday Brooke went in for her 4 month checkup!  She is now 13 lbs 7 oz (50%), and 25 inches tall (90%), with a 16.5 inch head(93%)!  4 month also means she got shots again... and it was much worse than last time.  The real issue we had today was that right at the end of the doctor's appointment she was getting hungry, so she was already crying when the  nurse came in with the shots.  Despite already crying I could definitely tell when she felt the first shot.  Her eyes shot all the way open and she stopped crying for a second... and then she wailed!!!  To the nurses credit she got all 3 shots in in at most... 15 seconds.  So at least it didn't take forever and then I picked her up and she started to calm down.  She also got really sleepy this time (she didn't with her 2 month shots).  She even slept for 11 hours that night.

On St. Patrick's Day Monica made an Irish dinner.  It was really good.  There were potato pancakes, and a stew, and things for dessert with names I don't remember...  Monica will probably edit that last sentence with all the correct names when she reads over this. (The dessert was sticky toffee pudding!- love, monica)

This dessert even has dates in it and is still good, impressive.

We took a family St. Patrick's day photo as well.  Just look at all the green!

Yesterday we all went shopping together.  It was decently cold over here, so Brooke was all bundled up in a coat and blanket.  While we were out walking around she fell asleep and when we got back she just looked really cute.

Such Adventures

Toward the end of last week we got a chair style thing for Brooke.  She's been sitting up some lately, always assisted, but seems to really enjoy being upright as of late.  Well, since here chair was here I figured it was time to give it a try.  I think she could still use a little work on sitting up on her own.

Also, we were going through the LDS tools because updating your picture was mentioned in relief society.  This was the household picture for us:

During the week... not much happened.  On Wednesday nights the elders play basketball at the church and I decided to go.  I got super wonderful blisters on both of my feet!  It hurt to walk for the next few days and I wasn't able to run again until Saturday.  All that said it was a lot of fun.  I'll have to try different shoes in the future and see if I can find some relief for my feet.

At some point in the last week a situation arose that resulted in this picture.

And that's the whole story I know...

Brooke has started to like when I bark and growl at her.  It is worth noting that she does not like actual dogs barking.  I tried playing a video of dogs for her and she didn't like it.  Hopefully the video works for reals this time.

In the way of an actual adventure we did go next door and play Ticket to Ride on Friday night.  It was a lot of fun.

I'm posting so late today that we already went to church.  It was good, but Brooke was real smelly.  Pretty sure she had gas most of today so far, which is super exciting for everyone around us!  We're planning to go on a walk here in a little to air her out!

Down Week(s)

Sorry for the egregious error of not blogging last week.  I forgot on Sunday, and by the time I remembered it was Thursday and it just didn't seem worth it.  As I reflect upon the last 2 weeks I realize that this post may be very brief...  

Eventually ago we went on a walk.  It was pretty chilly outside so we bundled up Brooke and headed out.  She loved it the whole time, but Monica got cold.

We went down to the outlets to trade in some clothes we hadn't used for upcoming sizes that we would need clothes in.  While walking through H&M I found these child size mannequins.  I think the picture captures the awkwardness pretty well.  They were approximately Brooke's size, but posed all "cool" and with hats and such.  It was a really weird display.

Then we did capture a few videos of Brooke.  But as anyone with kids can attest, whenever they're doing something cute/great they always stop once the camera comes out.  Brooke was hiccuping in her sleep, but of course I only got the last one!!

She loves to lay in her... play thing, and has to be at an angle so she can kick the poles.  She's maybe reached up and tried to grab stuff once or twice, but she loves kicking and watching everything move.

Well, I tried publishing and watching the videos and got an error... so hopefully they're just still uploading and will work by the time everyone else comes and checks this out.  With that I think I've covered everything of note in the last two weeks.  Hope everyone has a great week, and hopefully we'll have an adventure or two as well!

Baby Blessing and Shelf Building

Sorry for the missed post last week, but last weekend was pretty crazy around here as most all our family was out for Brooke's baby blessing, so I decided not to ignore everyone and do a blog post last week.

As for last week... well I don't remember much about what happened during the week.  Way too long ago for that.  Friday, however, family started coming into town (at least to our part of town) and we took advantage of baby sitters!  We went to Melting Pot for an early Valentines dinner.  It happened to be in downtown some-town, and the main street was all decorated!

It was a lot of fun and Monica and I had never been before.  It took a lot longer than we though it would, about 2 and a half to three hours, so if you decide to go just be prepared for that.  It was a lot of fun!

For our dessert we got the flaming turtle solely because they light it on fire.

But it also turned out that the chocolate fondue was super delicious!

We parked on the street, and on our walk to/from the car we passed this classy establishment.  I don't know what it used to be, but by the looks of it I missed the 5 day sale.

Then over the weekend we had family and friends over to visit.  I believe everyone had a good time, and I believe nothing was broken.  It's amazing how big a house feels once 24 people becomes 3 again.  Also, thanks to everyone who came, and for the help you provided while you were here.

This past week has been an interesting one.  There were a few germs floating around while people were out here and Monica got sick on Tuesday.  Then I got sick on Thursday.  That made for quite the hectic week, and Brooke was not amused (fortunately Brooke has not gotten sick).

Without any real story here are some pictures of Brooke:

Our La-Z-Boy that we ordered finally came in and I went and picked it up on Friday.  It's just Brooke's size too!

Saturday was a pretty warm day, and for some reason that caused our tree to weep.  It was hard to get a picture of, but if you look toward the bottom of this picture you can see a drop that fell off the tree.  Sap was just running out of the tree like crazy!

Saturday I also took our super spacious construction Corolla out to home depot to get some supplies.  For any of you wondering, you can fit at least 17 eight foot 2x4's in a Corolla.

The day had finally come to shelf up the garage.  I was more conscious with this project about taking more pictures and not just suddenly having a final product image.  Here is our before.

In total we ended up with 17 2x4's and 2 sheets of plywood.  Here's everything ready to go.

I even remembered to have Monica take a picture of me working!

And here are the finished shelves.  It ended up being a lot more project than I thought it would be.  From leaving the house to buy wood until the shelves were up was about 9 hours, but that also includes an hour or two to recharge batteries for the drill and eating lunch.  I probably used about 200 screws and had to charge the battery 3 times.  Turns out 2 1/2" screws take a lot of power to drive in.  I think this is the first time my forearm has been sore the next day from using a powered screw driver.  On the plus side we not have a bunch of storage space and we can move most of the stuff from the basement out into the garage!

It's nice to finally have that project done.  We have wanted to put those shelves in for a long time, but kept delaying, mostly due to not having a car large enough to haul the wood in.  Good thing our new car is HUGE!

And with that I think we're all caught up.  Brooke turned 3 months old last Wednesday, but we haven't gotten to the 3 month photo shoot yet.  Maybe in time for next weeks post...