Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Easter Dresses
All little girls need cute Easter and Christmas dresses I've decided. I just had to put my girls in matching dresses and they were just the cutest. Sorry there aren't more pictures, our camera ran out of batteries and we had to go to church. We had to change the girls right after church so we couldn't get anymore pictures then.
Sunday, April 16, 2006
Rollover
The big news is that Rachel is now rolling over. She's definitely growing and developing. She grabs onto toys better now and seems to be learning how to control her hands better. She is getting to be cuter and cuter. With her, there is no mistaking who she looks like, it's definitely Alicia. We got some baby pictures of Alicia out and she's a dead ringer.
Elizabeth is also growing up. She is just so cute, when she's not being a normal demanding two year old. She knows a lot of letters now, and she points them out to me when I read her stories at night. She is getting better at running too. Tonight she took me on a walk all around the neighborhood. I noticed that now she makes little fists and bends her elbows when she runs, it's cute. She used to just flail her arms all over the place.
A few weeks back we were having a terrible time getting her to stay in her room at night. She would come out of her room dozens of times a night, it was infuriating. Every book and resource we've heard of say just to take them back to bed and make no fuss over it. Yeah, that didn't work. Finally, we decided to shut her in her room. I write this hesitatingly because I don't want children's services knocking on my door, but the short story is that it worked. She threw a tantrum a couple of nights in a row, but we waited it out until she fell asleep (unlike other times). After that she's stayed in her room quite well.
The worst part, however, was that we found out later that she had a minor ear infection. She never had one before, to our knowledge, but she had just gotten over a cold. I felt terrible. Go ahead, let the insults fly in the comments section.
Well, I returned my HDTV tuner card from the last post. I was having intermittent hardware problems with it, and the DivX conversion wasn't working as well as I had hoped. In the end, I thought it was just too much money and too much time for not that much benefit. I didn't want to watch TV on my computer, it's not in a comfortable location.
Even more of a motivation, however, was that the weather started getting better. I decided I would rather spend the money on cycling and camping stuff. I'm getting excited about getting out and doing these things again after winter.
In unrelated news, I had a bit of a scare today. I was making a poppy seed cake, and of course I had to lick the beaters. Well, after that my chest and throat started constricting and I had difficult breathing. I recognized this reaction from the allergy shots I'm currently taking for my grass allergies. Alicia says she remembers me having a more mild reaction to poppy seeds before, but I know that I've eaten plenty of poppy seed muffins in my day, without any problems. Either it's a late onset allergy, or I think it may have something to do with myself baking with real poppy seeds. It seems like when I buy poppy seed muffins the poppy seeds don't have the same oil that these seeds had. At any rate, I took an antihistamine, but for about 15-30 minutes there I was having a hard time. Maybe I should get an epi pen :-)
One more fun fact about Elizabeth. Since finding the ear infection we've been giving her antibiotics, and she just loves it. She usually loves all kinds of medicine. I don't know if it's just the flavoring or if she actually can make the correlation to how medicine makes her feel (probably the former). But tonight I would give her any (the time for the antibiotics is up). She did not like that. She is definitely a two year old, she has distinct wishes and lets you know when they are not being met.
Today when I was walking with her we passed by a house on our street with a whole bunch of people outside speaking Spanish. They had a couple of one year olds and Elizabeth was interested in seeing them (the feeling was mutual, it was pretty cute). So I stopped and tried to speak a little spanish with them. They seemed to be excited when they heard me speak spanish but then I made the mistake of saying I only speak a little bit. I'm sure they get tired of that, just like I would get tired of people saying one or two phrases of English to me in my mission. I then told them I lived in Chile for a while, but they pretty much spoke to me in English, I bounced back and forth between the two languages. The sad thing is, that I probably do only speak a little bit of spanish now. I haven't kept up with it very well. I am excited about a new feature Google News has added, however. I usually try to read Google News in spansih for Chile, but what I really wanted was US news in spanish. Well, they've added a category for United States news. I would like to think it was because of the suggestion I submitted. One person can make a difference.
Elizabeth is also growing up. She is just so cute, when she's not being a normal demanding two year old. She knows a lot of letters now, and she points them out to me when I read her stories at night. She is getting better at running too. Tonight she took me on a walk all around the neighborhood. I noticed that now she makes little fists and bends her elbows when she runs, it's cute. She used to just flail her arms all over the place.
A few weeks back we were having a terrible time getting her to stay in her room at night. She would come out of her room dozens of times a night, it was infuriating. Every book and resource we've heard of say just to take them back to bed and make no fuss over it. Yeah, that didn't work. Finally, we decided to shut her in her room. I write this hesitatingly because I don't want children's services knocking on my door, but the short story is that it worked. She threw a tantrum a couple of nights in a row, but we waited it out until she fell asleep (unlike other times). After that she's stayed in her room quite well.
The worst part, however, was that we found out later that she had a minor ear infection. She never had one before, to our knowledge, but she had just gotten over a cold. I felt terrible. Go ahead, let the insults fly in the comments section.
Well, I returned my HDTV tuner card from the last post. I was having intermittent hardware problems with it, and the DivX conversion wasn't working as well as I had hoped. In the end, I thought it was just too much money and too much time for not that much benefit. I didn't want to watch TV on my computer, it's not in a comfortable location.
Even more of a motivation, however, was that the weather started getting better. I decided I would rather spend the money on cycling and camping stuff. I'm getting excited about getting out and doing these things again after winter.
In unrelated news, I had a bit of a scare today. I was making a poppy seed cake, and of course I had to lick the beaters. Well, after that my chest and throat started constricting and I had difficult breathing. I recognized this reaction from the allergy shots I'm currently taking for my grass allergies. Alicia says she remembers me having a more mild reaction to poppy seeds before, but I know that I've eaten plenty of poppy seed muffins in my day, without any problems. Either it's a late onset allergy, or I think it may have something to do with myself baking with real poppy seeds. It seems like when I buy poppy seed muffins the poppy seeds don't have the same oil that these seeds had. At any rate, I took an antihistamine, but for about 15-30 minutes there I was having a hard time. Maybe I should get an epi pen :-)
One more fun fact about Elizabeth. Since finding the ear infection we've been giving her antibiotics, and she just loves it. She usually loves all kinds of medicine. I don't know if it's just the flavoring or if she actually can make the correlation to how medicine makes her feel (probably the former). But tonight I would give her any (the time for the antibiotics is up). She did not like that. She is definitely a two year old, she has distinct wishes and lets you know when they are not being met.
Today when I was walking with her we passed by a house on our street with a whole bunch of people outside speaking Spanish. They had a couple of one year olds and Elizabeth was interested in seeing them (the feeling was mutual, it was pretty cute). So I stopped and tried to speak a little spanish with them. They seemed to be excited when they heard me speak spanish but then I made the mistake of saying I only speak a little bit. I'm sure they get tired of that, just like I would get tired of people saying one or two phrases of English to me in my mission. I then told them I lived in Chile for a while, but they pretty much spoke to me in English, I bounced back and forth between the two languages. The sad thing is, that I probably do only speak a little bit of spanish now. I haven't kept up with it very well. I am excited about a new feature Google News has added, however. I usually try to read Google News in spansih for Chile, but what I really wanted was US news in spanish. Well, they've added a category for United States news. I would like to think it was because of the suggestion I submitted. One person can make a difference.
Sunday, April 09, 2006
Spring is Finally Here!
Well, it's official, spring is here in Ohio. The daffodils and tulips are out and the weather has been nice and warm. We've even had some fun thunderstorms, what would the midwest be like without those? I'm excited to start my garden tomorrow and we'll see how much of a green thumb I have this year.
My little girls are growing bigger everyday as you can see by the pictures. Rachel is rolling over, mostly in bed when we're not looking. She's definitely more active now and will put any toy straight to her mouth before throwing it and loves to kick her legs. Elizabeth is learning her alphabet, colors, and numbers. I'm also trying to relearn some Spanish with her even though she doesn't really have English down yet but it's coming. She loves going for walks once again and we have to go in the stroller, ah my wonderful jogging stroller that I love! Hopefully we'll be able to get out jogging in it pretty soon since the mornings aren't as freezing anymore.
Enjoy the pictures of the cutest girls in the world (no bias there). Yes, Rachel does smile, I just haven't been able to get it on camera yet.
My little girls are growing bigger everyday as you can see by the pictures. Rachel is rolling over, mostly in bed when we're not looking. She's definitely more active now and will put any toy straight to her mouth before throwing it and loves to kick her legs. Elizabeth is learning her alphabet, colors, and numbers. I'm also trying to relearn some Spanish with her even though she doesn't really have English down yet but it's coming. She loves going for walks once again and we have to go in the stroller, ah my wonderful jogging stroller that I love! Hopefully we'll be able to get out jogging in it pretty soon since the mornings aren't as freezing anymore.
Enjoy the pictures of the cutest girls in the world (no bias there). Yes, Rachel does smile, I just haven't been able to get it on camera yet.
Saturday, April 01, 2006
Latest with Eric
Well, I know I promised something inflammatory, which is mainly why it took me so long to write something. However, it's not ready yet. In the mean time, I thought I should write something down.
Scouting is, of course, always a big part of my life right now. A few weeks ago we had a winter "lock-in." Basically that means that the boys came over and we slept in my (unfinished) basement and played video games. We had the boys bring a TV and some gaming systems over. I think I impressed them a little bit because one boy brought a system that didn't have the right connector and I recognized what it needed and took out my soldering iron and soldered the wires together with it. We had a lot of fun.
After that we did scouting for food in my neighborhood. That's a program where we hand out flyers one week telling people to put bags out of food and we collect them the next week. We had a dismal performance. We handed out a few hundred fliers and got 6-7 bags.
The latest toy I've been playing with is an HDTV tuner card that I bought (DViCO FusionHDTV 5 RT Gold). For those of you who don't know, that's a card that goes in my PC and allows me to watch and record over the air HDTV broadcasts. There are six stations locally that broadcast digital TV. We get all of them, with varying success for the WB (low transmit power, but who cares about the WB?). Anyway, it's awesome. Especially since I can record and later transcode the file to a DivX file, which basically fits a DVD quality movie on a CD. I have DivX player, so I can downconvert HD quality programs to standard definition and play it on our DVD player. My video card does let me output HD content to an HDTV for when we buy one, but the computer is in a different room, so that won't work too well. I grabbed a screenshot so you can check out the quality. You can click for a higher resolution. However, Blogger won't let me put the full res image up, it is 1280x760 pixels. Note that I do NOT watch NASCAR, I just grabbed an image of whatever was playing at the time.
So we're watching General Conference online through BYU-TV. There are feeds in two formats, and only one of them works for me. We just got through the Saturday morning session and all went well, we'll keep our fingers crossed. I think it's a good idea to sit in uncomfortable chairs, you pay more attention and don't fall asleep.
I'm currently reading the biography of Joseph Smith by Richard Bushman. I'm enjoying it a lot and I'll post a review when I'm finished. I also got a cool issue of the BYU Studies magazine recently. It's the proceedings of the conference they had at the Library of Congress last year. about Joseph Smith.
Scouting is, of course, always a big part of my life right now. A few weeks ago we had a winter "lock-in." Basically that means that the boys came over and we slept in my (unfinished) basement and played video games. We had the boys bring a TV and some gaming systems over. I think I impressed them a little bit because one boy brought a system that didn't have the right connector and I recognized what it needed and took out my soldering iron and soldered the wires together with it. We had a lot of fun.
After that we did scouting for food in my neighborhood. That's a program where we hand out flyers one week telling people to put bags out of food and we collect them the next week. We had a dismal performance. We handed out a few hundred fliers and got 6-7 bags.
The latest toy I've been playing with is an HDTV tuner card that I bought (DViCO FusionHDTV 5 RT Gold). For those of you who don't know, that's a card that goes in my PC and allows me to watch and record over the air HDTV broadcasts. There are six stations locally that broadcast digital TV. We get all of them, with varying success for the WB (low transmit power, but who cares about the WB?). Anyway, it's awesome. Especially since I can record and later transcode the file to a DivX file, which basically fits a DVD quality movie on a CD. I have DivX player, so I can downconvert HD quality programs to standard definition and play it on our DVD player. My video card does let me output HD content to an HDTV for when we buy one, but the computer is in a different room, so that won't work too well. I grabbed a screenshot so you can check out the quality. You can click for a higher resolution. However, Blogger won't let me put the full res image up, it is 1280x760 pixels. Note that I do NOT watch NASCAR, I just grabbed an image of whatever was playing at the time.
So we're watching General Conference online through BYU-TV. There are feeds in two formats, and only one of them works for me. We just got through the Saturday morning session and all went well, we'll keep our fingers crossed. I think it's a good idea to sit in uncomfortable chairs, you pay more attention and don't fall asleep.
I'm currently reading the biography of Joseph Smith by Richard Bushman. I'm enjoying it a lot and I'll post a review when I'm finished. I also got a cool issue of the BYU Studies magazine recently. It's the proceedings of the conference they had at the Library of Congress last year. about Joseph Smith.
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