This is one scene around the house that I never get tired of seeing! Even if he isn’t really so much as talking yet, Christopher seems to love flipping through books, whether they’re these big picture books meant to help him learn words or even just regular story books. I was always very much into reading growing up, so…
Apr 19, 2016: Homemade Cherry Coke
I’d forgotten just how addicting soda can be! This week I’ve consumed more than I would probably care to, mostly because I’m still coming off of my cold and it’s something simple that I’ve been enjoying, but also because I finally figured out how to make Cherry Coke the right way that used to be a lot harder…
Apr 13, 2016: Wasps?! Why Did It Have to be Wasps???
When I discovered earlier today that the AC in my house wasn’t working, a lot of things went through my head… For a brief, deluded period I wondered if I could actually fix it myself. Then I wondered if this was going to turn into my very expensive lesson for not renewing our home warranty…
Apr 12, 2016: Special Delivery
For those of you who’ve been following along with the crisis on Twitter … yes, my furniture did finally arrive! I know, I know – it’s just a bench – but in my defense, it really brings the room together, and it gives me a place to tie my shoes because my bed is really…
Apr 11, 2016: Undivided Attention
It’s so rare for us to focus on any one thing at a given time these days … sometimes it’s a little sad. Sad, I suppose, because although it started off merely as multi-tasking that at least has good intentions, let’s be honest that with the advent of social media in particular, more often than not we’re not even dividing…
Apr 10, 2016: House Hunting
We’re not really in the market to be buying a new house right now, but after finding a listing last night that was intriguing and happened to be having an open house today, we decided to pop in and see what it was all about anyways… The thought of our current house being a tad bit…
Apr 9, 2016: Your Mother Doesn’t Work in the Magic Kingdom Parking Lot
How is it that litterbugs aren’t a class of people who’ve been shunned out of society yet??? When you cut somebody off in traffic or cuss in front of a toddler, it’s still a reasonable excuse to claim that you merely weren’t paying attention, but unless you’re being chased by a group of thugs and the…
Apr 8, 2016: One Berkshire
Today I bought my first share of Berkshire Hathaway. Mind you, Berkshire has two classes of its common stock – Class A that runs something like $200,000 a share right now, and Class B that runs, well, less … so just to be clear, I bought Class B… 😛 Still, it was kind of a special purchase for me because…
Apr 7, 2016: Banana Shortage
Only when you’ve got a toddler in the middle of his I only want to eat bananas-phase is it possible to walk into your local Target and find nary a single bananular fruit in all of their entire produce section… Except for a small rack of super unripe, organic bananas that we soon found out were pretty much unedible on…
Apr 6, 2016: Trampoline!
It’s not hard to see why kids are always getting themselves into trouble for jumping on the bed when to your average toddler, a king-size bed is pretty much the perfect trampoline. Granted, I’m probably not helping the situation by repeatedly tossing him up into the air so that he can plummet with laughter into…
Apr 3, 2016: Bark Park
Against my better judgement, today I took both dog and child to the park for a bit of running around … all by myself! Admittedly, a big part of it was self-serving just to get away from house for a while because apparently our new neighbors have this thing about spending pretty much all of…
Apr 2, 2016: Shredded Debt
I finally broke down and bought a shredder – mostly due to a growing stack of credit cards that I’d rather not just cut in half and throw in the trash. The downside is that now after shredding roughly 20 cards, the kitchen smells vaguely of melting plastic. The upside, of course, is that shredding things…
Apr 1, 2016: Is That a Shark???
“Never look a gift shark in the mouth.” “A shark on your roof is worth two in the sea.” “Some days you just can’t get rid of a shark!” A lot of things went through my head when I was driving home this evening and saw this building that appeared to have a shark coming through the…
Mar 31, 2016: Refocus
This has been one of those weeks, and yet my trusty calendar tells me that it’s not even over yet! Between trying to get back in gear from last week’s birthday festivities, coupled with illness recovery, trying to adjust to Sara moving temporarily from nights to days at work, a lack of motivation due to…
Mar 28, 2016: Flight School
I’ve always liked Tampa’s airport … possibly for a lot of the same reasons I like Tampa as a city itself. It’s big, but not so big that it’s easy to get lost and/or murdered wandering around it. It’s typically pretty clean, as opposed to Detroit Metro which I always used to fly out of and is…
Mar 27, 2016: Having a Ball!
We learned a valuable lesson today – when one desires to get nice, family photos out of a group of kids, it’s best to take those photos early in the day and not several hours past nap time… 😛 Still, it’s nice to see that Christopher enjoys playing with his cousins now that they’re close enough that visitation doesn’t require a…
Mar 26, 2016: Boy Builder
It’s good to be the birthday boy! Christopher got so many Duplos for his birthday – I think we’re going to be building trains and rocket ships and wildlife refuges for the next year! Though granted for now we seem to just be getting really good at building gigantic towers… In fact, I started building a few…
Mar 25, 2016: Life is Like a Boat
Sometimes things manage to stay remarkably on course, and sometimes the lady in front of you does a 180 and runs into your boat head-on while also blocking the entire waterway for ancillary boaters even further upstream… So today is Christopher’s 2nd birthday! We’re actually breaking up the festivities over several days – yesterday was…
Mar 24, 2016: A Day Later…
This was supposed to be yesterday, so at least we’re only 24-hours off schedule after being derided by The Great Sevener Family Stomach Bug of 2016! Today we went to the beach. A gorgeous, out of the way beach that until earlier this afternoon I didn’t even know existing, but is certainly going to get some of our recreational time in…
Mar 23, 2016: 24 Hours in Bed (Almost)
The human body wasn’t meant to spend an entire day at a time in bed … as much as I certainly do love my sleep from time to time! So yesterday was a bit rough when that nasty bug that the kid drudged his way through managed to snake its way back through the rest…
Mar 22, 2016: Sicko
Of all the firsts that I’ve enjoyed seeing Christopher experience over the last two years, his first time throwing up most certainly isn’t one of them … and yet here we are, a week before the little guy’s second birthday and he’s barely been able to keep anything but Pedialyte down the last couple of days… And not for nothing, but at $6 a bottle that…
Mar 21, 2016: Cutting Nails
There was a time when my wife and I actually tried cutting our dog’s nails ourselves, but that was long ago and frankly, I don’t miss those times one bit! It was a horrible process, so we didn’t do it very often … which also coincidentally resulted in it being a horrible process. It literally took two of us to…
Mar 20, 2016: Picture This!
For whatever reason it dawned on me today that I’d started putting together this new blog of family photos however many months ago, and then even after struggling to get the swanky domain name that I wanted, I don’t think I ever actually got around to sharing the link or even writing a post about…
Mar 19, 2016: Time Management
I’ve been spending a good bit of time lately … ironically … trying to figure out how to be more productive with my time. It’s something that I’ve always struggled with creatively when I’ve got a limited amount of time in the day and a seemingly endless list of things that I want to do, and as much…