Home Life

Well, it’s that time of year again and Zachary will be playing spring soccer.  Angela signed me up to be the head-coach this season which stunned me when I got the notices!  🙂  Anyway, tonight, we had a meeting for all soccer coaches where they talked about the rules of the league.  We then picked up all our equipment and rosters.  We have 9 kids this season and I am looking forward to the games.  Wheatland Athletic Association is a good organization to be organized under.  They really care about the kids (who come first before winning).  I like that because it takes off a lot of the pressure.

Tonight Zachary and I went to Literacy night at Gombert Elementary.  Unfortunately, Kirstyn was sick and couldn’t go, so we really missed her there.  Zach LOVES reading and we think he has a photographic memory.  The other day, he sat down at breakfast and looked at a placement of all the states with their capitols and he memorized all of them in the time it took him to eat!  WOW!  We wish we had that kind of memory.

Anyway, the theme of the Literacy Night was around the Olympics.  Zach made a flag that each family carried with them.  On it were things that we like to do as a family around reading.  He drew pictures of the Magic Tree House books, church magazines, and family reading time.

We played all kinds of reading and matching games and had a fun time.  After it was over, Zach got to pick out a gift bag with a book and some treats!  He was really excited to do this and couldn’t wait until it was over!  🙂  Zach just can’t get enough reading and we are so proud of him for loving it.

Tonight I had a wonderful dinner and activity in downtown Chicago!  At work, I am a member of the Customer Advisory Board for LogMeIn, a vendor we work with that provides us the ability to remote into people’s computers from anywhere.  They had a dinner at Smith and Wollensky’s Steak and Chop House in downtown Chicago.  It is one of the best of it’s kind in the city.  I invited two of of my other collegues to come with.  As part of the evening’s activities, they asked me to stand and give a short presentation to the group about how we were using the product.  We have saved a TON of money by using it.

The dinner was awesome and that was just the appetizers!  I was almost full after that.  Dinner (after the casual appetizers) consisted of crab cakes, a 14 oz mouth-watering New York strip steak, garlic mashed potatoes, vegetables, and triple-layer chocolate cake.  Yum!  I drove home home almost ready to burst!  It was a LOT of fun!  I enjoy doing things like this.

Today we celebrated Ben’s birthday with a little party.  He was very excited to have us sing to him and to open his present.  He couldn’t do it fast enough!  🙂  He was so funny to watch!  He would get a present, rifle through the bag, see what it was, get excited for about 5 seconds, and then reach out and ask for the next one!  I think that if we just gave him presents of just bags with nothing in them but a small piece of candy, he would be good!  He just loves opening stuff!  🙂

Brittany made him a “dog” cake (with a little help from Kirstyn) as the present from her and Ben was excited about that!  He LOVES cake and ice cream!  We put him in his chair and when he saw the cake, he went wild!  He was also very excited to blow out the candle on it!

After he blew out the candle, we all had fun eating and talking.  He is getting MUCH better with a spoon and didn’t get as much all over himself as he did last year!  What a cute boy!  We all love him very much!  🙂

Happy Birthday Ben!

Happy Birthday to Benjamin!  Today he turned 2!  My how time flies!  It’s hard to believe that our little guy is growing up so fast!  Brittany and Kirstyn made him a VERY cute cake (picture will be posted when I finally pull it off the camera) and we sang to him and he smiled and clapped!  We will be having a family “party” for him on Sunday when he’ll be opening his presents, blowing out his candles, and eating his cake!

Today the kids were off school and so Angela took them to the portrait studio to have pictures taken.  They turned our VERY well!  Ben is quite the funny kid!  His hair is just getting wilder and wilder by the month!  : -)  They took a bunch of pictures and it was hard for Angela to decide what to purchase!  Here are a couple of the best ones that she decided on:

We can’t wait to get the pictures back and get them hung up in the house!  It’s amazing to see how fast the kids are growing!  It seems like yesterday that Ben was born and now he’s 2!  What’s worse is that it seems like yesterday that we were in college and Sarah was just born.  That was 16+ years ago!   Yikes!  🙂

Angela had a slight delay in getting home and didn’t walk through the front door of our home until about 3:00am!  She was exhausted, but had a GREAT time!  They left Wednesday afternoon and on  Thursday, they shopped, went to the “Lion King” show, and had a blast, Friday, they went to Hoover Dam and hung out some  more, and then Saturday morning, they went to the Las Vegas Temple and had a wonderful session there…

"The Girls" - Yolanda Fisher, Jemma Weisler, Tami Reid, Angela, and Jennifer Nix

Hoover Dam

The Bellagio Fountains at Night in Vegas!

The Las Vegas Temple on Saturday Morning

They all had a GREAT time and laughed and cried together a LOT.  They are talking about making this a yearly event!  🙂  It’s wonderful to have Angela home.  She had a ball telling us all her stories!

Today we worked hard to get the house clean because Angela was coming back home from her Vegas trip!  While we were cleaning, Kirstyn went over to a nearby middle school and took the PA math test to see if she could advance two grades ahead in math next year instead of the one year ahead that she is right now.  Good luck Kirstyn!

After we got everything cleaned up, I finished up all our daddy-daughter and father-son dates by taking Brittany to see Avatar in 3D.  We still hadn’t seen it, even though it’s been out for awhile.  What a GREAT movie, and I got to see it with a GREAT daughter!

Thanks Britt!

After a day of working at home and hoping Benjamin’s brain wouldn’t turn to mush watching TV while I worked, Sarah and I drove into downtown Chicago to go to the Chicago Auto Show!  We had a lot of fun just hanging out, looking at all the new and concept cars, and enjoying each other’s company!  One of Sarah’s highlights was that she got to sit in a black version of Edward Cullin’s Volvo!

She absolutely loved it!  We saw a ton of cool cars, including a Mercedes that was $456,000 to buy!  Yikes!  I couldn’t even believe paying that much money for something like that!  Here are some of the other pictures we took while there…

The one below was Sarah’s favorite car!  It was a total Scion concept car.  The roof opened up into side speakers, and the back was a full open dance floor with a mixer and stereo system that could be operated while standing up in the back.  There were also speakers in the front of the fold-out roof for a total party-mobile!

The Scion concept “pimped-out” car below was one of my favorites!  Whole back of the car slid out and turned into a full gas grill, and the sides of the car slid out and on one side there was a fridge and the other was a sink.  It was a total tailgate car which was really cool!

As you can tell, the Scion area was one of our favorites!  We also loved the Audi, BMW, Mercedes, and lots of other displays.  We were there for about 4 hours, after which we had a quick bite of nachos and then drove home, picking up some McDonald’s along the way because we were starving!

Thanks for a great daddy-daughter date, Sarah!

Today, Angela and 4 other friends left for a “girls vacation” and flew to Las Vegas for 3 days!  They are staying with the parents of one of her friends and going to a show, check out the strip, go to Hoover Dam, attend the temple, do some shopping, and just relax!  We’ll give a full report when she returns!  We’re sure she’ll have a lot of fun!

My motto is “while mom’s away, dad will play!”  That said, tonight I had two dates:  1 with Zach, and one with Kirstyn!  🙂  I have dates planned with each of the kids while Angela is out of town.  Stay tuned for the others…

Zach and I went out to dinner at a little restaurant called Choo Choo Johnny’s.  We had a great time together.  You sit around a long table (kind of like a bar) on bar stools and order your food.  When it’s ready, a train comes around tracks mounted on the bar and brings you your food in baskets!  Zach was REALLY excited to be there!

We had chicken nuggets, grilled cheese, pop, and ice cream.  After that, Zach played with all the games and such and watched the train bring other people their food.  He was in heaven.  He kept saying that he wished the Grandpa Halliday was there to see the trains (Grandpa and him have a train thing going)!  🙂

After Zach and I were done, I took him home, picked up Kirstyn from a band practice, and we went out to see “The Tooth Fairy” movie.  It was actually really funny and we had a lot of laughs.  We filled up on a large popcorn and candy.  It was fun spending time with her as well.  She really wanted to see the movie.

We didn’t get home from the movie until about 8:30 and then Kirstyn was up until about 10:30 or 11:00 finishing her homework!  😐  She didn’t tell me how much she had before we left.  Oops!  🙂

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!

I wasn’t very creative this year but I did give Angela a dozen long-stemmed roses and some chocolate.  She enjoyed them.  We had a long but good day at church and then had  a nice Valentine’s day dinner.

What an interesting holiday that has no real explanation of where it came from (lots of legends), other than to commemorate St. Valentine.

One legend has it that Valentine was a priest who served during the third century in Rome. When Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, he outlawed marriage for young men — his crop of potential soldiers. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. When Valentine’s actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death.  Sounds romantic, doesn’t it?  🙂

While some believe that Valentine’s Day is celebrated in the middle of February to commemorate the anniversary of Valentine’s death or burial — which probably occurred around 270 A.D — others claim that the Christian church may have decided to celebrate Valentine’s feast day in the middle of February in an effort to ‘christianize’ celebrations of the pagan Lupercalia festival. In ancient Rome, February was the official beginning of spring and was considered a time for purification. Houses were ritually cleansed by sweeping them out and then sprinkling salt and a type of wheat called spelt throughout their interiors. Lupercalia, which began at the ides of February, February 15, was a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture, as well as to the Roman founders Romulus and Remus.

Strange…

Today was a VERY interesting day!  A big storm hit us and we got about 8 inches of snow overnight.  It was cold and blowing so it wasn’t very pleasant.  To add to that, at about 4am, we woke up to the house shaking.  For about 10-12 seconds, the bed shook and immediately we knew what it was!  Fortunately it wasn’t a very strong earthquake, measuring about 4 on the Richter Scale.

The epicenter of the quake was located in Virgil, Illinois, about 15-20 miles away from our home.  Fortunately, there was no major damage and no one was hurt.  Some of the residents near the center said the rumble felt like an 18-wheeler rolling through their living room. Others assumed a train derailed.  Crazy stuff!  Things like that don’t usually occur out here!  We have our fair share of tornadoes, but not earthquakes!  🙂