Videos?

Since last Friday, I have been the beneficiary of some much needed work-life balance. As a result of said balance, I am attempting to deepen my "blogging skills" (Not to be confused with computer hacking skills or other such Napoleonic achievements).

Anyway, this first video was taken shortly after Halloween and documents my sadistic amusement at the expense of my child's innocence.


This next one is from back in October and documents Jacob's second day on a two wheeler. We sort of borrowed a play from Suzy's brother John and converted the bike you see here to a "Like-a-Like-a-bike" by removing the pedals. After about a week of tooling around without pedals, Suzy slapped them back on and Jacob was rolling in a few tries. He has since moved from this ridiculously small bike to a 16" bike. We never had to do the hold the seat, chase the kid routine.

Election 2008

Well, my children were very excited to see Barack Obama win the election tonight. They had both decided several weeks ago that they were going to 'vote' for Obama. Here is an excerpt of the conversation when I asked Jacob why he wanted Obama to be the next president:

"Why do you want Obama to win? What do you know about him that makes you think he will be a good president?"
"I like the way he looks."
"You like the way he looks?"
"I like his hair and his skin color. He looks good."

So Jacob was an Obama supporter based on physical appearance but apparently he talked about it at kindergarten (on the playground, I think) and would ask me almost everyday if I had decided who I was going to vote for. Last Friday he was very worried because I only had a few days left and I HAD to decide soon.

Ryan would flip-flop. He started out being an Obama supporter because he thought Obama's first name was "the Rock" and how cool would it be to have a president named "the Rock Obama". However, being the little brother that he is, in recent days he started professing loyalty to John McCain just to disagree with his older brother. Like many, seeing the excitement and energy of election night, Ryan wanted to be part of the action and is once again a blue child.

To give them credit, Jacob and Ryan tried to follow the campaign as much as their attention spans would allow. They would watch parts of the debates with John and whenever they saw pictures of either candidate in the newspaper they would get very excited.

I wish I had a good picture to post for this but I will just put a few random ones up: the kids with Grandpa Y; the boys in the garage putting on a show (after seeing the Blue's Clue's movie where they put on a show), and two pictures from a field trip to the pumpkin patch that John chaperoned for Jacob's class.

Alison's blessing

Alison was blessed on October 12. It was a beautiful day and we were lucky to have both of John's brothers and their families come as well as my parents and Arnold and 'Nise. Alison did well and was only a little fussy during the blessing. Ryan, on the other hand, was a different story. He was so excited to have his cousins at church that he basically lost control. I was pleading with him to stop talking so I could hear some of the prayer. Here are a few pictures of the day.