Category Archives: Family

The fire is crackling, the Christmas movies are going, and except for having to go to work tomorrow, this might just be the perfect evening.

We were on-the-go a lot yesterday.  Kayla was invited to a friend’s “bring a friend” soccer class, I had to be in Marietta at the same time for a few hours, then we had a Parent’s Night Out for Kayla at her school and had a friend watch Rebekah for us so we could get a few hours of peace.  We went to see Quantum of Solace and had a nice, quiet dinner.

So, today, we’ve just been enjoying a “family day” here at home all morning.  It’s nice to just slow down, sit around the house, watch a movie, color, drink coffee all morning, etc. once in a while.

We’ll get back to the church search next week, for today, I’m enjoying a Family Day at home with my girls.

Over the weekend, our not-quite-2-week old baby started running a fever.  Not much, but our pediatrician said to take her straight to the ER if it hit 100.5.  When it was 100.4, we decided to take her and made the mistake of going to our local, rural hospital ER.  They did some tests and discharged us telling us to come back if the fever went back up.

Well, Saturday rolled around and we were monitoring her fever.  After her afternoon nap, it was up to 100.7, so we called our pediatrician and after he spoke with the pediatrician on duty at a bigger hospital in the same network, he decided to send us to the Children’s Healthcare hospital.

Wow, these people are awesome.  If you want an example of what private industry can do in conjunction with tax deductible charitable organizations, check out the Children’s Healthcare system.  Everyone (doctors, nurses, techs) has been awesome and it’s wonderful to know that they specialize in children.  You can see the love for children that most, if not all the ones we’ve encountered have.  It almost makes me want to quit my job and find out some way to make a living helping these people care for these kids!

Our little one is doing great.  She’s been on antibiotics, hasn’t had any fever since early Sunday morning, and most of her labs have come back fine.  We still have to wait until tomorrow to get the 2-day culture results to find out if we’re going home or staying another day or two.  That being said, there are some very sick children here.

I have donated small amounts to Children’s Healthcare in the past, but after this experience, I’m going to find a way to fit a regular donation into our budget.  This is what happens when private industry and charitable organizations are allowed to solve the “problems” of our society rather than the government.

Welcome to the world!
8 lbs. 14 oz.
19.5 inches tall
September 21, 2008 5:30am

I’m sitting here in the labor and delivery room.  Valerie is resting (as well as one can with intense cramping every 3 minutes).  She has had some mind-altering drugs, but no epidural yet.

Kayla was born on a Sunday and it looks like this one will be too.  Kayla is so excited about being a big sister–she can’t wait to meet her little brother or sister (we decided to be surprised with this one).

Or, they would have been if both cars suddenly didn’t need major work that actually cost more than said car payment.

First, it was new tires for the Jeep last month.  Unfortunately, the price of tires has gone up.  Way up.  Last time, I had to buy a set it was around $600.  This time, it was $810.  At least they’ll last a while (hopefully at least 50K miles).  Thanks to a good mechanic friend of mine, Amos, I didn’t have to replace the front brakes–he turned the rotors for a very reasonable price and we were good to go on that.

Then, last week, I noticed my Mustang was lurching and/or bucking when I was just cruising down the road maintaining speed.  If I was accelerating or idling, no problem.  I had just filled up recently, so I thought maybe it was bad gas.  The problem got worse until finally on Monday I got a “Check Engine” light.  Oddly, after the check engine light came on, it ran better.

Well, my car has just over 100K miles, so I figured it was time for a tune-up anyway.  Amos is a little inconvenient when I need to leave the car for a period of time, so I took it over to America’s Service Station where Shane takes his car.  I figure if they can keep his ’96 Ford Exploder (that he didn’t change the oil in for the first 60K miles or so that he owned it) running, they could fix my car.

About an hour later, they called and said it was misfiring on a cylinder due to a bad O2 sensor (crap, that sounds expensive) in addition to needing the tune-up ($160 just for plugs and wires).  The nice thing is they told me the coolant flush/fill that I had suggested (I’ve never had it done in the car) was not needed.  So, that saved me a few bucks.  Still, it came out to just a few bucks shy of $800.

Well, I guess I’m glad I don’t have a car payment.  Otherwise, it might have been a challenge to come up with how to pay for the last two months!  I can now, however, give a pretty glowing recommendation to America’s Service Station considering they had the car done by just after lunchtime and actually saved me a few bucks by not doing some of the things they could have.  I wouldn’t have even blinked if they had serviced the coolant system, but they didn’t.

Oh, and it runs a heck of a lot better.  I’ve known something wasn’t quite right for a couple weeks now.  I guess when you drive a car nearly every day for 10 years, you get a bit of a “connection” to it.

It’s official, our house is up for sale. Well, it’ll really go into MLS (2 different listing services) this week, but everything is signed and there is a lockbox on the front door and a sign in the yard.  We’ve put a lot of work into it the past couple months and our realtor was pretty confident that our house will show nicely and sell, so we’ll just have to see!

So, if you know anyone looking to move to a 3 bedroom, 2 bath with a nice, finished room in the basement and 1.3 acres (woods) in Paulding County, GA, let me know.

If you have been wondering what’s become of me, waiting with baited breath and a finger on the refresh button for a new post, and/or just plain stalking me, this post is for you!

The long and short of it is that while we were on our cruise (which was totally awesome and everyone should take one sometime in their life) and after we came back, we’ve been doing a lot of talking about putting our house up on the market.  The part of Georgia we live in (northwest of Atlanta) has seen a huge boom of builders building houses in the $250k and up range–so much so that they are no longer selling and builders are selling at losses just to stay afloat.  Always one to try and improve our situation, we have hopes that our smaller, 3 bedroom, 2 bath on 1.3 acres of woods might sell fairly well if we spruce it up.  So, spruce it up we shall.

Our target is the middle of May and we have a ton to do before then.  Today, we had nearly 3 pallets of sod delivered and layed to cover our front yard where there was a huge lack of grass due to cheap contractors putting in pine straw instead of sod.  I’ll try to post some pictures tomorrow.  They had a bunch left over, so I put most of the rest of it down in another spot while the sun quickly dipped below the horizon.  Then, I spent the night cleaning out the garage with my shop-vac and rearranging stuff to make some room for packed boxes of stuff to go down there out of the way.  Prospective buyers are much more forgiving of a full, but organized garage than a cluttered house!

So, with much much more to do, you might not see as many posts from me for a few weeks.  To top it all off, things are very busy at work too!  I’ve been trying to get a small bug-fix update out for the Mac version and begin working on major feature planning for Safe Eyes 6.0 (Windows) all at the same time.  Plus, I have nearly two full weeks at the end of May and beginning of June where I’ll be in San Francisco.

Just a note to let you know that you won’t be hearing much from me over the next week.  We will be on a very large boat somewhere in the Caribbean.  I am taking a huge step (for me) and leaving home both the iPhone and the MacBook.  I will probably sneak into the “computer lounge” on the boat at least once or twice to check personal email (and maybe the Clan Elysium forum), but other than that, I am off the grid!  With my usual high level of connectivity, going “cold turkey” should be an interesting experience, but I think I can do it.

The most interesting thing about this vacation is that we will be without children.  Well, sort of.  Obviously, “Jellybean” will be with us since you can’t really leave him/her home.  This is unusual for us as we haven’t taken a vacation without Kayla since before she was born.  My mom was gracious enough to come down to stay with Kayla and Kayla is very excited about getting to play with Nana all week.  Although, I’m not sure she realizes yet that it comes at the expense of mommy and daddy being gone.

Since I will have time to read and listen to my iPod (two things that are hard to do on vacation with kids), I picked up a few new tunes.  Joe Satriani’s “The Electric Joe Satriani: An Anthology” which is basically 2 discs worth of Satriani’s best which iTunes had for $9.99.  I also grabbed Fireflight’s “The Healing of Harms” which I just found out about recently.  They’re a somewhat Evanescence-esque Christian band.

So, enjoy the week and don’t trash the place while I’m gone, ok?!

My good friend (and boss), Aaron, has been running a series on his blog about protecting your identity and credit.  I am all for that and I know I personally don’t do enough, so I thought I’d go ahead and post a link here to some good information on protecting your identity and credit.