Winters are So Boring in Maryland

Ok, so I know it’s been a while since I blogged, but winters out here are so boring.  Most of the things that we like to go see and do are outdoors.  Even though there’s not much going on, I figured I had still better go ahead and blog before I get any more hate mail.  So, here are some mostly-true stories that hopefully brighten up your day.

Well, Reagan is officially mobile.  She’s crawling all over the place these days.  As exciting as that is, it’s been a nice little reminder that we have a bunch of stuff that we now have to guard.  Baskets stand watch in front of the computer as chairs take their post as centurions blocking the pathway into the kitchen. 

The other day it all became worth it though.  Normally when I arrive home from work, Tyler will run and meet me at the door and give me a big hug.  Then I’ll give him either my lunch box or a piece of mail or something and while he’s distracted I’ll say hello to Thesha (or as Tyler like’s to say, “Hi to babe” – I give Thesha a kiss and say “Hi, babe.”).  Then I’ll go and find Reagan and hold her for a few minutes.  Well the other day she was following Tyler around so as I came in the door and got my hug from Tyler, here came Reagan following close behind.  She crawled – well, she was still lunging at that point – down the hallway to meet me at the door.  She came the whole way and was laughing and smiling the whole way.  It was adorable.

In addition to gaining mobility, Reagan’s personality is really starting to shine through these days.  I’m sure parent’s of daughters know exactly what I mean by that sentence.  When Tyler is upset he’ll cry or throw a tantrum or something.  When Reagan gets upset, she just yells at me.  Yes, she looks me straight in the face and her demeanor goes from this…

to this…

Yes, we’re all learning to get (and stay) on Reagan’s good side.

In addition to crawling all over the place, Reagan is learning to pull herself up onto toys, the couch, our legs, or whatever’s in her way.  One day she was crawling up on the little push cart (I don’t know what they’re really called, but you’ll see what I mean in the picture) so we decided to sit her in it and let her push herself around. 

I instantly became the dad in the car insurance commercials nervously watching as his daughter started to “drive” for the first time.  A proud but nervous moment.  Here she is so excited to go out and explore on her new toy.

In my mind I thought of all the scary, dangerous, and life-changing events that might happen when she’s really out on her own.  It went a little something like this…

It’s late on a Friday night.  Everyone was celebrating the homecoming victory of the local high school football team.  Suddenly the silence of the cool fall evening is disrupted by flashing red and blue lights.  Now pulled off to the side of the road, an officer shines his flashlight into the driver’s side window of a classic 1st driver car and asks, “Excuse me miss…

… but have you been drinking?”

To her relief, her brother is there to distract the officer.

“Whu sheems to be the problem… Occifer?

As the Officer turns his head to avoid getting contact drunk from their breath, Reagan quickly throws the half-empty cup from the car.  Looking back at the officer with her big blue eyes she asks…

“Can’t we just make this a warning?  Wink…wink…”

NO…No…, oh… it was just a nightmare.

Still.  I’ve already grounded Reagan for life and explained to her that driving is a total drag and that she should never learn how to do it.   Tyler’s punishment is that he now has to clean up Reagan’s spit-up off the carpet so he realizes how bad it would really be to spend time with a bunch of drunks.

Ok, back to reality.  If you look down to our blog about this year’s Christmas, you’ll see a picture of Tyler opening up a present that is full of books.  Those of you from Thesha’s family are probably thinking, “Oh that’s so great that you’re getting him interested in reading.”  Those of you from my side of the family are probably thinking, “You got him something cool, too, right?”  Actually, Tyler has gotten more enjoyment out of these books than probably any other gift we’ve ever given him.  I can’t imagine where he get’s his love of books from, but it looks like Thesha won’t be the only one around here getting books for every birthday, Christmas, or Cinco de Mayo … what? Mexican’s love to read.

Every night we get to sit together and read about Lego City, or Lightning McQueen, or the Cat in the Hat. 

Reagan loves to reach out and touch the pictures and this drives Tyler nuts.  He’s always pushing her hands away and sighing at her for disrupting the story.  Ahh the start of wrestling matches which are sure to come.

As the final thought for this blog, we are excited that Reagan’s hair has started to get long enough that Thesha can do a little styling.  We thought the earrings would be enough to help people realize she wasn’t a little boy (as if all the pink crap wasn’t enough) but apparently there are still some nice but dumb people out there.  With her hair done, it’s impossible to mistake her for a boy anymore.  Here are some glamour shots.  (Well, as glamorous as you can get with a runny nose and a bib on.)

If anyone mistakes her for a boy now I’m pretty sure I’m legally bound to kick them in the throat.

Little Gems

Well, there’s not much to blog about this week, but I couldn’t help but share one of the little gems that keep us smiling.

Ever since we got back from our trip, for some reason Tyler has started using a lot more adverbs, adjectives, and superlatives.  Things that used to be hot are now “really, really hot” and things that used to be fast are now “more fast.”  Well, tonight as we sat down to a bowl of ice cream for our family night refreshment, Tyler gave us all a nice little chuckle.  As he sat there shoveling the ice cream into his mouth as fast as Chadli at Oktoberfest, he looked up with a drip of melted vanilla goodness oozing down his chin and said, “It’s freezin’ cold.”  What are we going to do with this kid?

We also thought it would be good to share our family calendar pictures for those interested. 

Happy Holidays 2010/2011

Well, there are probably a lot of you reading this that have been waiting for several weeks for us to finally post our pictures of our trip back to Utah.  Well hold your horses a little longer ‘cause first you have to read through the obligatory Christmas Day stuff.

Well, we made it through our 2nd Christmas in Maryland.  With the trip to Utah scheduled for the day after Christmas we tried to keep the gifts pretty modest this year but Tyler and Reagan still seemed to love it.  It was really fun to see Tyler start to understand a little bit more about what Christmas is.  We found this site where you could enter information in about your kid then it would generate a movie of Santa Claus talking to your child.  When Tyler saw Santa and heard him say his name he was instantly mesmerized by it.  It was really fun.

We decided this year to get Tyler a little kitchen set.  For the last two months he had been walking around with Mr. Potato Head parts in a cup sipping it like it was soup and asking us if it tasted good.  Maybe it was all the times we had him help Thesha make cookies or something, but that kid loves to be in the kitchen.  Since we’re in a little apartment, however, having him in the actual kitchen with us is a pain because there’s just not enough room for us all.  So now we just let him pretend to cook in his kitchen and everyone’s happy.  Of course now I have to pretend to eat a plastic piece of pizza and say “mmmm, it’s good” but that’s better than potato head soup.  At 6 months old, Reagan was just happy to have something new to put in her mouth.  I could go on about what we actually got her but the reality is that we basically got her a bunch of different things to stick in her mouth or puke on. 

Here are some pictures of Christmas morning

Alright, assuming you didn’t just skip through that and jump to the pictures below, here’s the scoop on our trip.

It was kind of a different Christmas for us because once the Christmas morning activities were done we pretty much spent the rest of the afternoon getting ready for our trip.  As we started to see a few snowflakes fall we began to worry about our flight.  I kept checking and checking throughout the day and everything seemed fine until about 8:00 at night (keep in mind that we were supposed to get up at 4:00 the next morning to get to the airport in time).  With basically no snow on the ground we found out our flight had been cancelled due to the weather.  We spent the next 2-3 hours trying to get rebooked on another flight but the website kept giving us errors and when you called the customer service center you got a standard message that “Due to extreme weather conditions, we’re unable to take your call.”  I realize different locations have different uses for words and phrases, but I’m pretty sure that “extreme weather conditions” means something a little more than just a few snowflakes. 

After hours of frustration we finally got rebooked but not until the day after our original plans.  We assumed we’d probably end up stuck at some airport half-way across the country, but we figured we should at least give it a shot.  If nothing else it would give us some material for the blog.  When our direct flight turned into a flight to Minneapolis then to Denver then to SLC, we thought for sure we were screwed.  Then when our flight out of Baltimore was 40 minutes late and we only had a 45 minute layover in Minneapolis we pretty much resigned ourselves to the reality that we would be stuck in icy Minnesota for the evening.  Luckily we got there early enough that they were able to fit us on a red-eye flight from Minneapolis to SLC arriving at Midnight (that’d be 2:00 AM for those of us on the East coast).  Oh the kids loved that one.  Actually they both did really well.  And in Minneapolis we actually bumped into a pilot who was really nice and gave us a little more information about why our flight was probably cancelled even though our weather was fine.  Apparently he was still trying to get home to see his kids for Christmas and he’d gotten stuck on the East coast as well.  When he hadn’t even seen his kids for Christmas yet, we pretty much had to come to terms with our anger about the whole situation and realize that it could have been worse.

So at 2:30 in the morning on I can’t remember which day we finally laid down to rest at Thesha’s mom’s house.  They made it so nice for us and the kids absolutely loved being with their Grandma and Grandpa Checketts.

Here are a few pictures of us catching up with Thesha’s family.

It was so much fun to see Tyler and Reagan with their Aunts, Uncles, Cousins, and Grandparents.  It was especially exciting for us to be able to introduce everyone to our little Reagan.  It’s great that we have this blog to be able to share pictures, but there’s just no way to share her personality except through first-hand interactions.

For New Years Eve, we got together with my family at the Spare Time Fun Center in Syracuse.  We were able to bowl, have some pizza, jump on the trampolines, play laser tag (which the guys totally kicked butt at, by the way), and just have a good time laughing and spending time together.

My favorite part of the evening, however, was watching Tyler climb in the inflatable jungle gym.  The first time through it was funny to see Corbin hoisting Tyler up the climbing walls, shoving him over the top, then sliding him down the slides.  It was fun to see him have a chance to interact with his cousins.  Although I’m sure Tyler enjoyed it too, I think he preferred going through the obstacles without a diaper-wedgie, however, so he quickly learned how to get himself up the climbing wall and down the slide. 

When he started up the climbing wall for the first time by himself I thought, “well, at least he’ll be falling onto something soft.”  I was pretty shocked to see him navigate up the wall all by himself, figuring out how to reposition his feet, reach up, then steadily move up each obstacle until he reached the top.  I spent time with 30 year olds that didn’t know how to climb up a wall when I was going to all those military trips a couple years ago yet here was Tyler figuring it out at the age of 2.  I was a pretty proud papa that night and I could have watched him do that over and over again. 

Here are some pictures of our New Year’s Eve party.  By the way, I think Reagan beat us all at bowling.  Whatever…

I know there are a lot of people out in Utah that we would have loved to see, but there seemed to be so many places to go and so little time to do it all.  Thanks to everyone who helped make this trip a reality.  We’re hopeful we’ll be able to get out there again soon – maybe for good if we’re lucky.  Until then, thanks for the memories and we’ll see you all again soon.

Catching up

I know it’s been a few weeks since our last blog post.  I’ve actually meant to write something a few times but just got sidetracked by one thing or another.  Excuses aside, let’s get caught up.

Probably the biggest news lately is that our little girl had her first milestone of woman-hood - - - she got her little ears pierced.  The weekend she turned 6 months old we took her to the mall and turned the swarm of sales associates at the Claire’s loose.  Reagan was such a good little girl in spite of the painful experience.  She was done crying by the time we got to the register.  Yes, her first milestone as a woman also marked my first milestone as the father of a woman – forking out an unreasonable amount of money for two microscopic pieces of jewelry.  Here are some close-ups of her new bling.

One of the reasons we were so excited to get Reagan’s ears pierced was to finally make it impossible for strangers to mistake her for a little boy.  Apparently the mountain of pick clothes, blankets, etc. weren’t enough.  Obviously a little baby with two diamond earrings (ok, Cubic Zirconia, but whatever) would clearly be a baby girl, right?  Well, the other night we were out and about and an older woman was commenting about our kids but still kept referring to Reagan as a boy.  At first we were kind of bugged about it, but after the lady left we came to understand that she was obviously just mistaking her for an NFL wide receiver – the only other boys that have two diamond earrings. 

In other news, we’ve been having lots of fun this year teaching Tyler about Christmas.  We have a couple of Christmas books that we read each night, we’ve had Christmas related lessons during FHE, and we’ve been introducing him to the most common Christmas tradition – making and eating Christmas goodies.  Here are some pictures of our Christmas Cookie making FHE activity.

While it’s been fun working with Tyler on his understanding of Christmas, it’s amazing how quickly he latched on to the words “Santa Claus.”  We’ll say, “Tyler, can you say Christmas Tree?” … “Santa Claus.”  “Tyler, can you say baby Jesus?” … “Santa Claus.”  “Tyler, what does Dad’s belly remind you of?”… “Solid Granite.”  "Good boy!”

Lastly, a couple days ago we celebrated my 33rd birthday.  Yes, 33… Old enough that there’s no big birthday bash anymore but not old enough that you can start doing stupid stuff and blame it on old age.  In spite of the mediocrity of the milestone, Thesha was so nice and made me a cake and everything.  Now that Tyler understands the whole birthday concept, she wanted to make sure that he saw that it was Dad’s Birthday.  What he saw was Dad making a goof of himself – like he needed a special occasion to see that.  Thankfully she spared us all the fire hazard and only used two sets of three candles. 

Well, that’s about it.  This will probably be the last post before the holidays and our trip back to Utah.  Merry Christmas to all our friends and family!  We’ll catch up with you all in 2011.

Happy Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a time to sit with family and friends and remember all the things your thankful for.  Well, this year we were very thankful that we had a chance to sit with family and friends and remember that we certainly do have much to be thankful for.  One thing quite prominent in our minds that we have to be thankful for is that at least this year isn’t last year.  To quote myself from our Nov. 3oth 2009 blog post, “Well, it sucked.”  Last year Thanksgiving dinner consisted of Ramen noodles and a turkey sandwich from the gas station.  This year Thanksgiving was an awesome fried turkey with stuffing, two kinds of potatoes, rolls, Jell-o salad, pumpkin pie… a REAL Thanksgiving.  We owe a HUGE thanks to our friends the Williams for inviting us over to their house to share the holiday.  It was great.

In addition to getting the meal right this year and spending the day with friends, we also finally got a chance to Skype with my family.  I’m sure most of them wondered if it was really worth the 45 minutes of work to try to get the technology to work, but it was great for us to see how big all the kids had gotten and to fill that spot in the holiday that requires you to get agitated around your family.  Now we just have to keep practicing so we’re all familiar enough with the technology that it isn’t such a big deal for future events.  I must admit, however, that I did at one point confess that it’s probably a good thing that we’ll be coming back for a face-to-face visit around Christmas. 

In addition to being thankful for a plate full of extra calories and a family to make fun of you for eating it all, the other thing we’re thankful for this year is the fact that we had a really enjoyable weekend with the kids.  Last year we spent most of the nights after Thanksgiving in the emergency room with Tyler having a fever of 104.  This year we spent the weekend watching Reagan learn how to sit all by herself.  It was so much fun.  She had been sitting a little before, but this weekend she really figured it out.  We found that the trick was to give her a toy to play with and that would keep her attention forward so she wouldn’t fall backwards.  Here’s a picture of her with some toys giving it a try.  Notice the huge puke rag … I mean burp cloth (ok, puke rag) in the background.  I didn’t say it was a clean experience.

As we continued to work with Reagan we tried a handful of different toys to keep her attention.  As it turns out, her favorite was a big rubber ball.  Tyler would get in on the fun as well – sitting in front of her and rolling the ball back to her as she knocked it his way.  The funniest part was the sound she makes.  There’s no way I could type it so I had to include a video.  The only way I can think of to describe it is that she’s able to make the sound that the old analog TVs would make when you went to a channel that wasn’t broadcasting and just got the fuzzy picture.  Take a look and turn up the volume and you’ll see what I mean.

Baby Reagan learning to sit and playing with a ball.

Tyler’s favorite baby sound was the way he made the sound of a Rainbird sprinkler head.  Between the two of them we’ve got quite a pair of noise makers.

On a final note, as a weekend project I figured I would give our computer a little upgrade and install some additional RAM memory.  Those of you that know me well won’t find this as a surprise, but I figured the best way to accomplish this task was to run to Staples after dinner and just pick up the memory chip and go ahead and install it.  How hard could it be, right?  Well, although it really wasn’t hard, I got a friendly reminder that sometimes it pays to actually stop and think about what you’re doing first. 

After purchasing the RAM, Tyler and I pulled out the computer, popped the side off, tore open the packing, and stuck the chip into the RAM slot… well, almost.  As it turns out, the chip I was sure was the best bang for the buck was the wrong type of chip (DDR3 instead of DDR2, for the nerds out there).  Best Buy has the “Geek Squad”, the show Chuck has the “Nerd Herd”, well Tyler and I were huddled over the computer like the “Jackass Crew”.  Ok, I probably shouldn’t include Tyler in that designation.  After all, I think in the picture below he looks like he knows more about what’s going on than I do. 

When Thesha came over to take the picture she was so excited to see her two guys working together to fix stuff around the house.  Thankfully she took the pictures before the illusion wore off and she realized I had just dropped $60 on something that didn’t work.  Thankfully I redeemed myself and was able to make the exchange at Staples for the correct chip and all was made right.  Our computer is so fast now it can almost open up a program before Thesha starts yelling at it to “just freakin’ work.”

Happy Veteran’s Day

For this Veteran’s Day we decided that rather then celebrate by watching another war movie that we’d actually visit a site where veteran’s performed their heroic acts of patriotism.  We’ve got a handful of places to choose from, but we decided to make it a Baltimore day by visiting Ft. McHenry.  Ft. McHenry is the site of one of the battles of the War of 1812 where Francis Scott Key saw the stars and stripes fly after a 24 hour barrage of bombings by the British Navy and was inspired to write what later became known as the Star Spangled Banner.  Before getting into our experience, enjoy one of my favorite renditions of the national anthem.

Thank you Enrico Palazzo!

Joking aside, it really was a pretty cool site to visit.  Typically on Veteran’s Day we think of men and women who went “over there” to fight for the freedoms of others.  Visiting Ft. McHenry gave us a chance to remember those who went “just right over there” to fight on our own soil to keep our country free.  One of the most impressive parts of our visit was the impressive physical layout of the fort.  Between the large array of cannons as well as the impressive earth structures, it definitely would have been a significant obstacle for an invading force in 1812.  Top that all off with a huge American flag flying proudly and it’s not hard to imagine why it was so inspiring for Francis Scott Key.  Here are a handful of pictures from our visit.

As I mentioned earlier, we wanted to make it a Baltimore day, so after visiting a classic Baltimore tourist location we decided to visit the Café Hon (Hon pronounced like a waitress in a 50’s diner asking you “what kinda pie can I getcha, hon?”).  I heard about Café Hon on the radio and they talked it up like a great place with waitresses dressed up in “Hon” attire – paisley dresses, beehive hairdo, pointy glasses, etc.  We were all excited but apparently we picked the Hon’s night off.  Instead we got the 22 year old college student with tattoo’s up her arms and a nose ring.  “That spike in yer’ nose itchin’, hon?”  At least we got to sit next to the life-size replica of Elvis with a feather scarf wrapped around his neck.

Our Baltimore night wasn’t over yet, though.  In visiting the not-so-Hon café, we had the joy of driving home during rush hour traffic.  Thankfully we weren’t in a hurry but after about 30 minutes traveling 7 miles you start to get anxious for any type of movement.  The monotony was interrupted, however, with one moment of laughter.  Part of the reason for the delay was because there was some construction in the area.  Because of the construction, they had placed one of those signs that shows the speed limit on one side and your speed on the next.  You gain a whole new appreciation for “traffic” when you look at that sign and it says “Speed Limit… 55 mph… Your Speed… N/A.”  C’mon man, at least give me a 2 or 3 mph just to make me feel better about myself.

To cap off the Baltimore night, I watched the Ravens game before going to bed.  I’m quickly becoming a Ravens fan because I hear about it pretty much every morning on the way to work – even during the off season.  They’ll have players on the air talking about the game so you start to put personalities with the names and numbers on the jersey’s which really gives a whole new feeling to the game.  Unfortunately the Ravens lost which gives a whole new disappointment to the game as well, but I guess that’s all part of being a fan. 

All in all, though, it was a fun day giving us a chance to enjoy a few truly American activities – Stars and Stripes… Meatloaf from the Hon’s… Rooting for the home team… Sleeping safely without the threat of tyranny… Thanks to all the Veteran’s who help make it all possible.

Catching up on all the lack of news

So even from 2,000 miles away my dad can chastise me about slacking in my duties.  I know it’s been a while since the last blog posting but there is a pretty good reason.  All the fun activities we’ve had planned for the last few weeks have all basically fallen through.  In spite of the lack of news, I’ll try to catch you all up and make this post worth reading.

First on the list of fun activities was a trip to the Brandywine Zoo in Wilmington, DE.  After our last trip to the Plumpton Park Zoo we figured this one would have to be better.  Well, it was and it wasn’t.  At least it wasn’t just someone’s farm with a bunch of wild animals but it was microscopic.  We brought a lunch and figured we’d spend a couple hours there then have some lunch so we arrived at 10:00.  After taking our time at each and every exhibit we sat down for lunch at about 11:15…and that was stretching it.  I guess the zoo wanted to really go out of its way to represent Delaware.  And by represent Delaware I mean be extremely small.  I’m sure there’s a smaller zoo out there but people probably just refer to it as the cat lady’s house.

Even though it was a short trip, we at least got to spend some time with some of our friends, the Nairs.  They have two boys, Camden and Dallan, who are both within a year or so of Tyler.  Here are a few pictures of our outing (yes, there are more pictures of us by the river next to the parking lot – seriously it was a freaking small zoo.)

Ok, so the zoo was kind of a bust.  Hey, sometimes that just happens when you’re exploring new places.  So the next weekend we planned to go back to the place where we saw the horse races because they were having an equestrian competition.  Now I don’t know what an equestri is but on the website it looked like a bunch of horses jumpin’ over fences so that seemed like a fun activity.  To our dismay, however, Fall decided to arrive that morning bringing with it really cold and really fast winds.  Once again we packed a lunch and went out exploring and in the time it took us to walk from our car in the general parking to the bus that was to shuttle us to the event we realized this was a crappy idea and we were already sick of freezing our butts off.

So once again our plans fell through so we just went back and had a picnic at Tyler’s table in his bedroom.  In retrospect it’s probably a good thing.  I remember as a kid going to the rodeo for the 24th of July and thinking how cool it would be to get a cowboy hat, some cowboy boots, and be a real cowboy.  Of course, on the east coast you don’t go to a rodeo you go to an equestrian competition.  Had we actually made it to the competition, Tyler probably would have thought how cool it would be to get knee-high black leather boots, a cool black derby, and be a real douche-bag.  Yeah, a nice picnic in his room was probably a blessing in disguise.

Our last failed attempt at having something good to blog about was a Halloween birthday party for Dallan.  Luckily the party was a lot of fun and we got to spend some time with friends.  The only bad thing was that Tyler did not want to cooperate when we dressed him in his costume for a cute picture for the blog.  So here’s the best picture we have of Tyler in his costume.  In case you can’t tell what he is, he’s a 2 year old in an itchy fireman’s costume throwing a tantrum.  

Ahhhh… how cute.  I think he’s trying to honor those fireman who’ve lost the lower half of their legs in the line of duty. 

Those of you looking for a picture of Reagan in her costume have obviously never had to try and find a costume for a 4 month old ‘cause they don’t exist.  Ok, that’s not entirely true.  It’s just hard to find but we probably have something now (thanks to another friend from the ward with older girls who’ve grown out of their baby costumes).  We’ve got a couple more Halloween parties lined up so we’ll try to get a picture (of both the kids) next time.