Halloween

This year we had...



...the boy ladybug...



...Prince Caspian...



...and the fairy princess.


A great time and much candy was had by all!

Sammy's Suppa Stunnas

Yeauh! Hah yuh lak mih nah??

I don't think I even need to say how flippin' sweet my Halloween costume skills are.

Brothers

I uploaded some recent photos from our camera and when I went back to look at them, one of the photos of Sammy seemed very familiar.


Here's Samuel at 1 year..














And here's Benjamin at 1 year...3 years earlier...











Kinda freaky...

Catching up

I post entries here so infrequently that I totally forget my password everytime and I have to try every password can think of until I guess it right because the password reset/recovery doesn't work for some reason. I should write it down somewhere, but I'd only forget where I put it.

Anyhoo....I am slowly finding my marbles that were lost. One here...one there...pretty soon I hope to have most of them collected. Sammy is settling (for the most part) on a pretty decent nightly routine. Down at 8, up breifly at 12 and 4, and one in a while sleeps in until 7 or 7:30. When he first started this, we were afraid something was terribly wrong. But I have been getting sleep that I haven;t had since before he was born. Very nice.

Maddy started 1st grade and loves it. Ben switched to a new room in preschool and is now excited to go, instead of clutching to my pantlegs when I drop him off. I am starting to get my rear in gear and attempt to get back into the shape I was in 2 years ago and ready for next season's racing. I have got quite a ways to go. I have to make up for a whole year of mostly sitting on my duff.

Seeking Lost Marbles

I'm frustrated because I can't find my marbles. They're lost. I think maybe the new kid stole 'em!

I'm too old for this...

Boy, nothing slaps you in the face to mark the passage of time like seeing your infant child in an outfit that was worn by an older sibling.

"I swear Ben was just in that oufit that Samuel has on like a few months ago, right? What?! What do you mean it was three years ago??"

Actually, I'm not too old for this. I'm kinda glad that we had kids later in life than our parents did. It keeps us young in a way.

Most of the time, I don't really feel my 38 years. Sometimes I feel them too much. But overall, I don't mind the fact that I will be 56 when Samuel graduates from High School, almost 20 years older than my Dad was when I graduated. Strange to think about that.

I often think that my frequent lack of patience with crying, fussy children is due to being almost 40, selfish and set in my ways, and trying to raise a baby. But if I remind myself of who I was, where I was in life, and how my head was screwed on so crooked as an early 20-something, I think it's much better this way. And if you think about it, the trend is going this way. People our age are having kids much later in life than the previous generation, and what that means is that we are allowing ourselves more time to experience young single adult life and to find ourselves before we committ to the next chapter. Does this sound like lame gibberish? I think it means that maybe we are a little more balanced in our parenthood, and our mid-life crisis won't be so severe because we still have our kids with us as a distraction.

I don't know....maybe not. Maybe it will be worse!

Stop the Insanity!!!!

I'm at the pump, filling up the tank on the truck, and I'm seething at the rising gas prices. I know...who isn't? Anyway, I'm asking myself, "What is it going to take to get this society to rise up and shout 'Enough!!'?" I bet there is alternate fuel technology out there that is being supressed by high-pressure oil company dollars. It's a conspiracy, man!!
So I (re)committed myself to riding my bike to work on Mon-Wed-Fri. This morning, I go out the door, and see the wet streets. "Hey, it was dry out here a half an hour ago!" Oh well. I'm committed, right?
Got soaked and grimy. I start to think that I should have just turned back around and went in to change and grabbed the truck keys. But then I decided, what the heck. This is living. So I get a second shower before work...bonus! Except that I didn't bring a dry pair of underpants to put on.
A familiar chorus to an old song starts to play in my head...."Yeah, I'm free.....

Our Town

OK..so I'm driving around today in downtown in an area where I have been before, but not for some time and I looked down a street that I hadn't been on for a very long time, if ever, and I was struck by the feeling that I would love to just turn the wheel..point the truck down that road and see what there is to see. I have always enjoyed exploring parts of this town that are unfamiliar. I started thinking, "Boy, wouldn't it be fun to get in the car with the family on a Sunday afternoon and just drive around different parts of town and see what this place called Fresno is made up of." Then I think again. It may be fun for me, but I'm sure the kids would be bored stiff. I know that I've made the suggestion to Meegan in the past and it didn't go over so well. But someday I'm going to do it. I'm just going to load everyone up without saying anything and drive. I want the kids to realise that this town is much bigger and WAY more diverse than the street that they live on and the school or church that they go to. There are some pretty cool places out there...interesting old neighborhoods, places that were the very life of this city long ago that are now all but forgotten.

Does this sound crazy? Or dull? Lame? For some reason, I'm drawn to these things and these ideas. I love to see and experience places that were the building blocks of our community. Downtown is an amazing place and I could spend a whole day and more just driving around and looking at the people, the buildings, the homes, even the run down slums that were once shiny and new. Better yet, get out and walk. I was walking down the Fulton the other day and had a chat with an old homeless lady at a bus stop shelter who wanted me to join her under a blanket and keep her warm. Naturally I took a raincheck. But it's good not to shy away from interaction with the downtown "inhabitants". This attraction to exploring even holds true for other places. Like Sunnyside, or the west side. I even enjoy seeing the stuff popping up all over the north side (even though the wildfire growth rate of commercial development out there is astonishing and sometimes dismaying). But I always, always come back to the old. I don't know why. I'm just so intrigued by things that were made in another time that are still standing here today, even if barely. Pop Laval's photos of Old Fresno simply thrill me. Is that weird? Oh well. If it is, I don't care.

Sleepless in Fresno

I'm so tired I can't even think of what I was going to write in this post. I should go to bed right now. Not that it would do much good. Sam is now almost three and a half months old and he is stuck in this horrible glitch in which he is wide awake every 2 hours during the night and thrashing wildly and fitfully most of the time between. He sleeps in our bed with us, which is great. But he won't last in his crib. He doesn't even sleep for more than half an hour to 45 minutes for naps during the day. And getting him to do that is sometimes a struggle that may take an hour of messing with him. An hour of frustration for half an hour of peace?!?!? We have been trying to figure out what his problem is, why he is doing this, without any luck and then some friends offer some perspective and clarity. Sam is not in need of a solution. There is no why. Sam just IS. This is the season that we are in and Samuel is his own person and with each growth spurt and developmental milestone comes another side effect that may cost us something...like sleep. But look at him. What are you going to do? How can you get all upset about it when he is this cute?