Got to do some picking!

About mid-day today, I received a phone call from a guy I know from work. We have been talking about getting together and playing some Bluegrass music for months, but talking about it and doing it never seemed to come together. However, today, when Rusty called, he was ready to jam and he was hoping I could come along and bring my banjo. I checked with Pam to make sure we didn't have any plans and then off I went to do some picking.

I arrived to find the other guys already playing music on the back porch of Rusty's house. Rusty has a nice home in the country with lots of wooded area in the back and no neighbors close by. It is a perfect setting for playing music like this. I had fears that these guys were going to be far ahead of me in experience and ability, but I was able to hold my own fairly well. I started out with the banjo, but then moved over to the new Dobro (resonator guitar) that Pam gave me for Christmas. I have played the Dobro for only 2 days, so I warned the guys I may not be any good at it, but I think they were happy with what I had to offer on it. We all made mistakes, laughed them off and kept on going. Towards the end, I grabbed my guitar and worked through a few songs that I felt confident the guys would know. It was a great experience, I had a lot of fun and I think I have made some new friends today. When I left, they all were inviting me to come to their next jam. I'll be happy to.

What a wonderful Christmas we have had!

From 2008-12 (Dec)

There were so many highlights to this day; it is going to be hard to list them all. Perhaps the best thing to do is go in chronological order.

We woke up before the kids, but David got up soon after. Abby woke up just after Pam and I finished our showers. For the past several years, it has been a Christmas morning tradition that we open one gift each plus our stockings at home, then converge on Pam’s sister’s house for breakfast and the main event. We have a nice meal, then open all the presents and enjoy each other’s fun as the gifts are revealed. Once the excitement is over, we haul the gifts back home, play a while, and then return to Pam’s sister’s house for another meal with even more family members. It is always a wonderful time.

This year, we had an extra special treat. Riley, our nephew who is nearly finished with culinary school, offered to prepare our meals. He made us breakfast and supper. It was the most amazing two meals we have ever had the privilege of consuming. Have a look at the menu:

This was all of Riley’s creation and we were very impressed with his details and organization. He never looked overwhelmed. If anything, he looked like he was really enjoying himself. It was like he was “in a zone” and master of his world. Every single thing he prepared tasted fabulous. Congratulations, Riley. It was perfect! He will be going off to Chicago next month to do his internship with a fancy restaurant up there. Watch out Chicago. Here comes one heck of a Texas cook!

From 2008-12 (Dec)

From 2008-12 (Dec)

The kids really liked their Christmas gifts this year, but David may have gotten overwhelmed by all the excitement. He had trouble focusing on his toys and preferred to get into everything. He was hard to keep up with today, but he was being very sweet. Abby got overwhelmed by all the new exciting things to play with as well. She tried out several of her new toys today and was disappointed when she had to go to bed. There’s always tomorrow, though.

Pam spoiled me rotten. I gave her a list of things as suggested gift ideas and I think she made sure I got everything on the list. I know she let some other family members get a few things from my list as well. Thanks to everyone. Pam got lots of nice things, too. It has been a wonderful Christmas. Too bad I have to return to work tomorrow.

David says "Ho-Ho-Ho!"

Merry Christmas!

David's kidney update

Last night, we took the kids and some friends to an outdoor Christmas light display. It is one of those you drive through and view animated light displays from your car windows. The kids loved it and we all had a nice time. David is finally old enough to begin to appreciate the beauty of this place. He saw all the lights going by our windows and kept saying “pretty” and “more, please.” It was really sweet to hear his little voice commenting on the sights.

David met with his kidney doctor today. The news was not as good as we had hoped. His blood pressure is still not under control and his creatinine level is creeping up. We will be adding a second blood pressure medication to his daily routines. The hard part is he will have to go back to his pediatrician for weekly blood pressure checks. These are distressing for David and he has developed a great fear of going to the doctor’s office. I can relate to this. I was terrified of doctors when I was younger, too. To make matters worse, David will also have to go in for blood tests every month, which is much more frequent than before. The only upside from today is David is still growing and gaining weight and he’s still awfully cute and happy (when he’s not in the doctor’s office any way.)

Abby will be on her holiday break from school after tomorrow. The whole family is ready to be in a Christmas mindset and start enjoying the gifts of the season. We are very thankful and very blessed. Pam has been busy with lots of different projects this week. She’s been baking, running the kids around to places, making gifts for teachers and taking care of all of our domestic needs. She’s been working her tail off. I’m hoping we can give her some time to relax this weekend.

I’m getting excited. I just received my welcome packet from Pete Wernick (a.k.a. “Dr. Banjo”) for the 2009 session of his Bluegrass Jam Camp at Argyle. The camp isn’t until early March, but I’m really excited about going back. The 2008 camp was so much fun and I learned so much about playing music with other Bluegrass musicians and what I am capable of doing. I’m hoping to build on that experience at the next camp.

Busy! Busy! Busy!

We are less than 2 weeks away from Christmas and we are getting very busy around here. Abby has one more week of school before they break for the holidays and David has appointments with doctors plus Pam is doing several things for Abby's school this week. Heap on that some final shopping for Christmas (mostly by me) and getting the gifts wrapped and squeezing in time to get the Christmas cards out; there's an awful lot going on.

Abby has been learning about life in the Colonial days and we are finding that she is having an easy time with mathematics as well. We are pleased at how well she is doing at school. She also got to go to a birthday party this past weekend, so there's a lot of good going on in Abby's life right now.

We had a funny thing happen the other night. Most evenings, Abby will go to bed and then read for a while before she goes to sleep. She calls out to Pam when she begins and again when she stops reading so Pam can account for how long she spends reading. (Something we do for her school. She is rewarded for time spent reading outside of school.) Well, the other night, Abby started reading and fell silent. After a while, Pam and I started looking at each other wondering if Abby had fallen asleep reading. Pam checked on her and discovered that Abby had fallen asleep in bed with a book in her hands. I slipped in and took this picture of her:



David is giving us a lot of joy as well. He is really coming alive with his verbal skills now. He talks a lot when he is around us. He still clams up around other people and strangers, but that's just David. He has a real shy side in public. David is expanding his vocabulary with lots of new words every day. He counts, he fills in words on some simple songs and he loves to demonstrate what he knows and really enjoys getting praised for saying the right thing. He still has an obsession with the word, "vacuum." He uses that word any time he doesn't know what to call something and he occasionally says the word without any obvious reason. We know he is afraid of vacuums and he knows where we keep ours and makes sure we know that he knows. We hope he will grow tired of saying "vacuum" soon.

David had a blood test last week in preparation for a visit with his kidney doctor next week. We still don't have a clear idea of what we may be in for with his kidneys in the future, but he has not been getting worse. We hope next week's visit will continue to show that he is running steady and not slipping backwards on us as he grows. We still give him medication for his blood pressure and he may be on that for the rest of his life. If that is the worst we have to worry about for his future, we will be very grateful. David also has an appointment with his dentist later this week. We're hoping to get some help with some discoloration problems in his teeth due to some of the strong medicines he was on during and following his hospitalization in 2007.

I just finished a week of being on call with my employer. Thankfully, it was an easy week -- which is more than I can say about some of the Christmas decorating I have been trying to do. We put some new Christmas displays out in our front yard and our windy weather has destroyed nearly everything. I blame part of it on the wind, but most of it is just cheaply made stuff. The metal welds have been breaking open and the displays come crashing down. I have been busy trying to rig up fixes for everything and I finally managed to get everything back up by this afternoon, but they are not going to survive much more of this wind, so I hope the weather calms down soon. At least the indoor decorating we have done is holding up very nicely.

Next year, I'm going to have to completely rethink how we decorate the outdoors. I'm not satisfied with how things went this year and vow to do better in 2009.


Merry Christmas!

Christmas is coming soon!

Happy December!

Wow! The weather has changed a lot in the past couple of weeks. We have been trying to get our decorations out for Christmas and I have been trying to get some of the remaining outdoor stuff up since last weekend, but that has not been going very smoothly. First of all, we bought some new outdoor lighted displays for the front yard and we were happy to have purchased a couple of the items at a discount because the store was out of stock and we took the display items. The day we put them up in the yard, it was very cold and windy and within 20-30 minutes, one of the displays was knocked over and ruined. Days later, the other discounted display also gave in to the winds, broke and fell over. I have spent a lot of my time trying to repair these things and get them back out. I finally got one of them going today, but I am still brainstorming about the other one. My first repair attempt on that one failed miserably, so I need to be a little more creative.

Abby and David have been really sweet together lately. Abby has been teaching David lots of new words and a few silly (and noisy) games. It is nice to see them bonding like this and we hope they will always enjoy having fun together. David is learning handfuls of new words every day. Some of those words end up becoming points of obsession, though. For instance, he loves to say the word "vacuum", which comes out of his mouth as "a- bak'-koom." He says it even when there is no vacuum around, but he gets very animated about it when he sees one or goes near where one is stored. If you answer his comment about the vacuum and use that word, he will respond by buzzing his lips -- his way of imitating a motor sound. So, some things just defy explanation.

David is counting to 10 or 11 now and he very sweetly says "Thank you" when he hands something off to you or you give him something. He loves stringed instruments and he is constantly asking to see one of my banjos. The other day, I let David into my music room and showed him the wall where I have my guitar, banjo and bass hanging for easy access (you never know when you just need to pick for a while!) and David pointed to my guitar and said "a-tar" then turned to my banjo and said "a-ban'-jo." (David precedes many nouns with "a-". He figured this out on his own.) David turned to my bass and tried to call it another banjo, so I corrected him and said, "No, this is a bass. Can you say bass?" David responded with "a-boice!" So, we went down the line again and David called off the instruments as I pointed to them: "a-tar...banjo...boice!" Sweet.

We're going to spend the rest of the weekend doing things to continue to get into the full Christmas spirit. I'm looking forward to it.

Shifting into Christmas mode

Thanksgiving is now behind us and we are shifting into Christmas mode. We spent most of the Friday after Thanksgiving getting down and setting up our Christmas decorations (our annual day-after-Thanksgiving tradition). I got the tree up first thing and we spent hours trying to locate a couple of problems in the 1600 lights that illuminate it. Once those problems were solved, Pam and Abby proceeded to decorate the tree while I set up other lights around the house, then returned to help them with the upper decorations on the tree. David did his part in helping to re-arrange the lower decorations. Most of those ended up back on the floor. We tried to be careful not to place anything breakable down where David could reach it, but he managed to find the one decoration we overlooked and promptly pulled it off the branch and then dropped it to the floor where it shattered. We hope we can get him to understand the decorations are to remain on the tree. Abby has been very helpful with the decorations this year. It is nice that she is getting to an age where we can trust her with a lot more.

Today, I think we're going to try to find some more decorations for the outside of the house and I'll be busy inventing ways to provide them with electricity. I hope the weather cooperates...

Happy Thanksgiving!

We had a wonderfully delicious thanksgiving with many people in the house and lots of great food and happy times. We are grateful to all who came and contributed to this very happy day. Now our tummies are full and we're ready to sleep it off.

Happy day before Thanksgiving! We’re getting things ready over here and dealing with life as it happens at the same time. David had an appointment with his neurologist today and we have one more thing to be thankful for. David has been released from having any future appointments with his neurologist! Hooray! One more doctor no longer needed. David is picking up new words every single day and he has started counting things. He can count to five already.

This evening, we took the kids out to supper and Abby was quizzing David on animal names and sounds. She would name an animal and ask David what sound it made. He got most of them right, but every time she got to “horse”, David would reply with “horse.” Abby would laugh and try to correct him by saying, “No, a horse says ‘nay’.” She would ask him again about the horse sound and David would respond again by saying “horse.” After a while, it became a game between the two of them. Ah yes, I remember annoying my sister as well.

We’re going to have a house full of people tomorrow for Thanksgiving. I’m looking forward to all the sights and smells and tastes, but I’m also looking forward to taking a big nap afterwards. (Ha! Fat chance.)

New video about David now online

I just added a link to a new video I made using photos of David from birth to now and set it to music provided by Rickey Wasson. The song that runs behind the pictures is called "Touched by the Master's Hand." I heard this song for the first time just the other day and immediately bought the album. I have been wanting to do some kind of slide show with a representative sample of all the photos we have taken of David since his birth and set it to music. As soon as I heard this song, I knew I had what I wanted to play in the background. Hope you enjoy the pictures and the music.

This shook our windows Saturday night!

For those of you who live in the same community we do, you may have been disturbed by a loud rumbling noise that went on for over 3 minutes before it quit. We heard the noise and noticed our windows were rattling quite a bit. My first thought was our heater was going out, but after verifying the heater was not on, we began thinking it must be external to our house. I stepped out into the back yard and the noise seemed to be coming from everywhere. I also heard a train's horn blowing about the same time and wondered if there was a train derailing nearby. When the sound stopped, we were left wondering what it could have been. It turned out to be a rocket motor test by a company called "SpaceX, who does rocket motor testing for NASA. I'm relieved to know it wasn't something more serious, but I wish we had been warned in advance. Here's a video of the rocket test. http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1475275870/bclid1493222307/bctid3060463001

Rob

It is the weekend before Thanksgiving and we are all quite busy. David has taken on the role of getting out as many things as he can and scattering them around the house as quickly as possible. His activities include rummaging through our closet and finding things he can get himself hopelessly tangled in, and then holler at one of us for help. Note the photo on the left. That was this morning as Pam and I were getting ready for the day. David found a Rubbermaid container of yarn and other supplies which he thought would be fun to wear; then drag from room to room before attempting to mummify himself. After rescuing him from this self-imposed peril, he proceeded to the living room where he found every book and magazine we had neatly stashed in the furniture and created a horizontal wasteland of paper. Lovely. We are trying to get the house picked up for Thanksgiving this weekend and into the coming week, but the kids aren't being much help at the moment.

Abby has been busy doing her own things as well. While she hasn't left the trail of carnage that David leaves, she can mess up a room rather quickly in her own way with dolls and toys and lots of art supplies. Abby has been fascinated by a comment from her teacher about having a little bit of Cherokee Indian in her family tree. There's a little bit of that on Pam's side of the family as well, so Abby has decided to let her tiny drop of Indian out to play for a while. Pam fixed Abby's hair up this morning in two pony tails, or "dog ears" as she calls them. I went to take a picture of it and Abby grabbed her Indian headband and feather and placed them on her head before I could snap the picture.

I'm hoping for an easy, short work week ahead. I only work 3 days next week, but I have a feeling my evenings are going to be busy at home getting things ready for the big feed on Thursday.

Stay tuned!

This has been a fast week for us. Time seems to have gone by fairly quickly. I like that on the weeks when I am on call. This happens to be one of those weeks. So, the faster we can dispose of this week, the sooner I will not have to worry about getting called back into work and messing up my evening or weekend plans. Thankfully, I don't get called in that often, but every now and then, I get hit with a particularly difficult problem and that tends to compound the stress of being called out in the first place.

The kids are doing great lately. Abby brought home her report card from school this week and she had some amazingly high grades. I was never this good in school when I was her age. I guess she gets her smarts from her mother! That's a good thing. I married a very smart and wonderful lady. Abby is continuing to learn more at her karate classes and hopes to get to the point where she can test for another belt soon. I hope to be there to record it like I did last time.

Next week, Abby's school is having a Fall Festival and Pam and my mother plan to go. I'll be at work, but it would be nice to attend. I probably would have asked off if I hadn't already taken some time off this month. I'll send a camera along with Pam. Maybe I can go next year.







Many people have come up to me and asked questions about how David is doing. I get a little surprised when some people are unaware that he is walking and talking now. In fact, he has been walking very well for over six months. He's also quite the daredevil and he will climb up on nearly anything. We're always getting him off chairs and occasionally a few tables. He seems to have no fear at all. The nicest thing for us lately is he has been really turning up the charm and he is working hard at trying to learn to talk to us. We work with him a lot on his words and he has been very responsive. Of course, we're still at the stage where only we know what he is saying most of the time. He likes to put his own twist on the words we teach him. For instance, when a big truck goes by his window in the car, he yells out, "truck-ieee!" That "ieee" suffix gets appended to a lot of the words he repeats back to us. It is very cute. But, he recognizes animals and other objects in books and calls them by name and/or makes their appropriate sound. Occasionally, he gets it a little wrong, but most of the time, he's right.

Our only concerns about David so far are the unknown future for his kindeys and his insatiable appetite for water. He drinks water like there is no tomorrow. We have had him tested for diabetes a couple of times and he doesn't have it. We don't know why he thinks he must drink so much, so fast, but we hope to find a way to get him to calm down about it. This should get easier to manage as our ability to communicate with him improves.

David is still doing great on learning to use the toilet. I am maintaining our nightly ritual of associating his bath rituals with doing his business in the toilet and not somewhere else. So far, it works very well. He always goes before the bath and usually afterwards, he will go again. If he feels the need to do more, he will say, "poo-poo" to me and I'll place him back on the toilet. He understands what that word means and he doesn't disappoint me when I place him on the toilet. He does it!

I am hoping to get some "pickin' time" in this weekend. There are a lot of songs that have been rattling around in my head all week and I need to spend some time trying to play them. So, if I don't get called in to work, I hope to wear my fingers down to nubs playing some Bluegrass!

Thanks for checking in.

Rob

Here is a peek at David's remodeled bedroom. We painted the walls blue, removed his crib and replaced it with a new toddler bed that looks like a car and put a rug on his floor that looks like an overhead view of city streets. David has been pretty good about the transition. He seems to enjoy his new room and we have had only minimal trouble keeping him in his bed so far.

Abby had a jog-a-thon at her school today. We all went to cheer her on. David decided he would do some running of his own, so I chased him around the grounds while Pam helped with some of the other events.

We're looking forward to a simple, but enjoyable weekend at home. Thanks for stopping by.

Rob

We’re having a busy week over here. I took off from work most of this week with the exception of Monday. We had decided to use some of this time to make some big changes to David’s bedroom. We repainted the walls, removed the crib and replaced it with a toddler bed that is shaped like a car. Pam continued the car theme with a rug that looks like a matrix of city streets and some other car-themed decorations. David loves cars, so we thought this might make his room even more exciting for him. The painting was a lot of hard work and most of it had to be done while David was away at “Mother’s Day Out.” Pam and I worked very hard on his room and I continued the work while Pam went out to pick the kids up from their schools. We’re happy with the finished product.

Our next big worry was transitioning David from a crib to a toddler bed. We didn’t know how he was going to react to having a bed that was lower to the ground and had no cage to keep him in. He got his first experience in his new bed today during his nap. He had fallen asleep in the car, so Pam picked him up and placed him in his new bed. David woke later in his new bed and seemed happy with it. Then, the real test came this evening when we put him in his bed while he was still awake. He got sad for a few minutes, but quickly figured out this was time for him to be sleeping and he went right to sleep. What a good boy.

Abby has been doing a lot of fun things lately. She’s still an insatiable book reader. She is learning more and more at her karate classes and she has been spending some quality time on the computer playing some games she likes. She’s getting really good grades in school and she is very cheerful and helpful at home.

David is learning a lot of new words and he is helping us potty train him. He is getting better at telling us when he needs to do his “#2” business. He comes up and says, “poo poo” and that’s our signal that he wants to go sit on the potty. He gleefully runs to the bathroom and lets us put him on the toilet. He almost always does something for us; not always what he told us he needed to do, but the cooperation is remarkable to me. We have not “officially” started potty training on him. I just put him on the toilet each night before his bath as a matter of habit and preventative measures. I don’t want any “foreign objects” floating in the tub, if you get my drift. He has caught on to the process and has been branching it out to other times of the day at his request, so this is great.

I’m hoping to use some of my remaining vacation time to work on my music hobby and hopefully have some quality time alone with Pam. We’ll see how this pans out over the coming days.

Rob

Greedy ostrich at Fossil Rim!

We took the kids to Fossil Rim Wild Animal Park at Glen Rose this weekend and we had a fun time driving around, looking at and feeding the animals. The highlight of our visits to the park has been the greedy ostrich that usually stalks you at the entrance or exit of the driving trail. During the past three visits, we have been attacked by the same ostrich and each time he has managed to steal our bag of food. But, this time the joke ended up on him as he got his head stuck in the bag! At least he was able to get it off. We nearly busted a gut laughing at him.

Before:

After:


The site is beginning to take shape, but I'm not done making changes and additions to it. I plan to link to more photos and videos as we go along, but you will notice a new link to our videos over on YouTube now. There is also a slide show of our most recent visit to Fossil Rim on the page as well. I'm still learning how to do all this stuff, so bear with me while I get up to speed on making this blog look the way I want.

Rob

Welcome to our new blog! Pam and I have been talking about moving our blog off of MSN for quite some time and we finally made the jump. I will be posting a link to this site from our old site so those who have been following our family story can keep up with us. This site is still undergoing changes and updates, so the appearance may change from time to time until we get it looking the way we want. Stay tuned for more news and posts.

Thanks for checking in.

Rob

Pam and I took David to a local museum to meet some friends and play.

The boys try out typewriters.