Walking, Walking

So, I realize that it is past Monday, the day that I designated to be the "post" day, but I had nothing. My posts are already boring, so I didn't want to make the problem worse. Then I remembered a video we took the other night:



How could I forget this, you ask? Well, because nothing has happened since. We are convinced Coen could walk if he wanted, but he's much more comfortable crawling (and much quicker). In time you will see a video of him taking more steps. But not today.

Some other news that's kinda old is that Nora got a walker to use from STRIDE (Thank you, Thank you, STRIDE!!). She actually switches every other week with a different one. You can see the red one in the video here, which is a forward pushing walker. The other walker is purple and she pulls it along behind her. Much to my surprise she does a little better with the purple one. I am so excited about this. I got all emotional at the YMCA the other week to see her screetching and laughing walking around with the other kids. It was great!

I've got to find a video of her in it... here we go:

Pretend that our house is spotless... because it always is, of course. This is a rare day where there's clutter around... everywhere... Ummmm....

See you next week.

Last week of January... already?

Already gone, that is.

I tried to make Chicken and Shrimp Gumbo the other night and it was okay, but not the best recipe maybe... First off, don't use cooking wine when it calls for beer. Just doesn't cut it. It was too sweet, but still good. It just didn't have that Gumbo taste I was craving. Hubby got the bright idea to add Chulula to the Gumbo and then it was excellent. Way to go, Hubby! If something's not great, just add Chulula. I gotta go buy some more, we're out!


Friday we went for a stroll. This is the new bike trailer I got for 30 bucks from Salvation Army. A very good deal if you look up how much these guys are. Like, just under 200 buckaroos... I think. Anyway, it was a deal. I like to use it as a stroller for now. It's too cold for me to bike.

Coen and Nora snuggle right up in there and usually fall asleep. Nora managed to stay awake this time.




I was a little discouraged this time I went up the hill outside our subdivision. I use this route as a 2mi run and it's perfect because it's uphill the first mile and downhill the way home. And I used to run it in the evenings when the sun was going down and I had nice, little, grassy hills on both sides of me. Now there is this electrical farm on the West and on the East?...
Apartments!! Yay! I don't dislike apartments, but the ones right behind our house don't supply the worlds best neighbors. (i.e. cars driving over lots, drivers throwing certain glass bottles out their window as they drive by, cars screaming through our subdivision paying no attention to the possibilities of children in the streets, etc.) And it's definitely not as pretty as grassy hills with antelope roaming through. :( I'm not sure what I expected living in town. My idealist mind was in charge of the thought that I could have my little grassy hills in town, I guess.
Finally, Coen got his very first haircut Friday night. Now our little baby is a little boy. :( I had to cut his hair because he was starting to look goofy, I just couldn't get myself to cut it all off. So, I left the top long. This was right after his bath when his hair is more curly.
This one shows the more natural look... no Elvis do goin' on here.

Well, I stuck to my rule of posting every week so far. This is only the second week.... but, it's definitely an improvement. See you next week.

Winter Update

Why is there a giant, orange robo-dog cake just sitting here?

You guessed it:
Coen Turns One!

What is Coen up to these days, now that he's a big one-year-old? Here's a short list:
*Loves to give kisses to everything
*Says: "Dada" to almost everything, "woof" to every face (and looks for the doggie on his shirt), "Uh-uh" (uh-oh!) all the time and drops everything, "mama" occasionally, just started to say "nye-nye" when I ask him if he wants to go night-night. And he's starting to say more babbly stuff.
* Dances all the time, even to really bad restaurant music.
*pushes chairs, walker, Nora's walker all around.
*points and says "da?" (shows me stuff and talks about stuff)
*likes to give us stuff and then take it back, of course.
*hits toys and chases after them. Started to push cars.
*plays peek-a-boo... way too fast.
*claps and waves.
*plays little games with us when he's in a silly mood...makes them up.

Okay, that wasn't really a short list and I'm sure I forgot some. It's been so fun to watch him learn and grow and do things that Nora could never do or took a really long time to do. Makes me appreciate those little things even more now. He has a sweet personality: loves to snuggle, but also wants to conquer everything, has a streak of stubborn-ness (no idea who he got that from), wants to be in with what's going on around him. He's great at escaping places we've corralled him into. Coen is amazing, that's the only word I can really find that explains what he is and means to us. I can't wait to learn more from him... and watch him learn more.
His one year pictures I took. He's always crawling into baskets or anything he can get inside and sit in.Thanks for feeding me, Gramma, you're the best!
His very own personal cake. A robot dog. He didn't dig right into it like we all anticipated. He was a picker... don't know if he actually got any of the cake, just the frosting. So different than Nora, who completely destroyed her cake and ate most of it.

Is miss Haley bug jealous or just sniffing the cake?
Giving Daddy a messy kiss.

Hubby played a game of Chess with KT while the rest chatted. This isn't showing all who came, just a handful. I wish we could hold more people in our smallish house. There were quite a few who I didn't get to invite... Not that Coen cares at all. It's mostly for us adults. :)I wanted to thank all Nora's teacher's and therapists for their hard work, so I made them reversible bags with goodies inside as an end of the year holiday/thank you gift.
Daddy helping Coen open his first presents ever. Good practice for his birthday.
Hadders playing with her new magnets while sitting on Coen's bath train... silly girly.
Pretty hair, Norabelle. Cute new twisty-feelies look cute as a hat. We're starting a new fad.

Sister enjoying morning drink... coffee? tea? hot cocoa?Good morning, sleepy head.
Brooklyn loves her new baby. Congrats, Sister!Nora had her EKG before the new year. Just a check up thing, nothing to worry about here. I had to hold her on my lap while they stuck a bunch of electro thingys on her chest and under her arms, then they cliped the cords to the sticky things which liked to come undone a lot. The actual EKG only takes, like 10 seconds, it's the hook-up that takes a while.

We also had some visitors from Cornland come before the new year. My sister and her family!! I was so happy to see them. They also brought their old time friend, Stephanie along. It was lots of fun. Too short, though.We played greed. It was a wild night! You have no idea!
We were about to hire out Danny's services for continually putting Nora to sleep. It was amazingly wonderful...She loves her Uncle Danny.
Senna and Ocean got to stay up and play Greed with the adults.
Stephanie tried her hand at virtual 4wheeling.
and read Glade some books, some of which she wasn't too fond of.
Nora fell asleep on Uncle Danny again. Danny had a full lap.
Aspen playing on the floor. He was quite different than the last time I saw him. Cute!
On their way home. Stephanie gave Ocean a hammer for the car ride home. I'm sure Becky and Danny were thrilled with that.

Now we are guest free and into our old routine. Daddy here is reading the kids a book after their baths.

So, my New Year's resolution was to do a blog post a week (I don't actually believe in New Year's resolutions, it just happened to be a new year), which obviously hasn't happened so far, but hopefully from now on it will. Then I can save some time by not having to post a mile long post that everyone is bored with. Oh well. Working on it. I was also hoping to join in with the 52 weeks thing and have a picture with me and the kiddos each week. Kinda scared to commit to that. Gotta try anyway. See you next week!

2009, Husband's Retrospective

2009 was a crazy year. Here is a timeline of assorted events that took place this year. There is a rough chronological order to this but some things are probably out of order. This is all from memory, I didn't take the time to actually check dates.

1. I started going to the gym ~3 times per week to compensate for 8hrs at a desk every day.
2. Coen was born on January 16th. Our second child and first son.
3. Kathy came out and stayed with us for...a month?
4. My employer laid off about 10% of our staff. I was fortunate to keep my job and all of my employees.
5. I built a website for a company called Pharmaca.com. It was the largest freelance undertaking I've ever done.They only used it for a few months before half of their staff turned over and they ended up rebuilding a new website for eCommerce (which hadn't been a goal of the project that I did for them). This was also an interesting project in that it was entirely remote. I never met any of the clients in real life.
6. We had a family reunion on my dad's mom's side of the family. The first ever, I think. It was great to see old videos and pictures of my dad and other family when they were my age or younger.
7. The economic crises of the country got me focused on eliminating some of our debt. I got an old 1994 Saab that I got for free running and sold our 2006 Xterra, saving us nearly $400 per month.
8. My employer changed our health insurance plan, causing our health insurance to go up about $400 per month (that's what happens when you try to get ahead :P)
9. Danny and Becky visited over Spring Break
10. Nora learned to stand.
11. We had an awesome 4th of July in Laramie.
12. I built a planter in our front yard for flowers.
13. I entered a Microsoft-sponsored competition to build a video game from the ground up. I spent several months working on my submission and learned a new programming language (C#), new object-oriented programming concepts and lots more. I didn't place in the competition (my submission was pretty mediocre, honestly) but I had a lot of fun and learned tons of valuable skills.
14. Our family doctor gave us a referral to a Children's hospital to have Nora tested for Autism. Nora endured multiple tests. We went home.
15. Rebuilt a fairly-major web property for my employer using what I learned from the large freelance project.
16. We found out that Nora has Rett Syndrome. Many specialist appointments and trips to Denver would follow.
17. Guitar-building-legend Les Paul died. I bought a Gibson Les Paul electric guitar on a trip to Denver for Nora. This was mostly coincidental with Les Paul's death as I have wanted a Les Paul guitar for some time.
18. We bought a Canon Rebel XSI digital SLR camera and have shot tons of neat pictures that we have been too lazy to post on our blog. Sorry folks...
19. Kristy celebrated her 28th birthday in August and I celebrated mine in September.
20. We decided to get Nora's tonsils out due to breathing problems while she slept.
21. Kathy came out and stayed with us for over a month, helping out as Nora recovered from her tonsilectomy.
22. Rich and Dori came to visit
23. Kristy and her mom went to Texas to visit family. I stayed home by myself :(
24. We turned our basement into a play place for adults and kids and built Nora a swing for therapy and simple enjoyment.
25. I started building a new website around a niche community, developing unique software that doesn't exist online yet (as far as I can tell).
26. We took the kids to Harvest Farm, a fall-focused farm that had pumpkins and all sorts of stuff. They loved it.
27. We had some Halloween fun with the Painter and family
28. Coen got the Swine Flu (not totally confirmed). We all had colds and such. I took Coen to the emergency room with a high fever, got home at 2:30am. It seems like the whole family was sick for at least a month! We missed all but Laramie special meeting.
29. GetOutside visited
30. We had a small Thanksgiving at my parents house. Dad was gone bird hunting so it was just us, mom and my cousin.
31. I wrote a fairly-major program that can take screenshots of a list of websites. This was one of the more-significant applications that I wrote this year, it was built to gain competitive intel for online retailers.
32. I worked hard to get a major update to the website I built out-the-door by December 16th. A friend in Laramie started helping out with some programming tasks.
33. We spent a whole weekend in Laramie with the Stidolph family. It was fun to stay somewhere else as most of my vacation had been used for doctor appointments
34. Leaving the kids with mom and dad, we escaped to Denver for some nice alone time for our 5th anniversary. We came back for a Christmas dinner with my family.
35. Danny and Becky came to visit for a few days.

On this last day of the year, looking back, I have to say this was one of the biggest and, at times, most stressful years of my life. We had our second kid, a lot of pretty big things happened at work and Nora was diagnosed with Rett Syndrome. Here are the highlights and low points, not in any specific order...

High Points:

• Watching my kids grow and learn new things. Being with the kids, but also:
• Getting away from the kids occasionally...
• Stride. If any Stride folks read this, you rock and we appreciate everything you do for Nora.
• Spending time with my family, even though it seems like a lot of those times were at the doctor or sick
• Facing things with my wife, understanding each other more, faults and all. (Her faults. I don't have any of course :P )
• Having friends and family on both sides that are engaged in Nora's therapy and progress.
• Successfully completing a competition in a programming language I barely knew when I entered it.
• Building 3-4 websites and tons of small applications to solve various problems.
• Working out at lunch time (stress killer)!
• Getting a diagnosis for Nora so that we know what we are facing
• Driving a free car that goes fast, gets ~24mpg and only costs $20 for insurance!
• Getting out of the house to share good times with friends/family
• Shooting pictures with our new camera, playing my new guitar!
• Worker visits
• Art teacher friends
• Bert, Aaron, Candy, Geek Chad, Traveler Chad, Painter Chad, Lisa, Andy, Kate and other Friends, their kids and our families

Low Points:

• Finding out that Nora has Rett Syndrome
• Paying for expensive health insurance premiums and still fronting ~$8000 out-of-pocket for medical expenses.*
• Coen getting Swine Flu (scary!)
• Not getting to go hunting (although, I didn't make it a huge priority so it's sorta my fault)
• Missing our annual family camping trip
• Kids that don't want to sleep
• Stepping on sharp kids toys with bare feet
• Toys that make noise
• Cats**
• Friends that lost loved ones

Have a happy new year.

* This is mostly irritating because it's only going to get worse and instead of industry reform, the burden will simply be spread upon all tax payers.

** The fact that they exist doesn't bother me. Only that they happen to exist in my house.

Fall Fun at Harvest Farm

Hey, Llama, who's your mama?

Llama: "Are you my mama?"
Cow : "No! Shhhh...
Goat: "Yeah, shhhh. This is no time for questions. Now, be quiet, so we can give thanks.

Fall: the time for picking out pumpkins, jumping in leaves and taking rides in home-made barrel trains decorated like cows pulled by a tractor...and getting dirt in your teeth from the dust blowing in your face while your rear end turns numb as a result of being too big for the home-made barrel train decorated like cows??
Nora and Hadley take a look at their new home town... just their size.
Hubby and I go for a romantic stroll in the toddler corn maze... I swear we didn't get lost.

The corn bin! Coen and Nora made us look like we starve them, both trying to eat the corn.Nora got to kiss the sheep... goat... whatever this thing was it was sure cute.
This is the out-take of our romantic walk in the toddler corn maze... Or maybe the other one was the out-take... I can't remember. After all, this one actually has a toddler in it.
The look of pure glee on my face shows how much I am enjoying this. Smashing pumpkins is as fun as it looks.
Our newest family picture. Not bad, except the woman in the background is ruining it... she is not related...at all.

I will also post some pictures of our Texas trip, but felt the need to post a FALL post as "fall" is more like winter since we have, like, a foot of snow at least. So, coming soon are Texas pictures.