Category Archives: Abby

Home Sweet Home

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We finally arrived home yesterday evening from our long two week Christmas trip to Texas & Louisiana. That last day was grueling. We started at 8:00 a.m. Central Standard Time and didn’t get home until 6:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Basically: sunrise to sunset. Everyone was tired and the girls are very whiny in the back seat. We were all tired from the 16 hours in the car. I’m not sure if we are going to be making that trip again by car. It’s just too tough.

The last week was spent in Houston at Jennifer’s parents house. I went to see the last Houston Texans’ game of the season thanks to my friend George. They won ending their season 8-8, their best record ever. Afterward, Jennifer picked us up and we met up with George’s wife Heather for some dinner at a restaurant.

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The rest of the week was just driving around and eating or looking at places where we used to go. The highlight of the week was Jennifer’s parents taking Abby and Emily to one of the many stables near their house and setting them up with horse riding lessons. They both enjoyed it and will remember that for years to come.

Though the driving was long, we had a nice trip. Thanks everyone for the gifts and for letting us come and visit. I’m anxious to get back to work and the swing of things. I can now say that I’m working on NCAA Football 09 as the Development Director. They announced that there will be an NCAA 09 over the break as a tie in for the Bowl Championship Series. We are about half way through Production and will soon be heading into Finaling at the beginning of March.

One last thing I have to mention is that today is Emily’s 5th birthday. It was 5 years ago today at 1:11 p.m. in the afternoon that Emily was born. We are having her party on Saturday. We always have to have her party on the weekend after because no one is back from vacation on the weekend closest to her birthday. In celebration, we went to have some ice cream after dinner. I will have some more posts and pictures from the actual celebration.

The Trip to Nana & Poppy’s House

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Two days on the road and we made it to Nana and Poppy’s house yesterday. The drive was fairly uneventful. The first day took us through Florida where we once again stayed in Mobile, Alabama. We found a pretty nice hotel which actually had a suite: two bedrooms and a fold out couch in another. So, Abby & Emily had one room and Isabelle had her the fold out couch. Jennifer and I had our own room. This all actually helped when getting them all to bed and we could stay up and watch TV while they went to bed.

The second day we went up diagonally through Mississippi and hit I-20 in Jackson. From there it was a straight shot to Shreveport. We were able to make the second trip with only one stop for lunch in Vicksburg. When we got to Shreveport, Poppy and Jill were waiting for us. That night the temperature dropped and the wind picked up. Jennifer and I went to see I Am Legend and when we got out of the movie theater, we almost froze to death just walking to our car. It’s currently 80 degrees back in Florida and you suddenly dropped us into 32 degree weather.

Today Jennifer and I continued some Christmas shopping and stopped off to eat at one of our favorite Italian restaurants in Shreveport: Monjuni’s. Excellent bread and lasagna. While we were doing that Poppy and Jill took Abby and Emily to see Alvin and the Chipmunks. Abby and Emily both said the movie was good, but they didn’t really give specifics on what their favorite parts were.

We allowed the girls to open up one present tonight as well. Abby got upset because the other two opened up toys while she opened up clothes. We took pity on her and let her open up one more present.

Austin: Menace To Society

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A week ago Austin bit Emily on the arm when she fell on his back. Since this is obviously as sensitive area for Austin since he had back surgery, his instincts took over and he ended up leaving one puncture on the inside of Emily’s arm. We would have thought nothing of it, but the wound started to show signs of being infected. So, we decided to take her to the doctor so we could get some antibiotics. Unfortunately, when a dog bites someone, they have to report it to the county and they did and we got a visit from animal control. Since it was our dog biting someone in our family, Austin had to be “quarantined” inside our own house for a week. This was a pretty simple punishment since he spends 99.9% of his time inside our house anyway. Today the county called us back and said that the quarantine had been lifted and Austin was a “free dog”.

Also today was Emily and Isabelle’s Preschool Christmas Program. We were treated to the likes of “Jingle Bells” and “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”. For Isabelle, this was her first performance. She was a little shy, but she did well during “Jingle Bells”. Emily is an old pro and sang really well. After the singing, we all had milk and cookies to eat and Santa came out and visited, giving all the girls and boys presents. Both Emily and Isabelle received books about Christmas.

Over in Abby’s First Grade class, it was dress up like a fairy tale character day. Over the weekend we bought some red felt and Jennifer made a cape and hood so that she could be Little Red Riding Hood. She had a basket and put some plastic food in there to complete the outfit.

All I Want For Christmas Are My Two Front Teeth

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After you’ve been with EA for seven years, they give you an extra seven weeks of vacation which they call the “sabbatical”. That’s above and beyond the four weeks I normally get off and the week everyone gets at Christmas. So, there’s no way I’m going to be able to take off seven weeks all at one time, so I’m dividing it up into three parts. I took a week at Thanksgiving. I’m taking two weeks here at Christmas and then I’m going to take four weeks once the game I’m working on ships. So, I started my first week off this week and I don’t have to go back to work until January 9th.

I decided to treat myself to some lunch all on my own today. I went up to our favorite pizza place, American Pie. It was good being free from the kids just eating pizza and reading my book.

Later on in the afternoon it was time to rock. Jennifer went to a hair appointment and since she doesn’t care for Rock Band too much, it was time to get out the drum set and rock. I first looked over to see if there were any new songs to download from the music store. I picked up “My Sharona” by The Knack, one of my dad’s favorite songs. Mainly because he claims to have come up with the melody for the song. I’ve completed all the solo drum songs on “Easy” and now I’ve started going through all of them on “Medium”. Well, it appears I rocked too hard, because I think I pulled something in my ankle. I can barely move my foot around.

In another bit of news, Abby pulled her other top front tooth out tonight. So, she will be getting another visit from the tooth fairy and she will be without her two front teeth for Christmas. She was very exciting when it started bleeding coming downstairs and to inform the entire family. She then spent the next thirty minutes wiggling it until it finally broke free.

Abby 7th Birthday Camping, Day 2

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Today was the big birthday party at Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique. Two of Abby’s friends met us at Downtown Disney and along with Emily they all got their hair and makeup done as if they were princesses. The place was a mad house over run with giggling little girls. You can check out my Flickr page for pictures from my cell phone. When we get back home, I’ll post some better ones from our camera.

After the makeovers were done, our next door neighbor, Sadie, joined us and we headed over to Planet Hollywood for some lunch. Abby received a free sundae for being the birthday girl.

We then headed back to Magic Kingdom, but it was busy and we only had time for two rides: It’s a Small World and Haunted Mansion. It was getting dark so we headed back to camp for dinner. After some hamburgers for dinner the girls were getting cold and cranky so we quickly roasted some marshmallows for some smores and went to bed.

Abby Loses Third Tooth

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I was awaken this morning at 6:00 by Abby coming into our room and informing us that her tooth was really loose now. When I finally got up twenty minutes later, she showed me the hole in her teeth. She had pulled her tooth. She said that she wiggled and wiggled it until it finally just came out. She was so very happy because she would be put on the “tooth list” at school. She was also happy because she knew the Tooth Fairy would be bringing her another $5 and she could now afford a Barbie she had her eye on. The best thing is she saved her parent around $30, which is what the dentist was going to charge to pull her tooth yesterday. No, the Tooth Fairy will not be passing the savings down to Abby.

Dentist Round Up

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Today was dentist day for all the French girls. Even Isabelle made her first visit to the dentist. Isabelle was excellent. She watched her big sister Emily sit in the dentist chair and get her teeth looked at and cleaned. Then, she climbed on up just like the big girl she thinks she is and opened up her mouth real wide.

For Abby there was question on whether or not we wanted the dentist to pull one of her teeth that had been loose for a while. Abby ended up to scared to have it done, so we just decided that it would evenutally just come out on it’s own.

Long Week

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This past Sunday Jennifer left for a photography conference near Fort Meyer, Florida, leaving me with the kids for five days. This is definitely the longest I’ve ever had to take care of the girls on my own. So, I took off the week from work and played “Mr. Mom”. Everything went okay. We went shopping and played a little Guitar Hero II, but all and all it was a pretty normal week, except I was doing everything that Jennifer generally does. This was a rough time to take off from work as we are transitioning from our design phase into our production phase on the project I’m working on. I was able to push things along over e-mail, but I still felt out of the loop.

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When Jennifer got home, she used some of the new lighting techniques she had learned to create a few great pictures of the girls. She also received a new background. She’s starting to get really good at photography. She now just needs to start getting more clients. She’s taken out more ads in the local newspapers. Hopefully, that will pick up some regular clients. She also learned a few marketing techniques at the conference that she’s considering doing.

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This weekend I worked on giving Frenchville another face lift. You’ll notice the new theme, but there’s a few more new features as well. In the right panel you will notice “On This Date in Frenchville History”. This section will show previous entries over the seven years of Frenchville. In order to get this to work correctly, I had to import all of the older entries from November 2000 – October 2004. I have most of them in, but I’m still working on getting them all in. I think this is a pretty cool feature. You will also notice, that I have links to Flickr. I’m going to start putting all of my pictures up there so that you can see all the pictures I take, not just the ones I’m posting on the web site.

Playing Catch-Up

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Sorry that it’s been so long since I’ve blogged on Frenchville. Jennifer started poking me last night to get back on the wagon and start it up again. Let’s see what’s been going on since I wrote last…

Abby and Emily had their first day of school. Jennifer has been loving having Mondays and Wednesdays off without any of the kids. Of coarse, she didn’t get this past Monday off because Emily was up until 1:30 in the morning throwing up everywhere. I had to give her a bath twice because she didn’t quite make it to the bathroom.

Austin returned from his surgery in pretty good shape. He still has trouble getting around sometimes. When he tries to run he ends up sliding around on the hardwood floors because he can’t get any traction with his back feet. It’s sad and funny at the same time.

Jennifer and I have been watching the series Heroes on HD-DVD through Netflix. It’s been a great series. We have been watching at least an episode a night trying to finish it out before the new television series starts up.

Anyway, that’s a quick blog entry. Hopefully I will get back into this so you all out there can read up on what the French family is up to.

Meeting the Teachers

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This morning was Open House at Abby’s school so that you could meet the teacher or teachers in Abby’s case. So, I took the morning off from work and we headed up there. Abby is in a larger class (around 30 kids), but there’s two teachers. We met both of them and they seemed really nice. The little girl next door who is starting kindergarten is actually right next door to Abby’s class, so Abby can help direct her to the right classroom on the first day.

We received word that Austin is still recovering. He has feeling back in both legs, but one is weaker than the other. They are going to keep him through to Monday so that he can recover some more.

Today’s picture is the beach that we visited on our trip to Fort Clinch.