Category Archives: Emily

Universal Day

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Today the company I work for, EA-Tiburon, bought everyone tickets to Universal Studios Florida. It was foggy and misty this morning, but we decided to head out anyway. I had visited Universal once before, but this was the first time for Jennifer and the girls. Overall, everyone had fun. However, it wasn’t anything that you couldn’t see at one of Disney’s parks. The one exception being the Revenge of the Mummy, which is one of the best roller coasters I’ve ridden. We ended up riding the following rides: Jimmy Neutron, Shrek 4-D, Twister, Revenge of the Mummy, Jaws, Woody Woodpecker’s Nuthouse Coaster, Fievel’s Playland, and E.T. Adventures. We had to explain to Abby how each ride was based on a movie, since she had never seen Twister, Jaws, or E.T. We told her it might be a while before she can see Jaws, but we would try and add E.T. to our Friday movie night. Isabelle was quite funny during the Jaws ride. She kept burying her face into my side each time the shark would pop out. Everyone kept saying “awww” every time she would do it. By the afternoon the fog had burned off and the sun turned the park into a sauna. After that we only spent a few more hours because we all were starting to get cranky.

One other event of note is that we’ve been potty training Isabelle over the past week, starting last Monday. So far it’s looking like success. She now tells us when she needs to go instead of us asking every hour or so. It has been two days straight of her staying dry and she even survived the trip to Universal Studios and stayed dry all day. This is quite a momentous occasion for me as a parent. This now marks the end of seven straight years of changing diapers. Yea!

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.

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.

Fort Clinch Camping, Day 2

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REMOTE POSTING – FERNANDINA BEACH, FL.: It rained all night long. The girls slept right through it, but Jennifer and myself were tossing all night lon slept right through it, but Jennifer and myself were tossing all night long. At one point the wind started whipping, but we weathered the storm.
In the morning the girls got up at their normal 6:30 time and it was still raining. Every once in a while it would slow down to a sprinkle and I was able to get some charcoal lit for our breakfast. We cooked up egg and bacon English muffins heated up in a pie iron over the hot coals.
It was still raining and the girls were getting stir crazy, so we decided to get everyone into the Sequoia and head into Jacksonville. I looked up a children’s museum with directions on the Internet using my phone. And off we went. It was a cute place. It was just a locally owned joint with several went. It was a cute place. It was just a locally owned joint with several areas like a pretend bank and post office. It had a dress up area and stage which Abby enjoyed.
We let the girls play around for a couple of hours and then we headed over to Dave & Busters. D&B is an arcade/restaurant which they have in Texas, which we haven’t been to since leaving Austin. The best way to describe it is a Chuck E Cheese for adults. The girls had fun and won several toys playin a Chuck E Cheese for adults. The girls had fun and won several toys playing all the games that gave away tickets.
Believe it or not the sun had come out in the afternoon and dried up the camp. As the sun started to set, we had a quick snack for dinner and headed over to Fort Clinch for a candle light tour of the fort. The tour was very interesting. A soldier with a thick Irish accent answered the door to the fort and led us around the various areas. He stayed in character pretending to be a corporal in the Union army who captured and completed the fort during the Civil War. As I said, it was all very interesting. It was so hot inside the various buildings and it’s amazing that people could live in the South without air conditioning. That’s why our camper has it and I don’t leave home without it. home without it.

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Wastin’ Away Again in Margaritaville

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I did end up having to send my new Treo 750 back, but they were able to get me a new one just in time for my birthday. I spent most of the day trying to get my work e-mail transferred to the device and finally just gave up.

On Monday, we went to Typhoon Lagoon to continue using our annual water park passes. We had fun and actually got Emily to go on one of the water slides. Last time we got all the way to the top and she refused to slide down. Around 2:30 they shut down the rides because a thunder storm was heading our way. We had already been there since 10:00, so we took this as a sign to get going.

On my Birthday, we headed down to Universal CityWalk because I wanted to waste away in Margaritaville. I had a Cheeseburger in Paradise and downed a couple of Margaritas (which were very good). We were going to do some shopping around the CityWalk, but once again those pesky late afternoon Florida thunder storms scared us away. Overall, a nice birthday. As you get older, it gets harder and harder to get excited about birthdays. It’s just another day.

Today we headed to church mainly because we had to teach Emily’s Sunday school class. It’s always tough to do this because Emily clings to us the whole time. At one point I refused and walked away. This just caused her to become a puddle on the floor, refusing to participate. After church, we headed to Five Guys hamburgers. I had been there a couple of times for lunch, but this was the first time I took the family. They have very good hamburgers and French fries. I really recommend them. Because we had nothing else to do, we headed over to the Altamonte Springs mall. This mall we don’t get to as much since we moved up to the Lake Mary area. We had two missions: find a new camping cookbook and find some school shoes for the girls. Four pairs of shoes later, I can say we were successful in one of those missions.

The rest of the day was a lazy day around the house with most of us electing to take a nap. Me and the girls finally cleaned up their play room. The summer has been long and their room has become a mess. Neither Jennifer or myself have the energy at the end of the day to make them clean it. We are always ready for them to head off to bed.

Setting up for Vacation Bible School

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Today was a lounge around the house day with the kids while Jennifer went up to church to set up for vacation bible school. Jennifer is teaching crafts next week at our church’s vacation bible school, so she had to spend the afternoon up there getting ready for almost 400 kids to show up. They decorated nearly every room in the entire church. Jennifer was originally expecting around 325 kids and it kept increasing over the week. There was a mad dash this afternoon for some extra supplies, but they found what they were looking for and they should all be set.

Abby and Emily pretty much played on Jennifer’s computer while I watched TV and did the laundry. I also spent some time updating the look for Frenchville.