Category Archives: Emily

Shopping at the Mall

Posted on by
2

Today was just a trip to the mall and then an excursion to Chuck E Cheese. At the mall, Jennifer got a new iron work to go over the new china hutch kind of like the plaques that hang in our living room (you can see them in the video). I picked up the next book I’m going to be reading, The Mythical Man-Month. It’s about how adding software engineers to a project doesn’t always improve efficiency, in fact it can sometime make it worse. For me, the book is kind of topical.

Today’s picture is actually a video. Emily is dancing to “Livin’ La Vida Loca” at the end of Shrek 2. At first she doesn’t know I’m filming her and then she turns around and says, “cheese”, but continues to dance. Notice at the end of the song how all the characters at the end of the video freeze and she does the same. I only recommend watching the video if you have a high speed connection. It’s a 12 MB download.

Emily’s Potty Training

Posted on by
1

It’s been a while since my last post, but I’m back and should have pretty consistent entries for at least the next week. The reason being: I’m on vacation. I started my “Spring Break” today and won’t be back to work until a week from Monday. It’s nice to finally have some time off.

A couple of things have happened since the last entry. The dining room furniture that was Jennifer’s Christmas gift finally arrived. The furniture really looks great and it’s finally nice to have a dining room with furniture in it. I’ve always been embarrassed when I invite people over to our house and we don’t have anything in our dining room. The other event that happened this week is that we finally had the interior of the house painted. The painters have been working on it over the last few days and they finished up today. Jennifer did an excellent job picking out colors. Our bathroom looks about a billion times better than the pealing wallpaper that used to be in there. I made the comment to Jennifer that our house is starting to look like a “model home”. She really liked hearing that.

Because this was my first day of vacation, Jennifer thought it would be a good day to start potty training Emily. She’s been showing signs of wanting to sit on the potty, but we had a hard time getting Abby started, so we didn’t want to push her. After all, it is only two months after her two year birthday. Jennifer put panties on Emily and then promptly left me alone with her. I asked Emily every five minutes if she needed to go tinkle on the potty and even forced her to go sit on the potty, but no tinkle. Well, after two pairs of panties, two pairs of pants, and many paper towels later, I gave up and put a diaper on her. Fortunately later on in the day she did actually tinkle on the potty, which was a good sign. Just don’t leave me alone with her with nothing but thin cotton between her butt and the ground.

Today’s picture is from last week when we went to the park.

Emily’s First Haircut

Posted on by
Reply

Today I had a hard time rolling out of bed and decided that I would stay home and spend some time with Jennifer and the girls to make up for working all weekend. At first Jennifer was confused because she couldn’t believe I was actually staying home from work.

It was a good thing I did, because I would have missed Emily’s first haircut. We found a haircut place in the mall and Abby got her hair trimmed first in order to show her little sister how it was done. After that it was Emily’s turn and it didn’t look like it was going to be easy. The only way we could get her to calm down enough to cut her hair was to have Jennifer sit down in the chair first and have Emily sit in her lap. She was a trooper and now she looks a lot better without hair flying everywhere.

Next, we went shopping at Target. While we were there, Jennifer bought Emily her first panties. We will be starting her potty training real soon. We’ve gotten her to tinkle on the potty a couple of times, but she doesn’t quite understand that you are supposed to tinkle exclusively on the potty. We got her Dora the Explorer panties as a reward if she successfully tinkles on the potty.

Finally, this afternoon we went down to the park in order to run some energy out of the girls. They had a fun time and I brought the camera with me and I will be posting some of these pictures this week.

Ugly Blue Walls

Posted on by
Reply

Today was project day around the house. Jennifer continued taking down the wallpaper in our bathroom. This time it became serious as the tall ladder entered the house. Now we have these really ugly blue walls. This pretty much forces the issue on whether or not we are getting the inside of the house painted. 🙂 We either get it painted or I look at these horrible walls every morning.

My project was placing the toilet innards in our guest bathroom. The toilet has been running and running. We finally had to shut it off it was running so much. All the toilets in the house are slowly breaking down. I just fixed Abby’s toilet three weeks ago.

While playing around the house Emily thought it would be funny to use one of her doll’s strollers as a little car to ride in. We thought this was pretty funny and took a picture.

What Are We Going to Do?

Posted on by
Reply

Abby has been acting like a wild child lately. She’s been really hyper and jumping around and talking constantly. It’s like she’s hopped up on sugar, but she isn’t (we hope). Yesterday she wrapped a ribbon tape measure around one of our lamps and pull it off the side table, making it shatter on the ground. Today while I was watching her she couldn’t sit still for a minute.

Meanwhile, Emily has been the angel. She’s been cracking us up with what she does. Today she pointed at a picture of Santa Claus and said, “Ho Ho Ho”. I was like, okay, Christmas was two months ago, how do you know that now and not back then? She also has two very funny expressions that crack us up, and thus she continues to do them. She’ll go “Hummm” and have her fist balled up against her cheek with a poutty look on her face. The other one is she’ll put both hands on her cheeks and go, “What are we going to do?” Both very funny.

Jennifer has started peeling the wallpaper down out of our bathroom. The previous owners did a horrible job wall papering and we’ve always hated it. She finally could stand it no longer and started peeling. We’ve been toying with the idea of getting the house painted because my Employee Stock Purchase Plan money is about to arrive. I also like making the joke that Jennifer is “nesting” because she’s pregnant. So far with every child, she’s done some sort of house remodeling while pregnant.

The Cookie Debate

Posted on by

Hooray! I’m posting an entry two days in a row. Today Abby was off from school because of President’s Day, so Jennifer had set up a play date with a friend of Abby’s. When they arrived they were informed that everyone was sick, so they decided to go to the park instead.

Abby and Emily are getting quite funny together now that Emily is talking more. Today at the dinner table Abby wanted a cookie for desert and Emily was telling her no. The exchange went something like: “Mommie, can I have a cookie?” Emily would respond, “No cookie”. Abby would say “Yes” and then Emily would say “No”. This went back and forth until is escalated to screaming “Yes” and “No” at the top of their lungs and the parents had to step in and break it up.

Today’s picture is from Abby’s singing at church yesterday.

Working Too Hard to Post

Posted on by
Reply

Sorry it’s been over a week since my last entry. It’s been another busy week at work. Fortunately I’ve been able to do all of my work from home, but it still takes it’s toll when you are having to constantly think and do work. Even when I was my busiest last year while we were finalling Madden 2005, I had time for a small entry. This past week I haven’t even had time for that, if that explains how busy I’ve been. I’ll try to get better from here on out.

Enough about work, this morning I was woken up by Abby screaming “Sister is throwing up!” Emily has had a runny nose lately and apparently coughed once to many times and ended up gagging. Up came all the milk she had been drinking in the morning. Because Jennifer’s queasy due to the pregnancy, guess who got to do the honor of cleaning up the mess.

Because Emily wasn’t feeling well, she and I stayed at home while Jennifer and Abby went to church. Today Abby was singing in the choir. She was giving one of the small choir robes and stood in front of the church and sang. We’ve been working on her stage fright and she did very well. We had to bribe her with a trip to “Burger Cheese” in order to accomplish it, but hey, she wasn’t a crying mess, so that was a bonus.

All the Engineers One Can Handle

Posted on by
Reply

Another week that went by quick because I was so busy at work. I have found that our team is way too big for me to handle. Even with the number of people split amongst myself and the new Development Director, I still have sixteen software engineers that report to me. I’m working so hard on day-to-day problems, it’s hard to get to keep up with everyone’s schedule much less any long term planning that needs to be done. Looking at the work load it looks like six to ten engineers is the maximum number of people one should have to help. Beyond that, and you start losing issues and the product starts to suffer.

Tonight I met the girls at Quiznos for some dinner. Abby and Emily sat at a table all by themselves and ate their dinner. Emily has started talking a lot more. She’s started saying “Yes” instead of just nodding her head. She also says, “I’ll be right back” and holds up her index finger. Today’s picture is of Emily wearing her Dora the Explorer backpack. She’s started putting it on all by herself and walking around the house saying, “Let’s go”.

Late Nights and Slumped Shoulders

Posted on by
Reply

It’s been a week since my last entry and boy has it been a busy week. As predicted, last week was pretty hectic at work. It was the end of our second milestone and I ended up working late every night. The last night I was there until 5:30 a.m. It’s funny now that I’m a manager, you would think I would have nothing to do and have no reason to be up there except for moral support, but our with our new Development Director’s help we are trying to get our schedule under control. Right now, it doesn’t look like it’s going to be settling down any time soon. I think if we could just get our schedule for the rest of the year nailed down we would be in a better position to take on the day-to-day problems. As it is now we are trying to do scheduling in the midsts of handling the day-to-day problems. Very difficult.

This weekend wasn’t very fun at home because Emily had a fever and kept throwing up. It’s never fun to have one of your kids sick. You can really tell when they aren’t feeling well because they stop acting the way they normally do. In the case of Emily, she would mope around with her shoulders slumped down and a pout on her face. Once the Tylenol would take effect, she was up and bouncing around again, but those times were few and far between.

Jennifer was busy Sunday and will be busy the rest of the week working on “Hanna’s Closet”. It’s a giant consignment sale of baby clothes, toys, and furniture that she’s been helping to set up at church. She will be up at church every day this week with the final sale on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.

Today’s picture is of Abby with her baby. She actually had me go get the camera to take this picture. She’s been telling me lately that she wants to be a “mommy” when she grows up instead of a “princess”.

The Drawing on the Wall Incident

Posted on by
2

One thing that I forgot to mention that happened yesterday was that Abby, for some unknown reason, thought it would be a good idea to take a crayon that she found and start writing on nearly every wall in our living room. She thrust the crayon into Emily’s hand and wandered off waiting for the yelling to begin. Jennifer found Emily with the crayon in her hand and started to survey the damage. It was readily apparent that Emily wasn’t the one who decided to do some artwork on our walls. The lines were out of her reach and there were people’s faces drawn on the windows in our living room. A tale tale sign of a four-year-old not a two-year-old. Anyway, a lot of yelling and spanking happened and Abby was sent off to her room. Today Abby surprised Jennifer by apologizing for drawing on the wall.

Abby stayed home from school again today because of her sore throat. Right now we are to the point where we don’t know what to do with her. She won’t eat because “her tummy says that she’s not hungry” when it’s time for dinner, but once dinner is done she complains that she’s hungry. It almost sounds like an excuse not to eat what we are having for dinner.

I finished the Joel on Software book I picked up while on vacation in Houston. This was by far one of the best software management books I’ve ever read. I’ve been a fan of Joel’s site for years and you can pretty much read the entire book online by reading all of the articles on his site, but it was nice to re-read the articles in book form. He really gets down to the basic foundations of building a successfully software team. It isn’t some whiz bang method like Extreme Programming or some other crazy method. If you don’t have the basic methods he describes, you don’t have a good foundation to support your software project. Anyway, if you are in the software industry, I recommend this book highly.

Today’s picture is another one from our trip to the Houston Zoo. This time it’s Emily on one of the zoo animals on the merry-go-round.