Category Archives: Emily

Too Cold for the Park

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I had the day off from work today and so we decided to go to the park this morning even though it’s been pretty cold here the past couple of days. The high temperature today was 58 degrees, which obviously isn’t cold for most of the country, but it’s cold for here in Central Florida. Also, it’s pretty cold when last week the high was in the 80’s all week long. Anyway, we were there for only forty minutes before it became too cold and we headed to Chick Olé for some indoor playing.

While talking to Jennifer’s sister on the phone today, Abby admitted that her fish were named “Nemo” and “Dory”, so that puts to rest what the name of the fish are. I suppose my arguments against naming them after herself and her sister actually were having an effect.

I finished Ratchet & Clank today. This game was okay. It wasn’t stellar, but had its challenging moments. What I didn’t like about it was that I had to collect a certain amount of money in order to kill the last “boss” creature to end the game. I got online and found a cheat in order to collect a lot of money so I could win. When you have to resort to that type of tactic in order to finish the game, then there’s a flaw in the overall design, in my opinion.

Today it was announced that Electronic Arts has paid ESPN for exclusive rights to their brand. This effectively deals a one, two punch to our biggest competition Sega/Take Two who had their ESPN line of sports titles for the past two years. The exclusive NFL license killed their football game and now our ESPN license has killed pretty much all brand recognition that they built up. All I can say is: “It’s good to be the king.”

Today’s picture is of Emily playing a little soccer (with a basketball) while we were at Grandma and Grandpa’s house in Houston.

Happy Birthday, Emily!

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Sorry, but I’ve been so busy at work lately that I haven’t had time to put an entry into Frenchville. However, I had to get an entry in for Emily’s birthday. We celebrated her birthday in Houston last weekend, but today was her actual birthday.

We are still trying to get everything unpacked from the trip. Abby and Emily have been riding their new scooters around. I put the Barbie Jeep back together, but there isn’t any room to store it in the garage. I had to put it on the back porch and the girls have to go off roading in order to get it around the house and into the front yard. Hey, it is a Jeep after all.

Three Events While on the Road

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We made it back home all in one piece. That drove from Houston to Mobile and then to Orlando is way too long. We drive from 7:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. both days. Abby’s new statement was that she was “tired of this trip”.

We had three events all happen while we were driving for the past few days. First, we were called around 2:00 yesterday while driving through southern Louisiana, by our alarm company. The alarm on our house was going off and they asked if they should send the police. We told them yes and then we called one of our neighbors. We didn’t hear anything back from the alarm company, but our neighbor walked around the house and said that everything was okay. We found out from one of our other neighbors that the police did come to our house, but didn’t see anything wrong. Once we got home, everything seemed to be in order.

While we were strolling through Mississippi, the “MAINT REQD” light came up on the dashboard. Our car is only a couple of months old and just has over 5,000 miles on it. When I noticed the light we had 5,003 miles on the car. Even though Jennifer went ahead and got the oil changed right before we left, I figured it was just a light to remind one to get their oil changed. Once we got to our hotel in Mobile, I used their Internet connection to confirm my suspicion on Toyota.com.

Finally, today while driving through Florida, I was called by one of the managers at work to inform me that my boss had quit. I don’t know the reason why, and may never know. So, my life at work just got more complicated. I guess I will know more of the fallout tomorrow.

Longhorns Win Rose Bowl!

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Happy New Year! We spent the switch to the new year here in the Central Time Zone asleep. I guess roasting all the marshmallows made us a little groggy.

We went ahead and celebrated Emily’s second birthday while we were here in Houston. Abby and Grandma made a cake with sprinkles on top, of course, and some more homemade ice cream as well. We sung “Happy Birthday” and she blew out her candles with some help. She was much better than Abby on her second birthday who cried when we started singing.

What a great showing by the Texas Longhorns in the Rose Bowl today. They defeated Michigan in the last seconds of the game and showed everyone that they did belong in a BCS game. Vince Young and the offense looked great. It was the defense that I wasn’t too happy with. The secondary kept giving up the pass over the middle and it was getting very frustrating. They marched down the field in the last seconds and kicked a field goal two win with two seconds left in the game. Very exciting. HOOK ‘EM HORNS!

Mongolia Found

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Today Jennifer and I swung by our favorite Mongolian Bar-B-Q place in Clear Lake and had lunch. It tasted just like it did when we were last there four years ago and the restaurant didn’t look like it had changed a bit. We did some shopping and went by Jennifer’s old Home Depot that she used to work at. There was actually someone who still worked there in her department who she got to talk to. It was amazing that she were still there considering Jennifer hasn’t worked there in five years.

When we got home, Grandma, Jennifer, and the girls made homemade ice cream. Grandma started experimenting with eBay for the first time and bought an electric ice cream maker. The ice cream was great. They doubled their recipe and it only made about a dozen scoops. This was supposed to be a “trial run” and we are going to try more ice cream tomorrow. This time quadrupling the recipe.

Visiting with George & Heather

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Today we headed down to Galveston to go to Moody Gardens, where there’s a series of glass pyramids with different types of environments that you can visit. First, we traveled under the sea into their aquarium. The girls were amazed looking at all the sharks and penguins and Abby got to touch a star fish. After the aquarium, we traveled through a rain forest. When we entered there was so much humidity, it was like being back in Florida. Jennifer’s glasses and our camera fogged up. Emily met some birds and when she would say “hello”, the birds would squawk in response and she would laugh.

For dinner we went over to George’s new house. He and his wife, Heather, just moved into a townhouse near downtown. It’s not in a very good part of town, but George is now only about twenty minutes from work. The neighborhood is slowly being converted into a a bunch of new townhouses, but until then they have to put up with a shack across the street. They will probably make a ton of money on their townhouse once they are ready to sell. They got in on the ground floor on this area and once it’s all converted over they could probably sell their townhouse for twice what they paid for it. George had a huge HDTV, which was really nice. I guess that’s the type of thing you can spend your money on when you don’t have kids. It was nice visiting and seeing them again.

New Camera

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Another day spent in Shreveport with Nana and Poppy. My grandfather, PaPaw Wilmon, drove over with my Aunt Pat to have lunch and visit with us. He last saw the girls at the big Wilmon family reunion this past summer. It was good to see him again since I had to miss the reunion since we were finalling Madden.

Jennifer went ahead and let me open my Christmas present since “it had to charge if I was intending on using it on Christmas day”. She got me a new digital camera, a Kodak EasyShare DX7630. It’s a 6.1 mega-pixel camera, which is pretty nice. One thing that is nice is that the camera can take movies as well. If you click on today’s picture it will download and play a QuickTime movie of Emily throwing a fit. She is crying because she just woke up from her nap and she always ends up crying for about thirty minutes after she wakes up from her nap.

Tonight, Jennifer and I escaped to the casino once again to play some more roulette. This time I was the big winner with taking home $80 and I pretty much made up for all the money Jennifer lost. We still ended up ahead for our two day excursion to the casino. Jennifer says that she now has it “out of her system”.

Playing at the Duck Pond

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We had a big day in Shreveport with Nana and Poppy. First we all piled into the Sequoia and went to the duck pond where Abby and Emily played on the gym equipment. They had fun running around and playing with Nana and Poppy. At one point a group of ducks and geese swam by while Abby and Emily were watching.

Jennifer and I went out to eat by ourselves to one of my favorite restaurants in Shreveport, Monjunis. It’s an Italian restaurant with great lasagna. They also put bread and marinara sauce on the table like they do chips and salsa at a Mexican restaurant.

After Monjunis, we went to Horseshoe Casino. Jennifer ended up winning $300 playing roulette and I ended up loosing money at the dollar slot machines. It’s a good thing Jennifer made up for my loss and then then some.

While we were out on the town, Nana and Poppy took Abby and Emily to Chick Olé and then they drove around looking at Christmas lights. They had fun and then fell right to sleep when they got home.

From Shreveport, Louisiana: Day 1

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We finally made it! Driving in the truck was wearing thin very very fast. Both the girls and Jennifer were very cranky and just wanted to get to our destination. Our trip took us from Mobile, Alabama and up through Mississippi to connect up with I-20. Then we swung over to Shreveport. We didn’t have much trouble finding my parents’ new house once we got into town. It’s very nice and much bigger than their old house.

My parents had Abby and Emily open up a huge box which contained a Barbie PowerWheels Jeep. Abby drove around the yard while Emily was in charge of the music. There’s a kid sized juke box in the passenger seat.

My parents had me and Jennifer open a present too: a stay at a Bed and Breakfast in Natchitoches. We are pretty excited to get away from the kids for a day. My parents also love getting us out of the house so that they can pamper the kids.

Emily: Independent Child

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We didn’t do much today. We didn’t even go to our usual Saturday morning breakfast, instead we opted for bagels from Einstein’s. Jennifer then took off Christmas shopping leaving me to stay with the kids. One thing I’ve noticed about Emily lately is that she’s trying to do everything herself. When it was time to go for bagels, she wanted to put her socks and shoes on herself. Well, if we had about an hour to wait for her to accomplish this, we could have waited, but we were hungry for some bagels.

She did another thing that was pretty funny today while I was watching her. She was caring around this baby doll and then she walked off to the baby’s bedroom where we still have a changing table where we change Emily’s diapers. After a while I went in there to see what she was doing and she had climbed to the top of the changing table and was using the baby wipes to wipe the butt of her baby doll. I suppose the baby doll had pooped and she was cleaning it up.

During Emily’s nap, Jennifer and Abby worked on a gingerbread house. Well, actually Jennifer worked on the house. Abby mainly tried to eat all of the candy until Jennifer banished her from the kitchen. Today’s picture is of their work of art.