This was a momentous week because it marked Jennifer’s return to the workforce. We signed the girls up for day care and so it was a little nerve wracking making sure Abby and Emily knew they had to ride the bus from school to the day care. Abby said it best when she said she was both nervous and excited. I told her there’s a word for that: anxious. Everything went fine they made it to day care and Izzy’s getting used to new friends to play with during the day.
Saturday also marked Emily’s first soccer game. When you are in Kindergarten, it’s three-on-three with no goalie. So, it’s was pretty simple. Emily could really run, but she always hesitated getting into the middle of the fray. She got a few good kicks in and they ended up winning 9 – 5. At the end of the day Emily asked me why today was different than the other days she went to soccer. She didn’t really get the concept that that was a game and that they were playing another team. It was pretty cute.
I have some good news. This past week, Jennifer got a job with Coverings, Etc. as a sales person. They specialize in engineered stone surfaces, specifically recycled or as they put it “eco-friendly”. She’s pretty excited about it and will be going to sales training in Miami next weekend, leaving me with the girls for three days. It’s a commission job, but we think it’s a pretty good opportunity.
This week we moved our cell phone numbers to ones in Houston, so we no longer have our Florida phones. With this change, I upgraded to an iPhone. I’m still getting used to the interface and I don’t really enjoy using iTunes. It’s just too hard to use. I suppose it takes “Mac thinking”, which I don’t have.
This Christmas I had most of my family give me gift certificates to Amazon so that I could buy their digital book reader, the Kindle. However, I was going to hold off until the new “Kindle 2” came out so that I could get the latest design. Well, I got impatient at the end of January and decided to go ahead and order it. I was disappointed when it turned out that it was on backorder for over a month. This week I got the good news. The reason it was on backorder was because they were waiting for the “Kindle 2” to come out. I got an e-mail from Amazon saying that I would be getting the latest version of the Kindle in a couple of weeks.
After a few requests from friends, I bowed to the peer pressure and went ahead and bit the bullet. I created a Facebook account. I always figured, why would I need a Facebook account with my own family blog, but I now see the advantage. Just like I use Twitter, it’s a way to connect with old friends. In a week I now have 41 “friends” from people I know from EA, family, UT, and high school. It was cool seeing pictures from some people who I hadn’t seen in almost twenty years.
For Valentines Day, we decided to take advantage of living in the same city as Jennifer’s parents. For the first time, we sent the girls over their the grandparents while Jennifer and I went out to eat. We went to our favorite place, The Melting Pot, which we discovered while in Florida. It’s a fondue restaurant, where you cook your own meal right in front of you in a boiling pot. It’s really good and very filling. When we got home, the house seemed pretty desolate. It was almost too quiet with the girls and the dog gone. I guess we’ve just gotten used to them in our lives. It seems weird when they aren’t there.
I can’t believe a month has gone by without me updating Frenchville. It seems like it was just Christmas and now we are rolling into February. Of course we celebrated Emily’s birthday. We decided to keep the celebration small and asked her what she wanted to do. She decided that she wanted to go to the Houston Zoo, so we asked her cousin Kinley if she wanted to go and we headed into town even though Poppy had warned us about the monkeys who fling their poo. It was a little on the cold side and by the end we were really tired from walking around so much, but Emily enjoyed seeing all the animals. We got there right as they were training the elephants so we got a special show as they explained how they train them.
Another momentous occasion during the month of January was that Izzy got her first haircut. She’s three and a half and she was finally getting her haircut. It was getting a little wild on the side. Now that it’s cut, it still does cute curls, but they are a little more under control.
The past few weeks Emily has been working on getting Girl Scout Cookies sold. She went door-to-door in our neighborhood, got on the phone and asked relatives, and even made me take it up to work. I usually don’t like doing that sort of thing, and I did catch some flack from some of the guys, but in the end that put her over the sixty boxes she needed to sell in order to get her cookie sell patch.
A question I get often is how the guitar lessons are going. I actually stopped lessons back in October right after the hurricane. I used the money I got for my birthday to fund the lessons and, at the time, our house still wasn’t sold in Orlando. It was hard to justify spending $100 a month on that. At the beginning of the year, I found a good site, justinguitar.com, which has free online lessons. I decided in the end, all you really want to do it learn how to play songs you know. That’s the real motivator. So, he suggests for beginners just spending 15 minutes each day learning cords, transitions between cords, and then working on a song. I figured I can spare 15 minutes a day, and I’ve been pretty good about it so far. I’ve been working on the following cords: C, D, A-minor, G, and E-minor. And then working on “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd. The calluses on my fingers are starting to return and I’ve gotten almost through the intro. Like I said, working on music you like and the fact that you can spare 15 minutes a day has really helped.
Finally, we have been attending a new church here in Sienna Plantation called The Harvest United Methodist Church. It’s a small church without a building, they are meeting in the middle school which is here in the neighborhood. They have land right across from the middle school and are planning on building eventually once they have enough money. We never thought we would like a small church, but we’ve really been enjoying the fact that we are meeting other people here in the community. Today was a pot luck breakfast, so we brought up some breakfast tacos and enjoyed some of the other treats brought by some of the other families.
That’s pretty much January in review. I’ll try not to make it so long between updates.
We had a nice Christmas this year. The first time in a long time we haven’t had to drive 1500 miles from Florida to Texas, which was nice. We spent Christmas Eve cleaning the house so that Jennifer’s parents and sister could come over and have dinner and open presents.
Then, in the morning we got up early, checked to see what Santa brought the girls and then crammed everyone into the Sequoia in order to drive to Lindale to see my side of the family. The trip is about four and a half hours and it’s funny how the girls can only last around three hours before they become restless. The “stop touching me” or similar statements start coming from the back seats.
Once there, we got to see how big my cousin’s little girl Addison has gotten. She’s now walking around quite good now and is very cute. We had another round of opening presents there and just sat around and visited the rest of the day.
In the morning, we went and visited my Mom’s father in Grand Saline. It was nice to see him again and I know he enjoys seeing the girls. After that, we headed back to Houston and spent the next day cleaning up the house from the party on Christmas Eve.
It was a whirlwind trip, but we enjoyed the company and thank everyone for the presents. I know the girls enjoyed it and I hope everyone had a safe and great Christmas.
Just a few minutes ago Jennifer’s sister, Christina, and her husband, Mike, welcomed the latest addition to their family into the world. They are still debating the name, but he was 7 lbs. 9 oz. and 19″ long. Everyone is resting and doing well. Here’s hoping that their new bundle of joy doesn’t keep them up too much in the up coming days. Congratulations!
The weekend went pretty quick here at the French household. On Saturday, we broke into two groups. Jennifer, Abby, and Isabelle went with Jennifer’s mom to pick out carpet and paint for the construction that’s going on at their house. The house is being repaired after roof damage from Hurricane Ike. The roof is being completely re-done and a lot of the sheet rock and carpet are being replaced inside the house.
While they were off doing that, Emily and myself went to a pool party for her “boyfriend”, Zachary. I was a little confused about having a pool party in December, until I found out it was at an indoor pool. Emily still being timid around water, I took my swimsuit with me just in case she chickened out, which she did. She and I kept to the shallow end, but she had a good time.
Sunday we went back to our new favorite breakfast spot, the Avalon Diner. We discovered this place when my parents were down. The only problem being that it’s all the way into Sugar Land, which means about a 20 minute drive.
I can’t believe it’s been over a month since I last updated. Since then a lot has happened. We had Halloween where Abby went as an Egyptian princess, Emily went as a cowgirl, and Izzy went as bumble bee. One of the neighborhood mothers had arranged a Halloween block party so we went to that for a while before making it about half way around the block doing some old fashioned door-to-door trick-or-treating. We both went out with the girls this time and just left a bowl of candy at the door.
Emily has started Girl Scouts and was officially added to a new Daisy troop. She received her sash and one of the following weekends went and helped put together food boxes for needy families for Thanksgiving.
Also in that past month, we now have an 8 year-old in Abby. Since we don’t know too many people yet, we just made it a family affair. Mom and Dad drove down from Shreveport, Jennifer’s parents and sister joined us at the Incredible Pizza Company for pizza and games. Can’t believe that Abby is already 8 years-old. One of Abby’s gifts was tickets to the Nutcracker here in Houston. The Sunday after Thanksgiving, Abby, Jennifer, and Jennifer’s mom headed downtown and watched the ballet. Abby was looking quite the young lady in her new dress.
The following weekend was Thanksgiving and we had all of Jennifer’s family over for Turkey. Jennifer started the bird cooking in the morning and was ready by dinner time. Our dining room set is so stuffed into our rent house that we had to turn it length wise so that it was sticking out into the hall in order to get everyone around it. It was nice having everyone over. It’s one of the reasons we moved back to Texas so that we could get together with family more often.
A lot has happened in the two weeks since I last wrote. Last weekend we snuck up to Shreveport to surprise my mom for her birthday. She was quite surprised that we would make the five hour drive, but it was worth it seeing everyone again. It’s the reason we moved back to Texas. We went to the park for a picnic lunch and then Poppy, myself, Abby, and Emily went to see Beverly Hills Chihuahua.
The biggest news of the week is that we received an offer on our house in Orlando. We are happy, but are cautious. It’s not over until it’s over. We went back and forth a few times, but finally accepting the offer. The closing date has been set for December, 15th.
In the saddest news of the week, both Isabelle and myself had to go to the doctor on Friday because we had an ear infection. I’ve had a cold for about two weeks and it finally caused an infection. Right now all I hear out of my right ear is a ringing sound. It’s very annoying. Of coarse, Izzy didn’t start complaining about her ear until 6:00, so we had to take her to an after hours clinic.
Finally, today, we headed to the Texas Renaissance Festival. My company, TimeGate Studios, paid for the tickets so we met up with some others from the company and strolled around medieval times. We ate turkey legs, the girls got their faces painted and rode an elephant. It was fun, but the place is now huge and we were very pooped at the end of the day. We got home and collapsed on the couch watching the Texas Longhorns narrowly defeat the Oklahoma State Cowboys.
Another week back into the grind. Nothing major happened. I started out the week with a slight cold and since my company does make a distinction between vacation days and sick days, I decided to go ahead and stay home. That didn’t really help my situation at work, just making me more and more behind for the week. Looking like I’m going to have to put in a few extra hours in order to catch up.
On Thursday was mine and Jennifer’s 9th wedding anniversary. Can’t believe it’s been 9 years. It’s gone by fast. We didn’t do much for the anniversary. I stopped by Target and picked up a bouquet of roses and we stayed at home watching Survivor with the kids. We had purchased our anniversary gifts the weekend before. The Xbox 360 Wireless Network adapter for me and a cutting machine for scrap booking called the Cricut for Jennifer. Here’s to hoping that our house sells in Orlando before our 10th anniversary so we can do something just a little bit more exciting.
We were awaken at 5 a.m. By yelling from upstairs. Emily had thrown up. We think she either ate too much junk food at the block party or was too cold up in her room. Fortunately it was contained t her bed. So, we sent Emily to the shower and rolled up her sheets and threw them in te laundry room.
At lunch time we headed out again. We ate at a local Taco Cabana and then waited for around 30 minues for gas. Afterwards we headed to HEB, but they didn’t have anything parishable. We got a few things and headed home.
At around 4 p.m. One of our neighbors mentioned that the subdivision wanted us to start conseving water. They were afraid that the sewer system was going to start backing up. We also got word that the kids’ school was now canceled until Monday. We took this as the last proverbial straw and started packing thr car. Five hours later and we were at my grandparents’ in Lindale. It nice to be in civilization again.
Frenchville 