Today was the first day of Alpha and it was a much better pace than the past week. I actually left around 6:00 p.m. and was able to eat dinner with my family. We are still on mandated 10 hour days, so I’m going to start going in at 8:00 a.m. in order to leave in order to have dinner with Jennifer and the kids. We have been promised this weekend off as well.
Here’s another picture from the Easter egg hunt last Saturday. Emily is too small to jump in the Bounce House, but she can have fun, jumping on the outside.
After promising to do daily entries yesterday, I have decided that my family isn’t as interesting as Tom’s. However, I will still give it a try.
Madden 2005 has finally made it to Alpha. We are in the home stretch now. There’s still a lot of work to be done, but at least we are now pretty much feature complete and we are now switching gears into a bug fixing mode.
Jennifer has started painting all the baseboards in the new house. The trim between the hardwood floor and the baseboards is a wood color which matches the floor. Jennifer thinks this would look better as white, matching the baseboard. She’s done a section of it and I agree. The only problem is that I think it’s going to take her forever because she can only paint while the girls are asleep. We’ll see how long it take her.
Today’s picture is from Saturday’s Easter Egg hunt that was put on by church. Emily is enjoying opening up all of her Easter Eggs.
For October we had lots of activity. Emily has started to walk as her primary mode of transportation. She is much more interactive and greets me at the top of the stairs when I come home from work every day.
On October 9th, Jennifer and I celebrated our 4th wedding anniversary. We got a baby sitter and went out to eat at the Melting Pot restaurant.
On October 11th, Jennifer and I pretended we were not married to see if it would help the Texas Longhorns beat the University of Oklahoma. The Longhorns haven’t beat OU since we were married in 1999. It didn’t work. Texas lost 65-13.
On October 14th, we all went to Disney World’s Not So Scary Halloween. This is where they open up the part in the evening and all the kids get to wear the costumes and get candy. Both Abby and Emily had lots of fun riding the Dumbo and Tea Cup ride. According to Abby, she was dressed as “a princess” and Emily went as “a fairy”.
On October 18th, we went to the Electronic Arts-Tiburon Fall Festival. There was a hamburger cookout and there was games and rides for the kids. Abby had fun on the giant inflated slide and the merry-go-round. She also showed off her monkey bar skills on the playground.
October 25th, was the Winter Park First United Methodist School Fall Festival. This was a fund raiser for Abby’s school. There was clowns, pony rides, games, and other activities. Abby had lots of fun.
October 26th, George & Heather flew down in order for us to go to the Dallas Cowboys at Tampa Bay Buccaneers football game. The game wasn’t that exciting as the Cowboys were easily defeated by the Bucs 16-0.
For Halloween Abby had a Halloweek party at her school along with a costume parade. Later the girls came up to where I work and we did our trick-or-treating at Electronic Arts-Tiburon. The “princess” and “fairy” collected way too much candy wandering from cubicle to cubicle.
This year’s Easter was very eventful for the French family. Here is some pictures from Easter weekend 2003.
The weekend started very early Saturday morning when Abby woke me up at 6:00 with a, “Come on, Dad.” She was greeted with a whole spread of gifts from the Easter Bunny. She was also surprised when she found out that the Easter Bunny had also hidden eggs around the townhouse, filled with M&M’s.
Later that morning, we went to an Easter Egg hunt sponsored by our church, First United Methodist of Winter Park. We had a picnic lunch and there was a big Easter Egg hunt with about 100 other kids. Abby collected a basket full of eggs filled with candy. Later she jumped in a Bounce House and got to ride a pony. She loved riding the pony and was smiling the whole time.
The next morning we went to church and when we got back we took some pictures outside the townhouse’s club house. The matching Easter outfits were supplied by Abby and Emily’s Nana and Poppy.
Here are various pictures of Abby and Emily from the past couple of months. Abby is two years old and Emily is now 3 months old. Abby likes cooking for Emily and Emily likes sitting around the townhouse in her swing and bouncer. The pictures of Emily in her swing are not recycled Abby pictures. They just look alike at that age. 🙂
During the big move, while we were staying at Jennifer’s sister’s house, Jennifer’s parents, grand parents, and brother came over to visit with us. We had dinner and took pictures of the entire family.
On January 30th we closed on the sale of our house in Austin, Texas and started the big Trek to Orlando, Florida. We started by going to Jennifer’s sister’s house in Houston. There we were visited by more of Jennifer’s family.
We stayed there until February 3rd and then started on the road to Florida. We stopped in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Tallahassee, Florida. During the trip, we stopped at several rest stops and we got pictures of Abby entering Mississippi and Florida. On February 1st, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated over Texas. The rest stop in Mississippi had a make-shift memorial outside and I took a picture of Abby standing in front of it.
We survived the trip, but Abby was pretty grouchy the entire trip. She didn’t like being awaken in the middle of the night by Emily crying. She learned first hand what her parents had been going though each night for the past month since Emily was born. She was not happy.
When we got to Florida, we stayed in a hotel near Disney World until our stuff was to arrive on February 8th. We played some putt-putt and ate at Margaritaville at Universal Studios.
Abby traveled up to the hospital to go visit her new sister. She pretty much ignored her and roamed around the room doing her own thing. At one point she was being introduced to Emily and she started crying. Abby just got wide-eyed and started to back away. Today, she was very excited. She kept saying that she wanted to “go see sister”.
Frenchville 
