Everyone stay bundled up! (Unless you’re the Dog… in which case, stop wanting to go out!)

It wasn’t a fight.

Good thing too. I lost. And won.

We have a new family member. (assuming no horrific incidents in the next few days)

Details, invariably, to follow. Naming is still up in the preliminary stages.

We got back from Destin to find an order form for the Community Fall Festival… 4 days later. It seems EVERYTHING is moving quicker than it used to. Aren’t these things supposed to be closer to Halloween?

The Organizers of the festival included a parade, complete with a fire truck from the local station to lead. That was a great hit.

Mary decided on (or was forced into) her old standby… The Pumpkin. Complete with integrated treat pouch, this crowd pleaser is filled with cuteness.

That treat pouch caused Jeff significant gray hairs. It seems that Mary had taken one of our fridge magnets and placed it in the pouch.

It was conveniently shaped as a wine bottle.

She spent the majority of the parade in the following pose:

Personally, I found it funny enough to take the picture. Jeff was less than amused with her doing it, and exclaiming to any one that would listen:

I’m just having a few sips of some PRETEND wine.

Followed by her twisting a pretend cap on, and putting it back in the pouch. Repeat every 10 feet.

My only complaint is the screw top. I mean, come on. There aren’t many bottles in our house that aren’t cork.

The Festival itself was pretty standard fare, Bouncies, games, and catered by Famous Dave’s BBQ. Oh, and the firetruck stayed.

Ignore pretty much everything else, the kids enjoyed this more than anything.

The remainder of the pictures, are at the gallery page below:

Bury them of course!

Time to go for more.

Of course, while the recipe and technique may not have been passed through on this session, the joy certainly was.

Grandma makes a pretty killer Country fried steak, and Mary Vic was EXTREMELY interested in helping. When I came in to the kitchen, I was afraid that Mary’s face was going to split in two from the smile! They even tried to cook a cake for everyone, although that didn’t turn out so well, since there wasn’t actually anything ingredient-wise that was capable. The attempt was made anyways, and thankfully, everyone was smart enough NOT to try to eat it.

From Mary’s standpoint, the Lesson learned this day was simple: Cooking is fun, it’s hard work, and best finished with Ice Cream!

She’ll Catch you,

And you’ll probably end up looking worse than if you didn’t…

Jeffie says he Squirmed a bit.

After 13 years, it would appear that our Hot Water Heater followed the Upstairs Air Conditioning.

Begone, old Busted up:

Behold, The NEW Hotness!

Yes, I know… EXTREMELY exciting. I tried to at least make the lighting dramatic… There isn’t much you can do to make Hot water heaters look like they are in Milan. And Frankly, after this little surprise, I wasn’t WANTING to.

Good news is that I actually was at home for lunch, when the old one really started to leak, so I ran outside and turned off the water to the house before anything got seriously wet. This obviously could have been MUCH worse, as this is a second floor unit, in the Bonus Room closet. The contractors of my house really enjoyed themselves.

Well, I did say that I didn’t want to use the Air conditioning… tag again. Guess I’ll try the ‘expensive home Maintenance’ tag, and see if I can prevent THAT one from being used again…

And unfortunately, much like Star Wars and the Matrix, the third episode isn’t as good as anyone would have wished.

(Or at least the post isn’t… The kids unveiling was just fine)

We loaded the Kids into the vehicle at the Space center, and proceeded up 565 towards Nashville. Since we were leaving ~4:15pm, and the Airshow was ending about the same time, there was definitely some apprehension from me about how much traffic we were going to get into. Turns out, aside from a 5 minute slow period of about 35mph on the interstate, there wasn’t any major issue. That wasn’t bad at all. And both kids were out before we hit 65 North.

Mary slept the whole way, dreaming of the surprise to come. (We had to tell her something to detach her from her grandmother!) William slept most of the way, and then, in a fashion unique to himself, woke and screamed through half of Tennessee. Mary was oblivious.

Mary woke 2 minutes away from the house, perfect timing intact.

Jeff began to get the kids out while I grabbed the Camera bag and ran to the back. The Video camera went on the fort itself, the SLR in my hand, and the rest of the bag everywhere else. You can see the chaos spread since I was trying to make sure I caught their face when they saw it.

Pictures are here.

And the video (technical issues NOT resolved) is here:

Mary And William discover the Playfort from Greg Nicholson on Vimeo.

I’m a bit peeved. It took multiple multi hour sessions to get the video encoded from 1080i to 720p H264 AND under the limit for Vimeo. And then, it turns out that it failed on their end, and (based on the result) it looks like they down-sampled pretty heavily just to get it up. My guess is that the original file exceeded their encode parameters. If you are in the adventurous mode, and you’ve got tons of bandwidth, you can download the original .MOV file, at 485M. It’s probably not worth it though.

I’ll probably re-encode just the initial reactions and upload them on Wed when the counter resets.

The kids loved the fort, and they have played on it every day. William freaked again today when he saw it. It will be interesting to see how long it’s ‘new’ to him.

It is absolutely worth it. Not saying that I want to do it again anytime soon, but it was/is definitely worth it.

This turned out to be pretty easy, as Grandmother met us at the Cullman exit Crackerbarrel. Neither kid knew anything about it, and their faces when they saw her was priceless. Mary was all smiles, and William was literally trying to rip himself out of the car seat to get to her.

William was funny, as immediately after getting Grandma, he holds his hands up and to the side, and with a quizical look, “Papa?”

Papa was still at home, as his treatments haven’t left him with much energy. Thankfully they will be over soon.

We had figured that this would reduce the amount of time the kids were in the car, and give them some time with the Grandparents. They just don’t seem to get enough of that anyways! Next week was the Airshow in Huntsville, so we’d return for that. In the meantime, we had our own plans!

And no, it’s not what you think! (or us for that matter).

We bought the Kids a playfort. That was Monday Lunchtime. I’ll now show you the following week. It’s completely wrong than an entire week compresses to 30 seconds. It looks best if you press the expand icon next to the Vimeo logo. That will show the clip in 720p High def.

Playhouse Construction from Greg Nicholson on Vimeo.
Rockwalls and Upside down mounting beams SUCK.

We spent practically every available moment building this thing. Both came home at lunch, and we worked from 5 till after ten most nights to get this done before the kids returned. Jeff was quite happy at first, when on Wed, it started to storm. She actually thought I might stop and we could go eat dinner at the local Mexican place. HA! There were parts that could be constructed in the Garage. She didn’t speak very much to me that night.

I don’t think the kids missed us at all, although they did ask once if we thought about them. Oh, I assured them, they never wandered from our minds.

Last post, I showed our first look at the Baby Blue jays.

Yesterday, I was able to get a better shot of 1 of them.

Unfortunately, It’s sibling didn’t survive. Jeff and I debated about the nature of Blue Jay’s (we both thought that they were the type to push the sibling out of the nest to maximize the biggest’s chances).

I had thought a feline had taken care of it, but this morning I had to do the duty with a trash bag. Then, this afternoon, we found the remaining sibling. I don’t think there are any left. I don’t know if they left the nest too early, or what happened. I don’t think that a cat got them, they weren’t very disturbed.

Now, the issue… I tried VERY hard to make sure that Mary didn’t know what I was doing. I told her I had to take care of some stuff out in the yard, and get rid of some things that needed to go into the trash. Jeff had obviously mentioned baby bird loud enough that Mary could hear… I didn’t realize that. So, as I brought the bag back in, took care of it, and washed my hands, the inquisition began. I had thought I deflected it well enough, but when I came back in, I heard Jeff explaining that a baby bird had died, and Daddy was taking care of it.

Honestly, that was the last thing I wanted her to hear. Yes, I’m a protective parent. Yes, I have told less than the complete truth to her. I know that she’ll come to age. I want to make sure that she’s emotionally able to handle that when it happens. She still talks about her pet Kosh. I have enough problems in my heart when that comes up. I really don’t want her to make the full connection yet.

I know I can’t protect her from the fact that life includes death. Heck, some of her favorite programming is the Giant squid programs and the Killer (Humboldt) squid from the Discovery channel. She’ll quote facts and figures! from that shows all day long. And yes, it includes death. I think she does know, but it’s a theoretical knowledge.

I don’t want her to realize that it’s a real phenomenon just yet.

I certainly don’t want to field the questions, as even though she does have that incessant ‘why’ that kids have, some of her questions bite a bit, and you can tell that there is a mind behind there, probing, and trying to learn the reality. I want to enjoy the kid in her, and I want her to enjoy it. I don’t want her to grow up too quickly. It seemed that I had grown up quickly because of all of the relocations that my family went through. I feel that I came out stronger because of it and it certainly forged me, but I’d like for my kids to grow up ‘normal’.

I didn’t expect a 4 year old to have to deal with death. I was worried.

She dealt with it much better than I did. I hope it’s done and over with, and my worries were unfounded.

And yes, I’m a bit sad that the ugly UGLY bird above won’t make it to be a prettier adult. I was looking forward to watching them grow.