my little music man

i love this picture and thought it was worthy of its own post.

uncle mark will teach him the piano, uncle jordan the drums, uncle scott the guitar and aaron an assortment of brass and woodwinds with a little help from uncle steve...

He blogs!

Or at least I aspire to.  More often I'm reading other peoples' blogging handywork as I scroll through my Google Reader feed (highly recommended for those of you who enjoy information overload).  So where do I go for updates on the world when work affords a window of opportunity?  Some favorites and recommendations:


(1) Above the Law - awesome if you're a lawyer, law student, or know someone who is and can't quite make sense of why they are the way they are.  Essentially, ATL is a legal tabloid and go-to source for hilarious anecdotes about life as lawyer


(2) Tuned In - Time magazine's James Poniewozik represents a classier take on entertainment (mainly TV) news.  I enjoy the occasional "Morning After" reviews as well as his take on current events in the media





(3) Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball - less of a blog and more of a weekly commentary for us proud political junkies.  As the title would suggest, Sabato, a political science professor at UVa, has a penchant for accurately forecasting the outcomes of elections.  The site also offers the occasional regression analysis of voting behavior, for those so inclined.  I also enjoy the "Tweets of the Week"--it's rare to get pithy political insight from a PhD. 


On the lighter side...


(4) Pearls Before Swine - a somewhat irreverent comic strip that frequently "out funnys" Dilbert, Non Sequitur and the like.  



Of course, you have to be able to handle absurd characterizations (a gun-toting sea anemone) and outrageously horrible puns.

(5) Today's Big Thing - never at work, always at home.  Sometimes hilarious (see: icy hill in San Francisco), other times best left unwatched.  Still, worth a look every so often.  Case in point? These guys:


Tack on a mass of news feeds (CNN, NPR, WSJ, etc) and blogs from friends and family, and I'd say my online diversions pretty well sum me up.  Strange how that happens.

healthy by accident

Not too long ago I signed up for something called Green B.E.A.N delivery. Available to Northern Kentucky, Cincinnati, Dayton, and Columbus Green B.E.A.N delivers organic produce from local farmers right to your door. Every other Wednesday I find $35 worth of fresh organic fruits and vegetables waiting for me on my front porch and I love it.

I particularly like the vegetables. When I'm in the grocery store I frequently become frustrated with the desire to eat healthier greener things but hardly ever buying any because of how it looks or feeling lost as to how to incorporate it into dinner. But for some reason when all those beautiful vegetables show up at my door I have no trouble not only adding them to our diet but structuring our meals around them. 


It's also a great way to try new things. Every week a couple of days before delivery my order is put together and made available on line for me to see, then if I choose I can sub out things for produce that better suits our family (read "it's harder for some of us to eat vegetables than others..."). Well last week I forgot to check and edit so when we opened our box we found this:

It's red chard though it looks a lot like rhubarb and we had no idea what to do with it. So what do we do when we don't know? We google! It turns out that the green leaves are the part you eat and they taste like a more delicate spinach. We did some more googling and found a recipe that was surprisingly delicious. It was accidentally the healthiest, and the yummiest, meal we had all week.

What the What!? We bought a house...

Well we've almost bought a house anyway, just hanging out in a little place we like to call escrow. To some of you it's already old news, but to others it might come as a surprise. Surprising still when I tell you that this is actually the second house we've "bought" in the last two weeks. It's true. Two weeks, two different houses, two inspections, one canceled contract and one good contract equals one really great house.


We started this process in the beginning of March when we realized it might actually be possible to have a lower mortgage payment than our current rent, I know that's some crazy rent. So some encouragement from Aaron's dad, a few phone calls and one tax return (to put towards a downpayment) later we were on the hunt. 


We walked through 52 houses, not including the many "virtual tours" we took online, and our kind and patient Realtor was happy to oblige. Within the first week we found house #1. It was nice, with a huge yard and just enough space inside. It was the best one we'd seen and in an area we loved so we offered and the sellers accepted. A few days later the inspection revealed more hidden issues than we realistically would have been able to deal with so we walked away confident that this wasn't the house for us after all.

we don't really like ranches anyway

A week later we were deep into another round of house hunting. In the opposite direction of house #1 we found house #2 coming in at double the square feet and a lower price. The inspection went significantly better this time and we're looking forward to officially buying the house (closing) at the end of April.

much to my mother's chagrin the awnings are NOT staying

A lot's happened in the past few months and between becoming parents and becoming homeowners I'm not sure how much more "adult" we can get. Unless of course we buy a minivan...


P.S. Steve this one's for you:

so handy!

Some Observations for March

Greetings, all.  I thought I'd take a break from meeting Jath at Starbucks and offer some suggestions for the month ahead (hopefully not an indicator of the time before my next blog post).

Suggestion 1: Layer appropriately.  Today's high = 40, Tuesday's = 59 Thursday's = 45.  Temperature at the office = freezing.  Temperature in the car midway through the commute = balmy.  So I'll be walking out of the house in this:

And returning in this:

(And of course I'll look good doing it; I'm an F-18 bro).

Suggestion 2: Send me some Starbucks gift cards, cause it's trenta time.  Among the more exciting benefits of the warmer weather on the horizon is the justification it provides for iced coffee.  Fortunately for me, Howard knows that when America loves 20 ounces of something, it can't help but love 11 more.  Even without iced coffee, I've been to the local Starbucks enough in recent months that the employees know both my name and my order.  I can only imagine that by June, they'll have my 200 liquid calories ready to go.

Suggestion 3: Check you email!  After spending the last 10 years living with a cell phone that--gasp--only made phone calls (and sent a few txt messages here and there), I've finally upgraded to what the kids these days are calling a "Smartphone".  Using some money gifted to me in celebration of The Feast of the Nativity, I traded in the A767:

for the HTC Inspire 4G:

So far it's taken me 6 hours to figure out where my contacts are, I've twice accidentally called my parents and once been unable to end the call, and I have no idea how to get rid of a pre-installed app from Blockbuster (really AT&T/HTC...Blockbuster?  Ever heard of Netflix, Redbox, or even the concept of Chapter 11 Bankruptcy?).  Also because this phone is intelligent, it apparently requires a steady diet of "data".  And data, I'm told, is money--much like "time" used to be until they invented free nights and weekends, free mobile to mobile, anytime rollover minutes, and text messaging.  So be prepared for copious amounts of communication headed your way.

Suggestion 4: Keep mid-to-late April free on your calendar.  Why?  Well that's a post for another day.

A cut for Toby

Poor Toby. 

Life has been a little busy at our house these past few weeks leaving Toby to sit on the corner of the rug waiting for his turn at some attention. He's warming up to little Oliver though, or at least he pretends to be when we're all looking. 

It's sad, tragic even. He's visibly happy about three times a day: in the morning when he eats breakfast, in the evening when he eats dinner and shortly there after when Aaron comes home. The rest of the time he looks pretty depressed. And if you couldn't tell by the look on his little puppy dog face you might get a clue when you look at his 10 week shag. He looks homeless 1) because his hair really is long and 2) it's so long you can't even see his collar anymore.

okay this picture is misleading he doesn't look this cute with this hair in person

But today he became a new dog, in the hair department anyway. A close shave and a nice bath makes him look a little less homeless and little more loved. Unless you're my friend Robin and then you think he just looks silly.

Drinking Coffee from a Bottle

Or at least that's how it feels sometimes.  Greetings from a world at once highly routined and utterly chaotic.  It is  baby bottle, burp cloth, bedtime bliss.  Of course, "bliss" takes on a different meaning entirely when 5 hours of sleep becomes "Wow, a full night!"

I'm glad to share that baby Oliver is doing well, despite our complete lack of training/skills/experience.  After 3 weeks of finicky eating (at best), he finally decided to throw in the towel (#1) on breastfeeding. Unfortunately, Oliver hasn't taken sixth grade English, so he didn't know how to communicate this desire via a tired sports cliche.  Instead, he picked from his baby's arsenal of 5 functions and screamed like a banshee (#2) every time we attempted to feed him.

Sunday best

This turn of events left us with (1) a tired baby, (2), a hungry baby, and (3) a baby with no weight gain.  Needless to say, we sprang to action as best two first-born children can, read through all of our baby books, calmly discussed a plan of action, and went shopping (far from cathartic, the shopping was for baby bottles and groceries).   One week, several doctors appointments, 2 oz of supplemental formula per feeding, and many hours of pumping later, Oliver has gained over 1lb. and counting.  Phew.  Now we just have to convince him that breastfeeding is still cooler than the bed side of a goose down pillow (#3).

A visit from Steve & Jolie = games, gifts, and green peppers on the pizza

In other news (and yes, there is other news), we're back!  This weekend we made it to church for the first time in a month, managed to attend over 1.5 hours of a rockin' Super Bowl party--through which Oliver slept...soundly, and did some non-baby shopping.  I even managed to get my haircut by a woman who both tactfully and professionally informed me that my head is misshapen (actually, she merely informed me that my hair grew out in an unflattering shape because people who cut with clippers simply follow the curvature of my head...no more Great Clips for me apparently).  Thanks, Sharon!

In sum, we've begun to hit our stride (#4), keep our head above water (#5), and make lemonade out of the lemons parenthood has handed us so far (#6).  Who knows, with all the growing free time, my brain might actually be able to form a complete thought without relying on the outdated creativity of the guy who first contemplated how difficult it would be to actually find a needle in a haystack.  If I were you, though, I wouldn't get my hopes up (Judges? . . . #7).