Master's Week

It comes every year, regardless of the rain, sun, and for this year pollen; Master's Week. (A side note about the pollen. This is the worse year in the last 30 for the amount of pollen in the air. It looks like dust storms as you drive around town. Also, there is so much that the roads, parking lots, and even the roofs are turned green because of the volume of pollen that has fallen to the ground). It is the first major golf tournament as part of the PGA Tour. This year we are even hosting Tiger Woods in his first tournament after he dominated the headlines last year. But enough of him, you all want to know about us. Last week I was supposed to update the blog, but because of conference I didn't get around to it. So let the two week update begin. I have been working on research papers; one down and one to go. Besides that nothing else. Jaynee has been watching her garden grow, keeping the kids out of it, and spending a lot of time with the girls both inside and outside. The girls are as cute as ever. They love to spend time outside, and playing. They love to read, and I think that combined they have read every book they have at least 10 times in the last couple of weeks. They have a lot of book, three book shelves worth and growing.







Easter has also come and gone, and we learned a little more about the differences between our girls. Just before Easter, Jaynee took them to an Easter egg hunt at the library. The Easter bunny was there, and Emma was ecstatic with joy and happiness, while Sofia was the complete opposite. She was scared and very afraid of the big white bunny. Once the egg hunt started, it took the girls a while to understand what they were supposed to do, and then Emma went crazy. She got so excited and fixated that should would run past several eggs just to get the one she first saw. Sofia was a little more calm and reserved. She would slowly pick up each egg in beginning with the closest to her and working out to wherever Emma was at. On Easter Sunday we set up a little Easter egg hunt in the house and the exact same thing happened, except that the big white bunny wasn't here in person. Since that day, the girls have loved to play with their Easter buckets and the little plastic eggs that they picked up.







This morning Emma and I are staying home from church. Emma's mouth is in so much pain from her teeth trying to break through that she has not slept the last two nights. We think her mouth is swollen so when she lies down and rolls on that part of her face she wakes up in pain. Because of the pain she does not want to sleep unless she is 100% completely tired. With Sofia going to church, she got to wear the first Easter dress of the season for us. She looks rather cute and adorable.





Our outlook for the next couple of weeks include completing two of my classes, then lots more family time outside and inside depending upon the weather. For Jaynee, she will be watching the girls and working on getting ready to attend a spouse’s day that is being held in a couple of weeks. She is so excited that I need to find her some of my outfits that she can tear up when she plays Soldier for a day. Also, this upcoming weekend we are going out without the kids. Ft. Gordon offers "Parents Night Out" to enable people like us to go out from time to time. We drop the kids off at 6 and pick them up before 11. We are debating on if we want to go have dinner and a movie or return home for a nap. I think it will have to be a last minute decision.

The girls are progressing greatly. They are speaking all the time and are now beginning to put two, three, and even four and five words together when they speak. This morning Sofia helped me count up to eight. I said One, she said Two, Three, I said Four, she said Five, Six, I said Seven, and she said Eight. Emma can help us sing some of the songs we sing with the girls. Her favorite songs to sing include ABC's and Wheels on the Bus. They are so cute when they act out the parts of the song or attempt to sign the ABC's we are singing them. Emma's favorite letter is "Z". Well, more to follow in the next posting or two.

Green Thumb Anyone?

Well, after a week of late nights at work, some rain, and a couple of irritable girls, the garden is now complete. The other big adventure for our family this week was the purchase of a fence. With so much to talk about, I better begin.

Last weekend Jaynee decided that we needed a fence for the girls. They need a boundary to keep them safe, as well as to provide protection and structure. Jaynee made a couple of calls on Monday and by the end of the day she had a contractor lined up. Wednesday work began, but due to the lead worker being a little ill, work was not completed until Thursday afternoon. The girls just loved it. They can now run from one end of the yard to the other without being yelled at, picked up, or even headed off. It sort of reminds me of what a cattle herder does all day except that these beast are on two legs and know how to work together to make it that much harder for the herded.



Due to my late work schedule this week I was not able to get home with enough time to work on the garden before it was dark. We had time, but about 1 hour before sunset is the girl’s bed, so that factored into our schedule. I was able to take half of Friday off, and I plan on doing the same for Monday. It is nice to take time off when the boss is away. Monday night there was some rain, but not enough to turn our dig site into the canals of Venice. I was hoping there would be enough water to warrant the purchase of a remote control boat to play in my newly formed canals. Maybe luck will be on my side when I am tasked to create a strawberry patch later this year.

Friday Jaynee and I were able to complete the frame and clean up the dirt. Most of the dirt went back into the garden as part of the foundation for the step stones, but there were about three loads that I needed to dump out back behind the fence. The only thing left to do was to put the stones in their place, and then mix the dirt (after purchasing it of course). So after a late night Friday, Jaynee dragged the entire family to Home Depot at 6:45 in the morning. The ratio of employees to the number of people in our family was staggering. I think we lost time because we had to politely decline the help of every employee working at that time at least twice. After a couple of other stops, we returned home to continue working on our garden. After playing with the girls and getting them nice and tired, we put them down and worked on putting the paving stones in. Just as we finished that, the girls got up, so we decided we would stop until their afternoon nap. All we had left to do was mix Jaynee's soil mixture. The soil mixture contained 3 parts of peat moss, 1 part cow manure, 1 part mushroom manure, 1 part manure toasts, and 3 parts vermiculite. Don't ask me why the weird stuff and mixtures. I just figured out how much we needed and then perform all the muscle related tasks to manure. The mixing was a little fun with a strong wind, manure, and trying to mix each of the ingredients with the use of a twin size sheet. We were finally complete and with only a bag or two that I will need to return for a refund.


After cleaning up from playing in poop that I just so loved to play in (Jaynee was lucky that we didn't have a manure fight, or I would be writing this post from a hotel room somewhere in Augusta.) we decided to treat ourselves to a nice afternoon out. We have learned that our daughters do so much better when we eat an early dinner. After our night out, we put the girls to bed and then the planting began. This will be a learning experience for sure. Minutes before we began to plant our garden, Jaynee realized that some of the vegetables were for fall and winter planting. I guess we will be ready for our fall planting. Until then every open space was filled with radishes. So in the next 4-5 weeks we will see if anything edible will grow, because that is when the first harvest should be ready.



Not a lot of pictures of the girls this week (just got Sofi for some reason), but it was defiantly a learning experience on how manage home projects and the girls at the same time. There was several times when they were outside trying to help us with all the work that needed to be done, but after a while we had to pause to keep them out of harm’s way. Besides a couple of soar backs and a mild sunburn on my arms, no other injuries to report.

1.5 Projects Completed and Still Happily Married

Yes, Jaynee and I have undertaken several large projects to our home. The first of which was to removed all the pine needles used as a bed covering to our front yard flower patches. Then we dug a trench so that we could install a black boarder to separate the grass from the flower bed. Then finally we placed red mulch to give it a nice look. As the pictures below show, not bad for our first project.


The second project is has just started. What we thought would be only a day's worth of work, looks like it could be a week. We are building a garden in our back yard and to make it nice we need to make it level, so we are building a box. The box must have a border of paving stones on the top because of the way the water comes off the roof. Without the stones, there would be a 2 foot hole in the ground due to the water run-off. Well, after buying just about all the supplies and equipment that we would need, we started to dig, only to realize that a shovel was not going to get through the Georgia mud and clay that was below the grass. Jaynee ventured out to the store again and returned with a pickaxe and a mattock (a hand held pickaxe). Once she returned with those tools, what could have taken a full week to dig only lasted 1 day. It would have been shorter, but I still needed to complete some homework. The girls wanted to help, so we allowed them to join us and load up a bucket with dirt. They were able to stay outside with us for nearly 1 hour. That was pretty impressive. Shortly after that I needed a timeout to work on homework. So I went to work on homework and Jaynee played with the girls. After putting the girls down for the night we return to our archeological dig pit and finished it up. The next step is to cut the wood and create the framework necessary to support a garden and the paver stones. We were hoping to work on the frames Monday, but it looks like there will be lots of rain that day, so our dig pit will soon turn into the canals of Venice, Italy. There will be more pictures after our canals fill up.

These pictures show some before and after shots of our work thus far along with the girls helping us.

In Like a Lion; Out like a ???

Well, March is officially upon us. What does that mean? Well for starters, my birthday (but by the time anyone reads this it will be long over), March Madness, St. Patrick’s Day, hopefully Sofia's day in court to have her adoption to us finalized, and a few more doctor appointments (with 3 appointments on the 30th). In other news, Jaynee's mother and Belle (her service dog) came for a visit and to take care of the girls for the 5 different doctor appointments within the last week. The big one was Sofia's surgery to have tubes placed in her ears. The surgery went well, and the results seem to be really good.

I haven't seen Sofia in such a good mood since we got her. She is dancing, more aware of what is happening, and she is even trying to speak more. She has also been improving on her potty training, and except for one day in the last week, she has gone at least 4 times each day.

Sunday was a bummer of a day in the US Hockey Team lost in the finals bringing the end to our Olympic viewing for this year. At least the World Cup will be here later this summer. Well, everyone I hope you have a wonderful March. So far for us we nearly had snow and the average temperatures are nearly 15 degrees below normal. The forecast is looking nice with the possibility to hit the low 70s this upcoming weekend. I am so looking forward to the weather as I sit in my room working on homework all weekend long. I do hope the girls enjoy it.

February's Happenings

February has been a very busy month. Last week I listed several of the events that I would write more about, and here I go.

Yesterday, the girls went to their first birthday party as a threesome. The location of the party was a house with a lot of acreage to run and play. From what I heard, Sofia just wanted to run and run. Jaynee spent most of her time and energy trying to get Sofia to participate in the birthday activities. Sorry, I wasn't there because I needed to spend some time working on homework. Because of Jaynee's effort to keep Sofia corralled, no pictures were taken.

CJ's Visit
CJ is a friend of Jaynee. They have been close friends since my first deployment. Shortly after we all returned home from that deployment we all (their family and the two of us) went and spent a week in Orlando, FL. Take a guess what we did for a week. I have the wonderful privilege of dragging Jaynee and anyone else who was with us at the theme parks home each night. I then was awoken early and dragged to the parks each morning well before they opened just so we could be some of the first people there each day. Needless to say, our families go way back (nearly 5 years). CJ and her family are currently living out west and will move overseas later this summer. She happened to come across a ticket and flew out here to visit us. The visit was great for Jaynee who needed a personal boost. Having a close friend confirm that she is being a good mother and wife really has helped her out. Not to mention that Jaynee renewed her interest in cross stitching. While CJ was here we ate out a lot, played a lot of games, and allowed CJ to get sick. The girls loved to play with CJ, and I think they actually missed her after she left (for about 30 minutes because we took them to a place to help them forget about all the fun they had with CJ).





EdVenture

In Columbia, SC, there is a neat little kids museum that helps to teach kids about a wide variety of things. In the main lobby there is a 40 foot tall kid that has spaces in the back to explore the inside of his body. There was also many other exhibits and for those in the area, the web link is http://www.edventure.org/Default.aspx

Below are a couple of photos that we took of the girls while at EdVenture.







Emma's First Haircut

Not much to report here. Jaynee gave Emma a trim to help even out her hair on the back side. There were places that Jaynee cut nearly 2 inches and other spots where she barely took anything off. She did all right for her first cut. Notice how I was not involved with the haircut except to take pictures. I have given wonderful haircuts in the past. It is really simple, remove any guard on the clippers and start from the front and go to the back of the head keeping the clippers as close to the head as possible. The end result is a beautifully shaved head that is perfectly even. Maybe for Sofia's haircut I can help. :)

Blasted Olympics

Don't get me wrong, I love the Olympics. However, over the last year the TV has not been turned on as much as it has over the last week. Not only that, we normally go to bed around 10 each night, but due to the late night schedule of the Olympics we have been getting to be after midnight. GO USA!!!!

Anywho! I better write a little more about what has been going on. To begin with, Sofia will be having surgery next week, YAAAHH!!! This should clear up all the ear infections that she has been having. It should also help with her balance and ability to learn. We are looking forward to this that we asked Jaynee's mom to help with all the doctor appointments that will take place in the next 2 weeks. In that period of time we will have 4 appointments. There may be some follow up appointments for Sofia after her surgery.

Weather this week has been great, no snow, little rain, and mild temperatures. Today the high is forecasted to be 68. Lots of open rooms available for anyone who wants to make a trip down here.

I have been tasked by Jaynee to add some photos. Last week I also said I would write a little more about some of the other events that have recently taken place. So, I will just include some family photos now, and then in the next section I will write about some of the other events that happened in the month of February.