Joe and Christine start the latest branch of the family.
Esther is 3 years and 0 month old.
Katherine is 6 months old.
Esther is one week old today. To celebrate, we gave her her first bath. As you’ll see in the video, she can be quite a screamer when she wants to be. Just for the record, she also screams like this every single time she has her diaper changed. You’re welcome to come and help out, anytime.
For the video posts, there is a “Download” link beneath the video. To play these video files, you will need a recent version of Quicktime or iTunes. (Download Quicktime or download iTunes.) The iTunes download page asks for an e-mail address, but you don’t have to provide one.
If you decide to download and use iTunes, you will be able to subscribe to our “vodcast” with iTunes. That will let iTunes automatically download and save any new videos we put online. Here’s the link to subscribe to the vodcast (this link will only work with iTunes): subscribe with iTunes.
You don’t have to download and use iTunes. If you’d prefer, you can simply install Quicktime. Quicktime will allow you to watch the saved videos, but it won’t allow you to automatically download new ones.
Hi Everybody! Mom and dad brought me home from the hospital, around 4pm on Saturday. It felt weird — I wasn’t even 48 hours old yet, but I was already home and ready to explore the world. Now that I’ve been released from the hospital, I can’t wait to meet all of ya’ll. (Dad’s teaching me to speak Southern.)
Mom and I are doing fine, but we’d still appreciate your prayers as we get to know each other. Thanks!
Born: February 15th, 8:24pm
Weight: 6 pounds, 4 ounces
Length: 18 and 1/2 inches
Location: Oregon, Wisconsin
Mom and Dad couldn’t decide whether to name me Esther Grace or Esther Kaylee. Then I cried all night (instead of sleeping like the doctors said I would). Mom and Dad decided that I wasn’t acting very graceful and decided to name me Kaylee.
Dad has been taking some pictures of me. You can see them at our photo site.
Christine and I got up early to attend the 9:30am service at Blackhawk. We had coffee / chai / Coke with Katherine and Scott at Caribou Coffee. We came home and both took a long nap. Ate a late lunch and headed over to Kevin and Amanda’s place for the second annual Life Group Super Bowl Bash. Great fun was had by all. We came home and were asleep before 11pm.
I was supposed to have breakfast with Scott this morning. Didn’t happen. He was called into work this morning to help revise a report. Fortunately, I found this out before I drove all the way to Madison. He e-mailed me, but I’ve been experiencing some delays with my e-mail. I hope I haven’t missed anything else important. At any rate, I ate breakfast at home this morning and caught up on Heroes.
After breakfast, I decided to do something ambitious. First, I scanned in all of my 2006 tax documents and statements. Next, I started entering all of the information into TurboTax. It turns out that I underpaid my Federal taxes by about $800. That’s sorta kinda okay though because I overpaid my Wisconsin taxes by about $1600. Once everything is said and done, I should have a net refund of around $800. That will take a while though. Last year, it took Wisconsin more than two months to mail my refund check. It also turns out that tax refunds are considered taxable income. (Something about having taken it as a deduction on your Federal taxes.) So, Washington will want part of that $1600 back next year.
Also, this turns out to be the month of bills. I’ve already spent $450 on new tires for the Camry. Now I get to spend another $600 on auto-insurance and $55 on license plate renewal. So, the tax refund money has already been spent. Yay.
After Christine got home, we ate lunch together and watched The Bourne Identity. Then I took a nap, in preparation for my big evening.
I went out for dinner with Kevin, Lenny, Scott, and Steve. We ate at Quaker Steak & Lube, then played pool at the Blue Chalk Club. Great fun was had by all.
Wednesday, January 31, 2007: I don’t really remember anything about Wednesday, so I can’t tell you what happened.
Thursday, February 1, 2007: I’d been noticing that the Camry’s tires had increasingly little tread left. On Thursday, I decided to fix that. I dropped the car off at Tires Plus, conveniently located just three miles away from the office. Teri (a friend from Life Group as well as Pittsburgh) was able to pick me up and take me to the office, after I dropped off the car.
Of course, once I got into the office things got more interesting. Thursday was February 1. Which means my customer wanted to be able to run financial reports for January. But their reports weren’t showing any data for January. In the midst of helping them fix their reports, their Production server decided to hang. So I got to spend some time reading about how to do integrity checks on the server and then (once the server was rebooted), I got to run the integrity checks. It all checked out, but between one thing and another, I didn’t actually get to work my todo list until 2pm.
Once Teri and I were both done working on Thursday, she dropped me back off at Tires Plus. A mere $450 later, I was driving home car with 4 brand-new, 70,000 mile warranty tires.
When I got home, I noticed (again) that my desk was completely covered with papers. Rather than ignoring it (again), I decided to finally clean it up and organize everything. I spent about an hour and a half sorting through the paperwork and organizing. It was almost 2 months worth of credit card statements, receipts, and tax statements. I made a good start on getting everything filed and scanned. (I scan all of my tax paperwork and save it to Strongspace so I can have an offsite backup in case anything happens to the paper files.)
Oh, yeah. We also got a hazardous weather warning from NOAA:
THE COLDEST AIR OF THE SEASON WILL PUSH INTO THE REGION FRIDAY NIGHT AND SATURDAY…AND LINGER INTO WEDNESDAY. THE FRIGID AIR WILL COMBINE WITH WESTERLY WINDS TO PRODUCE WIND CHILL READINGS OF 10 TO 20 DEGREES BELOW ZERO DURING THE DAY…AND BETWEEN 20 TO 30 BELOW ZERO AT NIGHT.
Lovely.
Friday, February 2, 2007: On Friday morning, I actually made it to the office before 9am. Mainly because I had a 9am conference call I needed to be on. Thankfully, no minor emergencies cropped up during the day and I was able to get mostly caught up on my work. I was also able to leave on-time and got home with enough time to take a nap and start washing dishes before Christine came home. I made her a batch of buttermilk pancakes for dinner and ate a bowl of Malt-o-Meal myself.