Yup, I had a birthday.  I decided for my cake this year that I would like to have warm brownies and vanilla bean ice cream, with crushed sugar cones and chocolate syrup.  mmmmmmm :]

There were a couple of problems though.  It was hard to get all the candles lit without burning my hands.  Then, when I blew out the candles, we had to open up the doors and turn on the fans so that the smoke detector wouldn’t go off!

I think that this photo says it all.

Today is the baby’s due date.  We don’t mind that she came early, really.  About 1 1/2 weeks ago at the doctor appointment my wife was told that there wasn’t much progress and that the baby wouldn’t be born till her due date or maybe not until October.  My poor wife was crushed!  She has been so uncomfortable and has been working so hard to prepare for the baby.  This was some bad news.

Well, the Sunday following that appointment she started having some major contractions.  They were timed close enough that she woke me up and told me to get ready to go.  We got ready, and she took a shower and they all stopped.  Again, she was crushed.

She went to the doctor on Monday and they told her the same thing as last time.  No real changes, the baby was on track for the due date and maybe even later.  CRUSHED!!!!

I noticed late Tuesday afternoon that she was  in a really good mood.  I asked her what was going on and she said with a grin, “I’m having contractions!”  Odd that so much pain and discomfort can make someone so happy.  We put the kids to bed at 8:00 PM, called over a friend, went to the hospital and the baby came just before midnight. 

I’m sure that we’ve can all understand the sound reasoning behind the phrase “Measure Twice, Cut Once”.  I mean, it makes perfect sense!  You can only cut a piece of wood to the correct length one time.  So I am thankful and grateful for the forgiving nature of dirt.  The Trampoline was sitting where we wanted the hole.  So I moved I marked the area that the trampoline covered, moved it out of the way and started digging.  We decided that we wanted to have a block retaining wall in the hole.  So we turned the trampoline upside down, put it over the hole, and then put some block around it to make sure the hole was big enough.  It wasn’t so I dug it a bit more.

We were able to get some block from my brother-in-law and it all got moved in.  The Block didn’t come all the way up to the ground level, so when it started raining, we had some errosion.  Not a huge problem compaired to the fact that the block that we got was bigger than the block we used to measure the hole with. :S

So, it’s time to dig some more.  I’m glad that it only gets to be about 100 degrees these days.  I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that digging holes for a trampoline in not my specialty….BUT IT WILL BE!! 

My 2 year old son wanted to play with some of the new Galactic Heroes sets.  We had some old ones in there too, but I really didn’t want him to lose Darth Vader’s helmet (not to mention that the box clearly states the this toy has a choking hazard and is meat for ages 3+).  So I took the helmet aside and put it with our little R4-P17 that came to us with two left feet (AND it can’t dance!).  I was looking for someplace to put the helmet down and found the perfect spot.

And thus was born R4-V8r (pronounced ARE-Four VADER).

…and then I couldn’t get up in the morning.  My poor girl tried to sneak into our bed last night.  She snuggled up to my wife and fell asleep on the edge of the bed.  I was awoken when she rolled out of bed and hit her head.  We snuggled up and made sure she felt better and then I took her back to bed when she was sound asleep.  It wasn’t until this morning that we noticed the eye!  poor girl.

With everything that has been happening, we ended up missing out on 2 of our birthday breakfasts so we made up for it with our third one.  So I made some waffles, cut some fresh strawberries and topped it off with whipped cream, oh and a ton of kids!

My son decided that he wanted to skip over the traditional Cake and ice cream for his birthday and go for the ultimate mash-up… The Ice Cream Roll.  Recipe, instruction, ingredients, and more photos after the jump.

  (Read more…)

Well, I found a few neglected kids waiting for me at home.

We got right down to the important stuff and opened up the toys.

then they got broken

oh well, toys are meant to be played with (except mine!).  Here’s my little clone.

The second part of the Grand Opening was going down and helping to build a 9′ tall R2 D2.

You can see that Dan the Master Builder is roped off in the center with the beginings of the super famous Astromech droid.  All around him are BUCKETS of Bricks, and tables where the kids can work.

Dan had a model of R2 to use as a reference.

Each table had 2 different sizes of bricks and instructions to follow.  You see that the instructions are to make a 4x brick.  I thought that it was quite cleaver that the kids were actually making a scaled up version of the normal Lego brick.

(Read more…)

I’m going to do some investigating to find out the name of the group that put on this event, but my son and I had a great time at the Jedi/stormtrooper training event. Watch at the end of the Stormtrooper training, he’s a very accurate shot!