Blog Reader 101

As recently as last night, it was brought to my attention that perhaps not everyone who subscribes and receives regular updates from this blog are fully aware of some of the features and functions herein. I won't mention Carla's name, but whoever it was, I thank that unnamed individual for helping me to see that not everyone is aware of these things and that I should perhaps help with a few pointers.

Gotta Start Them Young

While, on the one hand, Kyle will not likely be the next Tiger Woods, that certainly doesn't mean that he can't get an early start to learning things that could eventually lead to a promising professional career. In this case, in music.

I know...I know. There are probably masses out there thinking that, as a parent, my objective should not be to push my child into a profession in order to live vicariously through him. If you did think that (or something very similar) please know that this is not a matter of Daddy pushing anything on Kyle. He does this because he keeps asking to. If he doesn't ask to play, I don't bring it up.

A Day at the Zoo: Part 2

Let us continue our journey through the animal kingdom today and look further at Kyle's trip to the Phoenix Zoo. Today, we get to see orangutans, Kyle trying to go hug the elephant, and trying on masks at the gift shop.

With no further hesitation, and to minimize the amount of waiting that you will have to do with respect to getting to the point of this post in order that you may not have to continue to bother with having to read a great deal of superfluous fluff (a.k.a. my writing) and instead go on to enjoy the pictures and see what a great day Kyle had at the zoo which is one of his favorite places, although it must be said that he did enjoy Disneyland a great deal as well, but since that is not in Phoenix, the zoo could be counted among one of his favorite places in the Phoenix area which is why he seems to be enjoying himself so much in the pictures that we are immediately going to get to rather than continue to drone on and on in what may constitute one of the longest single sentences written since some of the stuff that the Apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans.

A Day at the Zoo: Part 1

After a few days off, I'm now getting back into the thick of things. And so, here we are taking a look at Kyle's trip to the Phoenix Zoo last Sunday.

It was a great deal of fun! One of the best parts was getting there. Not until we were just about there did we realize that the PF Chang's Rock -n- Roll Marathon had the necessary roads blocked for us to get there. So, after a bit of driving around, we finally managed to get to the zoo!

Who's the President of the United States?

Welcome to the 21st Century!

Today, we try to bring to our loyal fan-base something new and different. You've obviously seen the various blog posts. You've seen lots of pictures. If you've been following this blog long enough, you've even seen a slide-show of pictures.

One of Nate's Christmas Presents

Welcome to the final "Christmasy" post for this year. After this, I have officially used up all the pictures I have of Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, pre-Christmas, Christmastime, the Christmas Holiday, Holiday Season and "The Holidays." (There, I think I've covered everything. Sorry, if you celebrate Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or something, but this being a predominantly Christian family, so we tend to not celebrate either of those holidays. Nothing personal.)

One of Nate's "big" gifts for this year was a new race car bed. It was all decked out with the Cars / Lightening McQueen bedsheets and everything. New kid beds are always so fun because they are so excited to sleep on them! I'm not sure if excitement is the emotion you want when you're hoping for them to fall asleep, but sometimes it may work.

Christmas Day

Merry Christmas!

Well, Merry Christmas about a month ago, anyway.

I'm finally starting to get caught up and now we're actually at the Christmas Day pictures. Aren't you excited? I know you've been waiting and waiting.

Christmas Morning

Ok. Today, we're going to make this short and sweet. Well, short anyway.

The primary purpose of this post is to show that, while not quite as obscene as the very first Christmas with Nate and Kyle, things really haven't backed off a whole lot quite yet. This was officially the boys' third Christmas and, as you can see, there was still a fairly monstrous pile of presents.

Cookies and Milk

Ok! It's Christmas Eve. Santa will be coming tonight to leave presents for all the good little boys and girls. He'll be working all night and won't really get a chance to stop for dinner, so he'll probably be pretty hungry. Let's go ahead and leave him some chocolate chip cookies and a glass of milk for when he gets here.

Get Ready to Wiggle

The boys were giving one present to open on Christmas Eve at Grandma's house. This is becoming a sort of tradition and this year was no exception.

So, today we have some pictures from Christmas Eve with the boys and their first present. It was lots of fun! In fact, I think the grown-ups may have had at least as much fun as the kids.

Just Before Christmas

Welcome back from a hiatus of a few days or so! I hope everyone's New Year is going well so far.

With us still being a bit behind on pictures anyway, I figured that it wouldn't be much worse if I release the pics on a somewhat slow pace (compared to the lightning fast pace I used to post the pictures of Disneyland...about a month for three days of pictures).

Best Buddies!

Sometimes, we come across pictures of scenes that just have a level of cuteness not often achieved and even less often, captured on camera. We did, however, recently have just such an experience. Note that I say "we" almost as though I had anything to do with it. (Well, I suppose since one of the boys is mine, I did have something to do with it, but that's really reaching.)

You may want to sit down for this one because, while Kyle and Nate are often cute, little can be done to prepare you for the level of adorability you are about to experience. (Yes, I'm also making up my own words, now. Jeannie will understand.)

More Site Updates

All righty, then!

So, after a brief time with the new site design/layout/template thingy (that would be a technical term, for those of you non-techies out there) we have received feedback from several people that the site looks really cute, but it's hard to really see some of the pictures because you can see the background through the pictures of Kyle.

Child Prodigy

Well, I don't have the Christmas pictures yet, but I thought this was kinda cute. Kyle used to use my drumsticks, but they were a bit to long and unwieldy for his little hands. So, we picked up some Kyle-sized drumsticks at Toys 'R Us and it seems like he was doing a whole lot better with the right sized sticks.

Here he is bashing away on daddy's Yamaha electronic kit. (This kind of drum set has a volume knob!) Welcome the next Neil Peart!

Disneyland '08 - Part VII

I know what you're thinking....

How long does it take to post pictures of a three day trip to Disneyland? And.... where the heck have you been for the last couple weeks? I mean, seriously...nothing new since 12/30/08? What's going on here? We're all waiting for Christmas pictures and we're still not even done with the vacation pics from over a month ago! That's it...I'm canceling my subscription to this blog. It's run by a bunch of flakes!