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February 23, 2009
A few days ago a quest of mine was completed. This particular quest started back in 1998 when I obtained the first piece to this collection. I was intrigued and started to search out and obtain each item in this collection. The last piece took me a bit longer than the others to come across but that day has finally occurred. Some of you may have figured out that I am talking about the statehood quarter collection and my last piece was the Hawaii quarter. I doubt this collection will ever be worth more than the 12.50 face value, it was fun to collect and see all the difference designs. Click to see the Hawaii quarter if you have not seen it yet.
Aiden’s potty training is basically complete. He mostly gives enough time for us to help him out of his pants and onto the potty. He sits w/o using any special seats which is a huge plus. The only remaining item is for him to be able to get out of his pants and on the potty by himself. I am sure that will take quite some time to finish but we are proud of him.
This last weekend Brandon went to a Blue and Gold ceremony. That is a cub scout ceremony where the second year webelo’s advance from being a cub scout to being a boy scout. This particular ceremony was a medieval theme, so Brandon made a sword and had a shield made with his name for the back of his chair. They had a magician show that was pretty cute. The magician was not that good, his sleight of hand needed work and you could see him pulling things from his pockets or storing things into them, but the kids loved it. And the rest of the night was very LONG. Aiden was going nuts by the time we could leave.
However there was one high light that made most of the adults smile. The younger kids were having mock sword fights and a little girl about four years old started to chase after the boys and hit them with her pink purse. I have captured a few pictures of her hitting Brandon, I will try to get them online at some point. So I will just leave you with a picture of Brandon, Hunter and his tiger den leader Scott.
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February 12, 2009
Wow, one month since my last post. Where does the time go? Well I guess those with kids know how much time flies when you spend it with your kids. That is a good thing by the way.
Lets start with the most recent and work backwards..Valentine’s Day, ok, I guess I am early. Since it is always so crowded on the actual Valentine’s day, Danith and I have an unspoken custom to go early. This year I took Danith to The Melting Pot. The Melting Pot is a fondue restaurant in Minneapolis. We had the 3 course meal, a beer cheese fondue, followed by the broth and meats and then a white/milk chocolate dessert fondue. With our wine it was a great dinner. I apologize for forgetting to rotate the picture of Danith and her Tulips, but too late now. 
I got a new Cannon camera to finally replace the two 5 year old camera’s that were our “primary” cameras. This camera is hackable and it allowed me to upload new features into the camera that out of the box it does not support, like faster or slower shutter speeds, better movies etc. One of the additional features is the ability to either greyscale all except a highlight color, or to swap colors. Now in the quick test I replaced Brandon’s shirt color from blue to red. Now in the picture on the left there was too many shadows to have it work well, but it is just an example of what it can do. The color highlight will save me time in photoshop to make nice highlighted pictures.
Another time waster for me is scanning old pictures. This time I send a large batch of photos, close to 500, to Scan Cafe to be scanned for me. I have not gotten them back, but got to see the thumbnails online and picked a couple that made me laugh. The first is me and Randy Vath in middle school during my “skater” days. The second is in high-school, Brad Nuss and I were “featured” in a Post Bulletin article about the advanced physics classes that Mayo offered. Of course they picked us doing something extremely geeky and moving equipment.
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January 12, 2009
This past weekend was pretty exciting for the kids. Friday night was Brandon’s cub scout pack meeting. During this pack meeting Brandon earned his Bobcat badge. At the moment he has to wear it upside down until he does a good deed.. But the exciting part was that during the pack meeting we had to pin the badge on him, but with him being held upside down! After the meeting the pack had a pizza and movie party with lots of young sugared up kids running everywhere.
Saturday was Brandon’s first skiing lesson at Afton Alps. He was in a smaller class with just 4 other kids and loved every second of the class. They spent the day going up the small magic carpet and down the meadows bunny hill, navigating obstacles and learning how to stop. By the end of the day we was so much more confident that after two lessons from dad. Click here to see a small crappily zoomed in phone camera picture of him in action.
Not to be outdone, it was a busy week for Aiden as well. He started potty training on the 5th and this was his first weekend at home with underwear on. There was a nice ending to a very stressfull day on Saturday which was filled with accidents, Aiden asked to use the potty before bed and actually went this time!
Sunday was so much better for Aiden.. He learned the feelings and only had two just missed pee accidents, otherwise he told us everytime before he had to go. The other landmark for him is that he is now comfortable in his new bed and has slept mostly through the night all weekend. Yeah for sleep for mom and dad!
Back to work and the grindstone today… Enjoy everybody!
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December 31, 2008
What a year it has been, but I am not going to go there. Every site in the universe is doing a year end review so I am not going to do that.
To start off my father celebrated his birthday yesterday. HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAD!
We are hosting a New Years party tomorrow night, our usual Fondue. This year we will start with a special cheese fondue, oil for the meats and finish it off with a nice chocolate fondue with marshmellows, bannanas and cake.
In other news I set Danith up with her own blog at: http://danith.fryar.org/
Hope everybody has a wonderful new years and gets home safe.
See you in 2009!
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December 26, 2008
We started off Christmas Eve by opening a package from my sister in Japan. She loves to send us Japanese treats for us to try. Pictured is Brandon holding up what he thought was a package of gum. He eagerly opened the package and popped it into his mouth. After a few seconds of chewing he exclaims, “Ugg, it has chunks!”. Personally I enjoyed it but it was more taffy than gum. Here is Brandon’s face after eating it.
After the 4pm church services we had Danith’s family over for a quick dinner and gift exchange. Everybody had a great time and lots of laughs were had by all. We had to cut the night short as Santa was coming and we did not want the kids to still be up for his arrival. After everybody was out the door, Brandon set up cookies and milk and quickly hit the hay.
We were awoken briefly at 2am by an antsy Brandon but had to tell him to head back to bed. At 7am we relented and let them both run downstairs to see what Santa brought. All the stockings were stuffed and there was even a few letters to the kids thanking them for the cookies. After the chaos of opening presents the kids had some down time before we had dinner at Danith’s parents and another round of presents!
Today we are hoping to relax and try to get the house back to some semblance of normal. Hope everybody had a great Christmas!
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Aiden’s potty training is basically complete. He mostly gives enough time for us to help him out of his pants and onto the potty. He sits w/o using any special seats which is a huge plus. The only remaining item is for him to be able to get out of his pants and on the potty by himself. I am sure that will take quite some time to finish but we are proud of him.
This last weekend Brandon went to a Blue and Gold ceremony. That is a cub scout ceremony where the second year webelo’s advance from being a cub scout to being a boy scout. This particular ceremony was a medieval theme, so Brandon made a sword and had a shield made with his name for the back of his chair. They had a magician show that was pretty cute. The magician was not that good, his sleight of hand needed work and you could see him pulling things from his pockets or storing things into them, but the kids loved it. And the rest of the night was very LONG. Aiden was going nuts by the time we could leave.
However there was one high light that made most of the adults smile. The younger kids were having mock sword fights and a little girl about four years old started to chase after the boys and hit them with her pink purse. I have captured a few pictures of her hitting Brandon, I will try to get them online at some point. So I will just leave you with a picture of Brandon, Hunter and his tiger den leader Scott.
