Brent’s Thoughts

More talking about our house payments and also about a housing project that is going to be coming up near our house.  Don’t jump unless that is what you are interested in.

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I guess I will attribute the lack of posting here to that.  Things have pretty much just been static around here.  Julie is getting bigger, smarter, more active, but there haven’t been any crazy changes.  She says a few single words every now and then, but she isn’t really talking a bunch yet.

P is getting close to finishing her thesis for her Masters.  I think she is planning on trying to defend it here in a month or so.  I don’t know if I had mentioned it on here yet, but she went back to working everyday right around Julie’s birthday.  Julie has been in daycare with a lady that lives just a bit down the road, and she seems to really like it.

i have just been working around the house a little.  It has been cool the last few days, so I took that chance to trim all the bushes around the house back down to a more normal size.  Some of them are getting big and we are going to have to move a couple of them because there just isn’t any room in the bed anymore.

P and I put down a edging around some of the beds that made them look a little better and should make it a lot easier to keep the grass out of the mulch.

I guess things are just moving along really.

Julie had her first birthday last Friday and her first birthday party on Sunday.  Things went really well after a minor error on when everyone was supposed to be at the house.  I think Julie had a good time with the people being there and with the things that she got.  It was obvious that she enjoyed the cake, but then who doesn’t.

Here are some of my favorite pictures from the two days:

A couple of weeks ago Pauline and I headed down to Nashville for Laura and Ethan’s wedding.  Ethan had ask me to be a groomsman so we got there for the rehersal and dinner afterwards.

It was great to be there and see people from college that I hadn’t seen in a while.  It was also great to meet other people that were involved in Ethan and Laura’s life that I had never met before.  Everyone got along great and had a wonderful time at the dinner, and I think I can say that we even had a pretty good time at the rehersal too.
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Well, I have been feeling alittle worrysome lately. I watched a house the other night that was about a father that was caring for his mentally challenged son. the son had been brain damaged following a bus accident and the father was now going to have to make a big medical decision for him. I also watched the movie “A knights tale” tonight, where the father was sending his son off to apprentice with a knight at a tender young age saying that was all he had to give to him (the man was poor) and that he wanted his son to live a better life than he himself had lived.
I have just been feeling alittle crazy I guess. I just stop and think about all the what ifs. Julie is still so small and will be for a long time. so helpless. So many things are uncertain. Money, health, accidents are all things you can’t control. She can’t make any decisions for herself (not to say that when she is capable of making her own decisions that they will be good ones). alot of movies and tv shows (and I watch way too much tv) have this underlying theme of parents and their kids and the heartbreaking circumstances that they meet.
I guess I will just have to stop watching tv.

We have been moving parts of the district over to a central VoIP phone switch located in our office at the Board of Education. It does put a importance on our servers staying up since if they are down the phones out at the buildings are effectively paper weights. That shouldn’t be a problem though as we are near a 99.9% uptime (only 8 hours of down time a year) on our equipment.

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Well, we went to Julie’s two month appointment today. She is (drum roll) 11 lb 2 oz, in the 70th percentile for weight; 23 3/4 inches long, 95th percentile for height; and her head size is in the 50th percentile. She got 3 shots, her vaccinations. She took it okay, she was upset at first but she settled down pretty quick. I also had some coupons for free formula so I got 3 more cans of Enfamil. She will have her next appointment Oct 24th.

After the doctor’s appointment we met Coach and Joey for lunch at Toots and then we went to see their new house. It is huge. They were planning on a main floor with an attic and it turned into a main floor with a full finished basement and a finished bonus area upstairs. The place is crazy big. They have 25 hundred sq feet just on the main floor. Oh well, it is nice.

Hello all, I just thought that I would write in with an update on Julie. She is precious. She is sleeping less during the day and better at night. Occasionally she is cranky for no reason and she prefers to be held all the time, but other than that she is a joy. I guess I have lucked out with a good baby. Currently, I am spending my days maintaining the house, feeding and tending to Julie, watching TV and working ever so slowly on plans for a thesis. I have emailed a few specialists with questions on something I wanted to try. If they write me back and indicate that it might be worth a shot to try it, I will start my experiments once I get back from maternity leave. Current stumbling blocks include a lack of being able to access older articles online. Most items before 1997 are only available on hard copy at the library.

Currently the plan is to go to work 4 days/week at 9.5 hours/day and try to take Wed off so that I can watch Julie on Wed leaving my mom to watch her on Monday and Tues and Linda to watch her on Thurs and Fri. At least I guess that is the plan… As a fall back I have filled out an application to the daycare at Western. I get preference due to being staff at Western, but I get moved farther down the waiting line since Brent and I aren’t finacially bad off and Julie is white with no disabilities. I don’t know if she would get in at Western, there are only 8 spots for birth-2 years.

After the jump I am going to talk about something that a few people might consider bragging. If you think you might be one of them then don’t read one afterwards. Please understand though that I do not see it as bragging, I am instead proud of something that Pauline and I have accomplished and I want to talk about it. I am not attempting to rub it in to anyone’s face and am not trying to flaunt anything.

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USPS this one is for free. All I ask is that someone from there posts a comment here saying it was a good idea.

I have a new system for you that will increase your good will from your residential customers by a ton. It will also show that you really care about people and not bulk mailing companies.
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