2012-10-31

2012-10-13

Ahhh, Fall... Football, Foliage, Field trips ...so much to do, so little time!

2012-09-22

2012-09-10

Wow! Summer is over. I can't believe it. Tyler started first grade today, and Anna's first day back at Shelburne Nursery School is Friday. Time sure flies by. We've been busy has heck these past few weeks around the house and getting ready for school and working and all that good stuff. I haven't been able to update this lately because our computer has been under a drop cloth in a heap for a few weeks. We did a fairly major renovation of our downstairs over the past few weeks...Since we bought the house we wanted to put wood floor down in the living room, and we never cared much for the tile (style, or amount of it)...so we finally bit the bullet...new floor, baseboards, hearth, door casings, window casings, counter top and appliances. I took a few days off, and worked a handful of half days, and Katie was a machine all the while. We included the kids where safety permitted, but a lot of it was too noisy for their liking. Fortunately, they get along good and had fun together while we did a lot. They were awesome actually. We also had some help from friends and relatives, which was invaluable. I can not thank Al, Jacob, Paul and Greg enough for their time, help and tools I borrowed :-) The demolition took one week to get the old tile/oak/carpet out of the downstairs, and then a week to get the wood floor down, then another week for the trim and hooking up new appliances and whatnot. Having no kitchen for nearly three weeks was tough, but we're really happy with how it all came out.

2012-08-29

2012-07-20

2012-07-12

This is a big post... we've been super busy the past month, wrapping up school, t-ball, and kicking off summer with some great adventures. The weather has been awesome, and work is getting back to "normal" for me, so things are starting to settle down for a nice summer "break". Enjoy the pictures and a few videos thrown in here to see what we've been up to with the kids. I hope everyone is well! We are. -Chris

2012-07-01

Cousin William Has Arrived!

2012-06-04

Congratulations Beth and Jacob!

2012-05-23

2012-05-04

2012-04-17

2012-03-03

2012-03-07

2012-02-07

Christmas, Birthday, Skiing

Merry Christmas! It's been a fun season so far...

2011_12_23

2011_12_07

2011_11_08

2011_09_20

I accidentally added new photos to the previous album... there's new one's here, but also the last batch in the beginning...so if you feel like you've seen them before... you have!

It's hard to believe Summer is over, time definitely flies when you're busy! The kids are still enjoying school, although Tyler no longer loves the bus (thanks to some punk-a$$ fourth grader squirting juice boxes in kids faces...not Tyler's but he wants nothing to do with the bus anymore) so we're not pushing him to take it, but trying to encourage him to get back on. I know he will eventually. He is playing recreation soccer and really loves that... he played goalie the first game and scored a goal from his own net, and last week he was out there and scored 3 more goals. I know I'm bragging, but hey, that's what this is for right? :-)
Anna is also having fun at school, but has the separation anxiety when Katie first leaves her. She will get in the groove in no time I'm sure...it's only been three days so far. She goes M-T-Th for the morning, so she's not quite used to the routine yet. She also started ballet classes on Monday afternoons. LOVES that.
We don't tend to take many pictures these days, but I have a couple here...

2011_09_20

2011_09_08

Well today was Tyler's first day of kindergarten. Full day, 5 days a week. He was super excited to ride the bus, and he had a great day. The phone rang at lunch and was Tyler's teacher, Mrs. Read. This was of course our worst fear with his nut allergy, but she just wanted to know if he could buy a "hot lunch". Apparently he ate his entire lunch during morning snack, and wanted to buy himself lunch! We're proud of him for taking care of himself and not just sitting there with no food. It was great to hear that he was AT school period, since we had been worrying about him all morning (hey, it's hard to send a 5 year old off to a full day of school on a bus at 7:30 for the first time). He likes his teacher, talked about new friends, and had fun. So far, so good!
Anna starts preschool on Thursday (she has "open house" on Tuesday, again, to meet the teachers and stuff, who she already knows because it's where Tyler went for two years). She is very anxious to get started, and SO excited.

In other news, we are totally unscathed by "tropical storm Irene"...we had some flooding in the backyard, but it was gone in 24 hours. Didn't reach the fish pond. The power went out for a few hours, but came back on before morning. Vermont got it pretty bad down south of us, but we basically just got some heavy rain. Hope you all are doing well also!

2011_09_02

2011_08_23

2011_08_04

2011_07_10

Here's a random assortment of pictures from the past few weeks. T-ball is over, and ended with the last few games of the kids hitting over-hand pitching, so that was pretty neat, and then last Sunday, Katie's sister got married! The wedding was perfect, and the rain held off...There's a lot of pictures from that (sorry to those of you who don't even know Beth and Jacob, but some of their family couldn't make it up (the wedding was at Gail and Paul's house in Peacham, VT) so I wanted to share a few more than just the kids :-)

2011_06_29

The kids at the driving range:


Tyler getting a hit:

2011_06_01

Anna had a little dance recital today at Essex High School up on the stage (I say little because the full shin-dig was all ages/levels, and lasted three hours...Anna's class was second, and lasted about 4 minutes :-) She did great!!... I don't think I could go out on a stage in front of a full house...it was totally packed! People were turned away at the door by the fire marshal it got so crowded... Fortunately, we were there early and got seats in the front row. We had our doubts that she would go through with it when she realized how many people were there, but she proved us wrong, and we are SO proud of her.

Here's a couple of clips... I grabbed with the camera. If you don't know the song (I'd be shocked if if you did), it's from Pinnochio and it's called "I've Got No Strings"... hence the suspenders with the tutu.

I've got a ton of pictures to go through from the past few weeks and a trip to Story Land, but wanted to share Anna's dance tonight.

2011_06_12

2011_05_30

Recognize anyone on this page?

http://shelburnemuseum.org/learn/families-and-kids/

2011_05_07

2011_05_10

Happy Easter!

So it's been a long time since the last update, I know. I've been busy working on finishing the basement almost every night after the kids go to bed and just haven't taken the time otherwise to download the pictures from the camera and put some up. I don't have many pictures to prove it, but it's coming along well. Framing, electric, lighting, and half the sheetrock is done.
The pictures go from most recent to oldest... you could probably figure that out by the snow in the last few pictures and the Easter eggs in the first few :-)

2011_04_24

2011_03_26

2011_03_21

Just a few more pictures and videos from Katie's camera now that she's home:

2011_02_25

Katie and the kids are in Pennsylvania visiting Beth and Jacob. They work at Whitetail resort, and are teaching the kids to ski!

Skiing at Whitetail, PA

Skiing Day 2

2011_02_20

A lot of people have asked me if I am "working on" the IBM 'Watson' super-computer which is going to be competing in Jeopardy on Feb 14-16. The short answer is "kind of". To build 'Watson', they connected 360 IBM Power7 microprocessors (2,880 total cores), along with 15 terabytes of RAM, and some incredibly smart software. The processor itself is what I work on, and it's primary application is in an IBM server, not to play Jeopardy!(in case you were thinking it was a waste of money). But that is one of the chips that I have been involved in developing, so I do have a little skin in it I suppose. Hopefully it doesn't crash. If it does, I take it back... I had nothing to do with it.

If you're interested, or have no idea what I'm talking about, check out this video:

 

 

enough snow already!!!

2011_01_31

2011_01_20

Happy New Year!

We had a great Christmas! I hope you all did too!

2011_01_04

2010_12_22

2010_12_08

Random question...

Something came up at lunch today and I wanted to ask around before I forget... did we lend any of you the DVD "Alone in the Wilderness"? It's the self-made documentary made by the guy who moved to Alaska in the 60's and filmed himself setting up shop and living off the land. It's been missing from our collection for a while, but I know we lent it around to a bunch of you. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, don't laugh, it's really interesting).

If you have it, please let me know. The guys at lunch were talking about it and it made me want to watch it again :-)

Thanks.... I'll post some more pictures of the kids after it's returned! hahaha...just kidding... I'll put some more up soon. We've been busy in the snow!

-Chris

Well it's definitely the Christmas season now...we've had parties, presents, snow, sledding, cookies, and Santa.
Here's pictures to prove it:

2010_11_30

There's a slight change in format...pictures used to go oldest to most recent if you went through them sequentially, now they go from newest to oldest, so the most recent are first. It's not my choice, Picasa changed the way they organize them, and thus the order that I go through them.


Here's a few videos of the kids placing their orders with Santa... Turn up the volume if you want any chance at understanding them. Tyler is describing a bike that he saw two days prior (this was news to us!) and Anna is asking for a princess bike, and "Dora and Princess coloring books" ...and Dora and Princess other stuff.

2010_11_29

Well we've been pretty busy with the move and getting settled, and I don't have pictures of the new house yet, but here are a few from the past few weeks. There's a cute video of Tyler at his school "Thanksgiving Feast" that they did for parents. The kids sing songs and helped make sauces and breads, and the teachers cooked an entire turkey(s) with all the fixings and stuff. It was quite impressive I'll say, and fun as always to see your kid standing up there singing and acting crazy.

The house closings went well... No hitches, with the exception of the buyers asking us to take the sandbox with us (we weren't planning on moving 400 lbs of sand across town). In the end, we had to agree to remove it, and we went back that night and shoveled it into trash cans....but it was wet, so the 400lbs turned into 900 lbs, and then we couldn't move the trash cans to save our lives (even though they were on wheels).... eventually we split it out into more containers and with the help of some neighbors (thanks Kyle, Sam), we were able to get the buckets and cans all into the moving truck (we were back there to get the swing-set anyhow after we emptied the first load of the truck). We're finally starting to feel settled a bit, with the furniture and big stuff all in place, and most of the important day-to-day stuff is unpacked and located. Now it's just a matter of decorating and painting.
The previous owner came back and showed me how to swap out the 'main' pump in the Koi pond for the winter-mode one...so the waterfalls are not running anymore for the season, but I was relieved to find out that it's actually not too complicated... and the fish just hang out in there all winter. We will definitely be putting a small fence around it in the spring. It's not anything that we ever wanted per say, but it's pretty cool with the little waterfalls going and humongous fish!

The kids are happy, they're excited to get all their toys back after they've been packed up for a couple weeks now. They didn't miss a beat getting right back into their routines and everything. They adjusted very quickly it seems.

Another great thing that we didn't really know about is the land around the neighborhood is mostly wooded, and there are trails throughout that you can walk, mountain bike, snowshoe, cross-country ski, and it feels like you're in the middle of nowhere. There's even a brooke that runs out there that's pretty cool, and a TON of rocks on the banks for Tyler to throw all day long (they're big into that... what kid isn't?). Don't worry, he won't be out there by himself for years... it's a few minutes walk away and they would never go out there alone. (I already know my mom and others are worried with the pond, I haven't told her about the whitewater in the woods yet!) :-P I might buy Tyler a kayak for Christmas so he can go play in the river when he's not swimming in the koi pond by himself...hehe.

I'll try to get some pictures out as we get settled more and I remember to take some. (When I'm home, there's just so much else to be doing right now, I don't think of it)

Anyways, Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I hope you all have fun. We'll see you soon.

-Chris, Katie, Tyler, Anna

2010_11_22