The other day we were getting ready to eat, Alex was already sitting at the table, and I brought him a fork and spoon. It turns out he already had both and as I was walking back to the kitchen to get something else he said,

“Dad, I don’t need this forkin’ spoon.”

It took me a second to realize that he wasn’t using a rather colorful adjective to describe his spoon but rather the “fork and” part was just run together.

Happy (American) Thanksgiving everyone. While all you Canadians are toiling at work I’m sitting at home enjoying a nice couple of days off with nothing really planned for today and the weekend.

We made the traditional Thanksgiving meal of turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, green beans, and pumpkin pie for dessert. A big mile stone for us this year was that we made real gravy and it turned out fantastic. For some reason gravy has always been one of the items that we’ve never managed to get just right but this year, oh la la, it was fantastic and there was tonnes of it. There’s nothing quite so good as turkey, potatoes, and stuffing just swimming in gravy. mmmm.

We also had a “God, I feel like my parents” moment today too. Alex is going through a phase where he really isn’t excited about trying new foods and today’s food of choice was turkey. “I don’t like turkey” was all we heard from the time we put it in the oven to the time we served it but we told him that there wouldn’t be any pumpkin pie until he ate some turkey. He just kept pushing it around the plate and Jen said “We’re going to have to invest in a timer.” Ahhhhh, the dreaded timer! I remember the dreaded timer and the cold spinach for breakfast the next morning. He eventually ate a piece of turkey but it was like we were force feeding him turnips or Brussels sprouts :-).

I’ve finally got around to posting a couple of October pictures. Last week I posted a couple of halloween pictures of the boys. This year Alex went as Winnie the Pooh and we dressed Andrew up as Roo. I took both of them tick-or-treating to a couple of blocks in the neighbourhood and then Jen took Alex out after that to got to a couple more houses.

Today I posted just some random pictures from October. It turns out that October was a pretty slow month for pictures so I didn’t have a whole lot to choose from. The big deal for Alex was that when Jen’s parents came into town they got him his first two wheeler so I put a couple of pictures of him riding his bike. I kind of explain it on the web page but we’ve had a couple of bike accidents since we got it so right now he’s not too hot on going for rides. We figure that in a couple of weeks or so he’ll be ready to try again.

Jen’s parents are back in New Orleans now and they are back in their house too. They are busy trying to settle back into some semblance of normal life and in the process we’ve been hearing that Bob is supposed to have been on the NBC Evening News with Brian Williams in a story about New Orleans and City Park. The week that they were supposed to air his story it seemed like something bigger came up in the news that would end up bumping his story. (Or at least that’s the best explanation we could come up.) Then he called us the other day and said that he was going to be interviewed on “American Morning with Soledad O’Brian and Miles O’Brian”
on CNN. Jen was luckily to have the morning off and persistence payed off and he was on. It’s kind of cool to be watching CNN and see your father in law being interviewed by Soledad O’Brian. The premise of the story is that City Park is starting to charge rent to the workers who have been setting up camps in the park for living in while they are working on contracts to clean up the city. It sounds like there was some thought that they should just be allowed to stay for free or that these were city residents that lost everything. I thought the funniest part of the interview was during this exchange:

S. O’BRIEN: As you well know, there are some critics of this plan to charge people who would say, hey, you know what, I’m here cleaning up the city, doing a favor for your city, and now I’m going to be charged money to sleep out on the ground in a tent. Do you have — see any validity to those arguments?

BECKER: No, not really. I don’t. First of all, nobody’s doing us a favor. There’s nobody here who’s volunteering to clean up this city. We have many volunteer groups here providing food and other kinds of assistance to homeowners trying to deal with their property, but these people, they’re here to make money. And they are following the contractors as they go around cleaning up the city. So there’s no volunteer here cleaning up the city. They’re all being paid to do it.

They way he delivers the “No, not really.” is absolutely classic. We video taped it and if I get around to it I’ll try and get a version posted to the web, until then you can read the transcript on the CNN website.

This weekend Alex and I are going to watch FC Dallas in the MLS Cup here in Dallas. I’ll take the camera with us and post some pictures next week.

We’ve all been sick again. It seems like one of us has been sick for a couple of weeks now but this time we all got it. Thursday night Alex was supposed to go to the Monster Mash Bash Halloween Celebration at Texins Activity Centre at work. I stayed at work and Jen was going to call me when she got there and I would drive up there and meet them. Well Jen called from the and said that Alex just threw up in the parking lot when they got there so we decided to skip the Monster Mash and just head back home.

When we were getting Alex ready for bed later that night I started to feel a little sick to my stomach as well and it didn’t take long after that for me to go down hard. I ended up staying in bed from Thursday night until Saturday morning and in that time I must have lost anywhere between five and ten pounds. Alex got sick one more time Thursday night and then on Friday night Jen started feeling sick to top it off. She’s much tougher then I am and didn’t get it quite as bad but we were all pretty bed ridden for a stretch.

As of this morning we are all started to feel a little better so I’m going to keep my fingers crossed that we are now on the mend and only healthy days are ahead for us.

Jen’s parents were in town this weekend. (What a weekend to come in eh?) They are finally back in their house and starting to get settled. As of now there are only about three or four families that have moved back on the street so it’s not quite populated, and the way Bob describes it a little creepy, though people are slowly starting to come back. They picked up the dogs too so we are now a dog-less house again.

While they were in town this week they got Alex his first two wheeler. Bob wanted to get himself a bike for riding back and forth to work and while they were out Jen was trying Alex on bicycles for size because we were thinking of getting him one for Christmas. Well Alex managed to pull out all the stops with the sweet talk and convinced the Gandparents that it would be better to get one now and not wait until later. So he’s been riding his two wheeler, with training wheels, around the block everyday, twice a day. I’ll get some pictures posted here in the next couple of days.

Alex has recovered from his Hand, Foot, and Mouth virus. On one of they days he suddenly broke out in blisters on his feet, hands, and on the inside of his mouth. They went away soon after that and this week he’s well enough that we were able to send him back to school. He didn’t appear to be in that much discomfort overall but you could tell that eating caused him a little pain so he ended up living on yogourt for a couple of days. Luckily Andrew didn’t get sick even though it was difficult, actually impossible, to keep the two of them separated.

Alex is getting excited about Halloween. Everyday he asks, “How many more days until Halloween?” This year he is going to be Winnie The Pooh and Andrew is going to be Roo. Kind of a funny story about the Pooh costume. About two months ago Jen was out with the boys at Babies R Us and they had a one piece Pooh costume so she tried it on Alex. Turns out it was a wee too small. The problem was that once she had him zipped into the costume she couldn’t get him out. Alex started freaking out and getting all upset and Jen ended up having to get a pair of scissors and cut him out of the costume. Now we were the owners of a Pooh costume that was just a bit too small but Alex has been convinced since that day that he’s going as Winnie the Pooh. In the two months since we bought the costume he has grown a little more so it’ss even smaller then when we first got it.

This week Jen took the costume to the fabric store and asked/begged if someone there could help out and alter the costume. A nice old lady volunteered and she did a good job with it so Alex has a costume that fits. Once I get some Halloween pictures together I’ll post them.

Andrew is really trying to crawl around now. I think it’s frustrating him that he can’t easily get where he wants to go. Right now he uses a combination of rolling and using his legs to push him in the direction he wants to go. On the other hand he really enjoys the Jolly Jumper. When we put Alex in it he would just sort of sit there and sway back and forth but Andrew just loves jumping. He used to get going up and down and then not be able to stop himself but he’s much better now and he can jump like crazy and then stop himself. If you click on the picture it should take you to a movie clip of him jumping.

So Alex has hand, foot, and mouth disease. (Not to be confused with Foot and Mouth Disease affecting livestock which I keep calling it.) When he went to the sitters last week one of the kids came home sick from school with it but we were really crossing our fingers that he wouldn’t come down with it. We had dogged it once before when one of the play group kids got it but our luck ran out this time.

Monday night Alex wasn’t feeling that great and he ran a fever most of the night so Jen took both him and Andrew to the doctor yesterday to get things checked out and they confirmed he had it. So far we are lucky and Andrew doesn’t have anything so with any luck maybe he won’t get it. Unfortunately there isn’t anything you can do about hand, foot, and mouth except try and alleviate the pain with Benadryl and of all things Maalox. The good thing is that he isn’t in too much pain and the only real affect is that he really doesn’t feel like eating much.

So, we’ll have to keep him out of school for the rest of the week and then see how things are going on the weekend to see if he can go back next week.

I always hate when I don’t update this in ages because I just have so much stuff to write about. Jen and I have both been sick but we are pretty much over it now. Jen had it first and I thought for sure that I was in the clear but then right before corporate olympics I ended up getting sick.

It was a rematch from last year where TI won over RISD by one point, 57 to 56. This year was just as close but RISD beat us by two points, 58 to 60.

I swam all events, 50 Free, Back, Breast and then a 50 on the relay and Jen swam the 50 back and the relay.

    Jen    Derek
50 Free          26.56
50 Back   35.20  30.81
50 Breast        35.81

Considering how I felt those times aren’t all the bad but considering how much I’ve been in the pool lately they aren’t great. Maybe next year we can get them.

Alex is picking up words like crazy and most of the time I don’t know where he comes up with half the stuff he says. Like the other night I was putting him down to bed and he said “Dad, I’ve got some gunk in my nose.” Gunk, where did he pick that up? Then today in the car he was drawing on his magnadoodle and said, “Hey look at what I drew.” It was just kind of random lines in a big ball with really no shape to it. “Very nice, what is it?” Jen asked him. “Compost” he told us. Compost?! We finally dug deep enough to find out that he pick that up from a Bob the builder episode he watched the other day where Bob was building an enclosure for the farmers compose pile.

Andrew has started eating his first solid foods and by solid I mean slightly thicker then water. First we started him off with rice cereal and just recently we added oatmeal to the mix. mmmmm. At least he seems to like it.

It still hasn’t rained here but the winds really started gusting this afternoon. The trees in front of the house lost a bunch of leaves and a couple of smaller branches but that’s been about it. So it looks like the worst of it is past us.

Still nothing.  It’s really overcast and dark but still no rain..

Nothing.  Currently there are hardly any clouds in the sky, it’s really calm out, and the forecast has us on the very west edge of the rains which they don’t think will start until tonight.

So it looks like it’s not going to be all that bad for us.