Dustin’s Weblog

Its 5:30 and I now have a week off! Since its been a nice long four months since my last post I guess I have some catching up to do.. and will probably miss most of the important stuff, if there was any. If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook this is all stuff you probably already know

Family Events: The kids are growing fast! Sawyer is talking about everything AND he plays a few games on the Wii and a racing game on Xbox. I think that he also said his first swear word.. but we are going to try and forget about that. Morgan is even starting to play the Wii and doing a little bit of talking now, she has a few words down pretty good including “Dada”, “Mama”, “Baba”, “Kitty”, “Hot”, “Cold” and “Meow”. I don’t think that the kids are huge Thomas The Train fans, but we have an electronic Thomas train set that we will be buying additional track and cars for to give on Christmas that we all enjoy playing with. OH, AND we found out that our baby due in April will be a BOY!  We are planning to do a home birth again if all continues to go smoothly, the only pain about that (for me anyway) is the insurance company - CIGNA. When Morgan was born in 2008 UnitedHealthcare covered us 100% after only a little back-and-fourth. CIGNA on the other hand is not being as nice about it.. but I think that NY State law is on our side and we will be covered in the end.With the third child on the way we needed to upgrade Kim’s truck to a van - a Kia. So on top of all of our other bills, we now have a more expensive auto-loan to pay for. Oh well.. I’m getting used to the debt and being poor I guess. To add to that, we now have a cat with no name.. exactly what vowed never to get after having to find a new home for our ferrets when Sawyer was born, but sometimes family life isn’t about me and what I believe are the right choices I guess! Seemingly related to all this, but possibly not, I am now on blood pressure medication to try and control my chronic high blood pressure.. something my doctor and I had talked about years ago, but I initially resisted.. but I don’t think that I can put it off any longer. So far it seems to be going well.. we’ll see though.

Other: I’ve been trying to do some “casual” life-logging lately to keep a digital record of things that I would usually forget, but might need to recall someday. I’ve been using a free Evernote account for this, and so far it has been pretty awesome. I can scan in documents, or jot them down with my Livescribe pen and be able to search for text within them from their web gui or my phone! I’ve also tried to tie it together with my social media accounts using Tarpipe, which is another cool site that I would recommend if you use Evernote, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Delicious and other such sites. For this vacation I have a pile of tasks that I’ve been trying to keep track of with RememberTheMilk.com.. we’ll see how well it works out as a to-do list over the next 9 days.

Oh yeah, I also tried some J2ME programming for my phone over the last couple months. If anyone is interested I wrote a little app to run in the background while you take pictures with the Samsung Eternity to geoTag your photos. I posted it here.

First post in a few months, so here are a couple of updates.

Sawyer is growing up fast! He is saying quite a bit more these past few weeks. When before he would just kind of make sounds if he didn’t know how to say a specific word, now I think he is actually trying to say the word.. even if it doesn’t come out quite right all the time. Some words he has no problems saying at all are NO!, Momo (Morgan), Lawnmower, Cars and Bike.

Morgan is also getting big! She is trying really really hard to start walking. She pulls herself up on her own when she is near a chair or table, but that first real step on her own might still be a few weeks off. She has four teeth now and getting good at biting.

Sunday, October 12th at 8:18am Morgan Jean Runnells was born in our bathtub. She weighs 8lbs 6oz and is 21 inches long. Both Kim and Morgan are doing great! Kim did an amazing job, this was a home birth with no pain medication or anything! So far Sawyer is adapting well to being a big brother too.

Since this wasn’t at a hospital there are a few things the hospital did with sawyer that we have to make separate appointments for, like a hearing test. Meg, our midwife is able to do almost everything else herself, including the birth certificate paperwork and blood tests. Kim and I will do her foot prints in a few days when things calm down, we have those for Sawyer, and we’d like to have them for Morgan too. Kim also took the above photo of Morgan, and I took the border from Sawyer’s hospital photo and made it pink.. so now we have a “hospital photo” of Morgan too!

Man, longest time in the past couple years that I have gone without posting I think. Definitely not because nothing has been happening.. in fact, this may have been the most postworthy couple of months I’ve had in a while… I just haven’t been able to find the time. And now that I do have time (Kim is off with her mom and Sawyer is sleeping) I can’t remember very much that has happened! So I’ll start with the big one - IT WILL BE A GIRL (probably)! On 5/21 we went in for Kim’s 2nd trimester ultrasound (posted here if you are interested),  and the ultrasound tech says that in her opinion it is a girl. This is good news, name wise, because we were having a hard time coming up with a boy name. Before Sawyer was born we had done a lot of thinking about both boy and girl names, and came up with what we liked way back then.. and for girl names, Morgan Jean Runnells is what we decided on. I think it will be a nice name.

With the pregnancy still moving along fine we are planning on moving Sawyer to the bigger extra bedroom and will put Morgan in his current room. This meant painting. Kim picked out a good beige color for Sawyers new room and we painted it a couple of weeks ago, his current room is light blue but this might work good for a girl’s room too if there are pink things around.. maybe.

Other events from the past two months:

• I my copy of Grand Theft Auto IV, which may be one of my favorite games of all time.. though I don’t get that much time to play it these days.
• The whole family got a bad cold and then got better.
• Gas prices passed $4/gal making my commute to Syracuse close to $30 a day with tolls. Luckily this is still only a once a week thing.
• Kim and I found a couple great houses on nothnagle.com closer to the thruway, only to find out they were model homes for new builds.. and a new build is something that I don’t think I have the patience for to do again. We are not really that actively looking to move anyway.