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.

Here are a few of the many things that have happened in the last few months that I haven’t blogged about.

Sawyer has been moved to the larger bedroom and is sleeping in his “big boy” bed. He had been trying to get out of his crib for about a day and then finally broke loose.. so we needed to move him into a bed that would hurt less if he fell out of it. He seems to have adjusted pretty well, but now he is back to waking up in the middle of the night and crying one or two times. I think this is because when he first moved to the new bed I would go in there to check on him if he cried.. seeing how it is new and all, and then he got used to it. I believe the solution will be to just let him cry for longer and longer periods until he finally just gives up.. this worked for us in the past when he was in the crib.

Our baby girl will be born somewhere around October 10th IN OUR HOME (probably). I’m no hippie or advocate of home births, but this is something that Kim really really wants to do, and as long as everything continues to go smoothly I’m not going to put up too much of a fuss. And many years from now it might even be cool to say we had a birth at home. PLUS, let the record show that Kim has granted me one FREE argument win that I can use at anytime to immediately win an argument with her!

Company picnic. Today was the company picnic for ShoreGroup (my employer). Lots of fun, but most of the time I wound up just chasing Sawyer around.. instead of mingling with co-workers and I probably should have. But hey, it was a “family” picnic, and family is all about chasing kids around and not getting what you want!

Money! I need some. Actually, I need A LOT of cash.. and SOON. Insurance does not cover crazy stuff like home birth, so we need to come up with more than just bill and grocery money for the next couple of months. We are considering selling a bunch of crap on craig’s list and ebay sometime soon. I’ve sold one of my better domain names for a bunch of money, which should help.. but we still have a ways to go. Its a long shot, but I’ve been experimenting with a different ad networks for the userbar websites.. so far Google Adsense continues to be the only one that generates any reasonable revenue.

I guess thats it for now!