Leave it to Beaver

In addition to having a beaver at the clubhouse, we have a beaver in our house. Allie has been gnawing on her books. She has a couple out of commission and the latest casualty is “My Fluffy Bunny”. Sorry to whoever bought this for us. It was used in the most loving way a child with two huge teeth knows how.

Brayden turns One!

We had Brayden’s birthday party today! He's One!


He made out like the little bandit he is and had a great time. It occurred to me after I saw the cup cake treat that I had been spelling his name wrong in all of my previous emails. Brayden, not Braydon (spell check picks up neither of the names for what it’s worth, so I officially default the blame to Microsoft, but I digress).
Bond, Brayden Bond

Sweety

Yeah, I'm not going to stand a chance when it comes to her wanting something and being able to say no. I mean look at this face.

GO CUBS!

Visit from Reagan

My buddy Sam, his wife Jamie, and Sam’s parents brought over Reagan (Sam and Jamie’s little girl).



They are a little over one month apart so its nice to get them together as they will be able to be playmates. They were funny together and didn’t really know what to make of each other. Things were going well until I have Allie to Sam. Allie started crying then Reagan started crying and it got out of control with sobbing noise.
http://lubenkov.blogspot.com/2007/10/reagan-alyssa.html



Nice Sam, I hope your proud of your self....meany. :-)

Back Date: 13 April 2008

I need to get some other stories, but right now my world revolves around Allie so my apologies for another Allie post.

Bath time...how fun. My hope is that Allie likes and enjoys the water. I grew up in house that had a pool and loved it and my wife grew up in house that had a lake and she loved it. Both the pool and lake our still around so our hopes are that Allie is going to be as comfortable with water since she will get a decent exposure to water.

Well...let me tell you what happened at bath time. I was giving Allie a bath and she was putting her face in the water and blowing bubbles! She's almost 8 months old and I have no idea if this is normal, but it's awesome! Later she started drinking the water which went down the wrong pipe, she coughed but went back for more. So here are some pictures in order of the whole event of Allie blowing/putting her face in the water. (Click picture to enlarge)

Back Date: 07 April 2008

I'm not sure what my wife was doing with Allie, and I raised an eyebrow to this. However I'll give her the benefit of the doubt and assume it had something to do with fixing the axel on the Red Ryder Wagon.

Good Job Allie, you fixed it!!

Back Date: 04 April 2008

We had a farm meeting after work so Allie and her cousin Braydon were able to play around together while we went over business. He's 4 months older and now walking so Allie has trouble keeping up, but they are good around each other. They already have very different personalities. Allie can play with a toy for longer the 5 minutes and is content in area for more then 15 minutes. Braydon gets tired of a toy after 5 seconds and leaves the area after 15 seconds. It hilarious watching the two of them. On this night Braydon was walking, which looked like an impersonation of Frankenstein's walk. Mikey said you should see his legs without his pants on, because there is no bend at the knee's...it's funny.

Here is a picture of Allie trying to keep up with Braydon while Oma (Grandma in German) watches on.


And here is Mikey feeding Braydon.

Bloody Gumday

I'm so vary behind on Blogging.

This one is from April 05th:

Allie gets her first wound. Somehow she fell face first. (Kelli probably pushed her...again) Anyway, she didn't cry but she kept smacking her lips and Kelli noticed there was a blood spot on the carpet. When she looked at Allie her mouth was bloody. Eveidently her two front, and only, teeth cut her upper gum. I was out cutting grass, and Kelli's first reaction was to feed her so the liquid would subsided the bleeding.

When I came in my first reaction was to take a picture.

Then we gave her a wet wash cloth with an ice cube in the middle. The bleeding stopped, and both Allie and Kelli made it through without crying.

Also here is a picture from earlier in the day when Kelli was taking pictures of daffodil's from around the house.

Dog days

I may or may not have blogged about a time when Allie was in a weird phase. There were times when she would stick out her tongue like a panting dog. She would even start breathing heavier on occasions. How weird is that, right? Too much time watching our dog I suppose. Allie would do this all the time and it got to the point I was worried this was what she would do forever. Kelli cracked up I looked worriedly on waiting for her to stop. This picture was taken on February 18th and I can report that this panting phenomenon does not take place any longer. She naturally stopped. (Click on picture to make larger.)

The other picture is just cute picture to redeem her cuteness.

Dinner Time

Dinner time is, Fun time. I let Allie play with the spoon and bowl after she gets done eating.

English Ruling

Today at work I was pulled off to the side and asked the question, “Which should be used in this email "a" or "an" before an acronym such as NTF. NTF at work means No Trouble Found.
I answered but now I don't know. This is such a conundrum...

Sentence Examples:
1. Contact (a or an) NSA agent.
2. I flew (a or an) F14.
3. This was (a or an) OOBF[out of box failure].
4. I own (a or an) PS3.
...and then we have NASA. Those acronym's we say as a word.
5. I talked to (a or an) NASA representative.

My initial thought is
a NSA agent
a F14
an OOBF
a PS3
a NASA

but is sounds better as
an NSA agent
an F14
an OOBF
a PS3
a NASA


If anyone has a good ruling please comment.

Trip Down Memory Lane

I had been looking on my PC for some files when I got side tracked and noticed these two. Thought this was a fun A - B comparison.

First,

-and more recently-


yeah, she wasn't into laying her head on my hand or staying still. This is extremely difficult balancing a 17lb squirming kids...note the struggling huge pythons I'm blessed with. We do need to try this again, but when she is sleeping and then have an A - B - C comparison.

My very first vehicle Oil Change

Yep, I decided to do this and yep, it's done. 20 minutes oil change...shoot that's nothing. 2hr and 40 minutes and I even got a free pair of oily pants.

It started with me purchasing the wrong oil filter. For some reason I thought I had V6 4.3Liter engine. It turned out its a V8 4.8Liter. (my head is hanging low for this blunder). I had to go to Auto Zone twice to get the Oil Filter and the second time I just had the guy cross reference my old filter. I looked in the owners manual book which said I needed 4.5 quarts of oil for a V6. However my old speed lube statements said they put 6quarts of oil...so I'm immediately jumped to the conclusion they overcharged me because I mechanically illiterate. As it turned out they were right I needed 6 quarts.

Regardless of the time spent on rookie mistakes, it's done and the Chevy Silverado is running great for at least then next 3000 miles. This cost me me a whopping total of $36 dollars. This includes replacing the engine air filter which was $12 alone.

Speaking of air filters here is a Public Service Announcement. During this process, I also learned my truck consists of what the manufacturer calls a "Cabin Air Filter". I've never replaced this yet it's recommended to be changed every 12K miles and I'm at 150K miles...oops. Well I found it, and leaves fell from the filter that was originally white but was now charcoal gray. So now I have clean cabin air also. "Cabin"(chuckle). I'm totally going to mention to the next passenger in my vehicle that in the event of a loss of "Cabin" pressure, do not stick your head by the vent and this will be only hilarious to me. But back to the PSA, check if you have a Cabin Air Filter. This may need to be changed and can help with removing allergins and other airborn particlulates. Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

And the beat goes on…

Currently I’m taking two evening classes at SIUE. My Tuesday class is a Business Ethics class which is interesting considering it is ethics…and business. The teacher had given us an option earlier in the semester for extra credit in a group setting for his research project. I along with two girls, who are probably 20 years old went in after class and began filling out a profile form. Most of the questions were general. Name, age, sex, race, education, and then it came to work experience. It asked how many years of work experience did we have. I’m 29 and I started part time working when I was 16 so most educated people would say 13. However I didn’t want to believe that I was in fact getting older and had 13 years of working experience. That means they were 7 when I started working.

So I said to the girls knowing fully their response but I hoping they wouldn’t “Are you including your part time working experience.” Both of them simultaneously said “Yea”. One of them kind of giggled and said she wouldn’t have any experience if part time wasn’t included.

Ouch….ok I get it 30 is around the corner, thanks for the reminder. We did the extra credit and additionally the teacher paid us! It was $17 but I felt bad taking it because I was more interested in the extra credit and told the teacher so. His response was that money is allocated for this research project and wrote off already so I should just take the money and buy some beers for my buddies. The girls had their money tightly sealed in their purse’s by now and I thought well that will be long time off. I guess this goes into Allies fund.
As we walked out each of them said they didn’t feel bad at all and that they desperately needed the money because of this, that, and the other. Live it up ladies…because the beat goes on.