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Archive for category Family

A Fine Flood Weekend

Jun 15

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | 1 Comment

This weekend we had some very heavy rain.  While we were running around town, we passed over a bridge on K-10 and saw that the creek below had completely overflowed its banks.  We decided to make a little detour and stop in at the Streamway Trails park near Northwood Trails, the neighborhood we used to live in, since the creek passes through there.  We suspected it would be high, but what we saw was pretty amazing!

The kids had fun stomping around some of the flooded trails, so we spent about a half-hour there just looking around and playing.  Katherine wanted to stay and play on the playground, but it was completely saturated so we decided to pass on that.

We also got some movies off Robin’s new jeejah, which functions as a pretty good speelycaptor.  (OK, I’ll quit with the Anathem references…)  I’ve uploaded them and linked them below.

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Baby Monkey

Jun 14

Posted by Robin Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

Jonathan only moved from belly crawling to hands-and-knees crawling about two weeks ago and now he is pulling up to a full stand on furniture and climbing full flights of stairs.  We’re going to need some more baby gates! I’ll need to look back and see how that compares to Thomas & Katherine.

There is at least one thing special about Jonathan and that is his magical ability to spit out medicine no matter how I contrive to give it to him.  First we tried moving him to lay on his back so the medicine would immediately flow to the back of his mouth.  No dice!  He blocked it with his tongue and pushed it right back out.  Then we tried sliding it in just a little at a time thinking it would be harder for him to catch and push back with smaller amounts.  He could sometimes still make a direct spit and if he couldn’t he would let the meds roll around in the back of his mouth until it mixed with enough saliva to give him a spitable quantity.  We tried adding sugar water to make it more palatable.  Then, at the recommendation of our pediatrician’s office, we tried mixing it with chocolate syrup.  But by the time we got around to making it taste better he was already firmly attached to his no-medicine policy.

Jonathan wants to control his destiny at all turns.  He even feels strongly about being able to voice his opinion.  Thomas used to slump into a relaxed stupor the second the binky made contact with his mouth.  Jonathan likes the binky on his own terms when he is already happy but views it as a gag-order when he is crying.  If he is upset, he wants you to know it and is not interested in being pacified by a pacifier.  He has two approaches for dealing with an unwanted binky.  First he came up with a move Thomas calls the “power spit”.  Little J uses his tongue to shoot for distance.  Most recently, as he has gained more motor control, he pulls it from his mouth and spikes it on the floor.  He really slams it down as though he needed to emphasize his point.  Fortunately he is a pretty sweet tempered little man so hearing his opinions is usually pretty pleasant.

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Katherine the Chef

Jun 10

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family, Humor | No Comments

Katherine has been very interested in grocery shopping and cooking lately.  Many times she will suggest a trip to the grocery store to Robin, where she insists on helping to load and unload the cart, and gets upset if the trip is too quick.

If she can’t go to the actual store, she will often pretend-shop at home.  She gets food from the pantry and refrigerator, loads it up in her toy shopping cart, and pushes it around the kitchen.  When she’s done with that, she gets plastic shopping bags from the pantry and bags the groceries, leaving them arrayed on the floor for us to gather up.  We have not yet been able to get her interested in the process of unloading the groceries and putting them back in their proper places, unfortunately.

But recently that has not been enough to fully satisfy her.  We came downstairs after doing some cleaning to find that in a remarkably short time, Katherine had gotten out a bowl, a spoon, soy milk, oil, eggs, hot chocolate powder, and Folgers instant coffee crystals, and had mixed them all together in what can only have been an attempt to make brownies.  In what may have been a tactical error, we praised her for the attempt because we thought it was incredibly cute.  So the next day she followed up with an even grander concoction of graham cracker crumbs, a full container of maple syrup, about two dozen whole strawberries, and milk.  We think the intended end product was strawberry shortcake.

She also had a can of blueberries from a blueberry muffin mix and had gotten the can opener out and set it next to it, which is pretty amazing since we open cans about maybe four times a year.  She’s obviously more perceptive and holds more in her memory than we sometimes give her credit for!

That attempt wasn’t praised.

Since then we haven’t had any more solo cooking exploits, although Robin has done a lot of cooking with her to keep her satisfied.  I’m just glad that she didn’t try to flambé anything.

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Owie Ears

Jun 8

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

Sorry, I’m not prepared for a substantive post today.  Jonathan had gotten over his ear infection but it looks like it recurred, at least in one ear.  He was very very fussy yesterday and had a terrible night’s sleep.  The good news is that we have a new prescription — hopefully he’ll like the taste better — and with any luck we’ll get him back to his happy self very soon.

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Duct Cleaning — A Cautionary Tale

Jun 4

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | 1 Comment

Unless you like trying to get your duct cleaning company to pay for a blown furnace circuit board, make sure you keep your condensate line clear and check it often after you get your ducts cleaned.

We had our ducts cleaned at the end of April, which they do by cutting holes in the ducts near the plenum chamber and running a vacuum to pull everything from the vents back to those access ports.  What they are supposed to do is to put an inflatable pillow behind the access port so dust and debris doesn’t get pulled back into the chamber and settle on the A-coil.

Well, these guys didn’t do that.  We had about a month of cool weather following the cleaning where we didn’t need to run the air conditioner, so it just sat there until the first hot day.  In the morning, the air was blowing nice and cold, but by afternoon it was just blowing warm air through the ducts.  When I got a service technician in, he noticed a thick slurry of dust and debris plugging the condensate line.  The water had overflowed and dripped throughout the furnace, shorting out the control board and leaving a nice big black scorch mark.

It was a $600 repair, and the duct cleaning itself was around $650.  I’m currently working with the duct cleaning company to get reimbursed for the repair — I don’t think they’re going to see much profit out of this particular job.

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Thomas’s Birthday Party

Jun 2

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

Two weekends ago we had Thomas’s ninth birthday party.  We recently joined the new Lifetime Fitness here in town, and they have a party package, so we decided to give them a shot.  Although the kids had fun, I’m not sure I’d do this again.  We got the use of an aerobics room to eat pizza and cake, which was fun — the kids ran around and played in the big open spaces and had a good time.  After that they all went out to the pool.

That’s a story in itself:  when Robin had set up the party originally, they had said that the outdoor pool would be open the weekend of the 29th.  The party was the weekend of the 22nd.  So you’d assume we’d be in the indoor pool.  When we got there, everyone was outside and we were informed that there was no choice; the party would have to be outside.  They did scrounge up some sunscreen, since no one had brought any.  Unfortunately, it was not waterproof or water-resistant, so we ended up having to go get our own from the car.

I supervised Katherine most of the time while the other kids all swam around in groups and played.  We had a bit of an issue when we couldn’t remember how many of Thomas’s school friends actually showed up for the party; Robin thought there had been only four, and I only remembered three.  We could only locate three in the pool.  To resolve the issue, we wanted to get the release forms from the party, but the three staff kids (and I do mean kids; they had to be just 15 or 16 years old) had not been thorough about getting the forms signed, so that wasn’t conclusive.  They also hadn’t been paying much attention during the party, being much more concerned with flirting and talking amongst themselves.  Anything we wanted to have done we had to push them into doing, and they spent no time actually playing with or leading activities for the kids despite the fact that their presence was required for the duration of the party.

We left with a pretty negative impression of the Lifetime Fitness party setup; I think next year we’ll go back to the Matt Ross community center or try another set of activities.

On the plus side — as I said, all the kids had fun and we got some great pictures.  Here they are!

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(Short) Hiatus

May 28

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

Sorry for the lack of updates this week.  We’re leaving town for Memorial Day, so I probably won’t post again until next Wednesday.  I actually have quite a lot to report, including Thomas’ birthday to our air conditioner woes and Katherine’s adventures in “cooking”, but I need to get the pictures downloaded first, and get my life back under control.

Have a good weekend!

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Racquetball Results

May 24

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

The Corporate Challenge racquetball tournament was fun, but went down pretty much as I expected.  I had a great first match, defeating my opponent 15-2, 15-5 and pretty much controlling the pace of the play.

The second match, against the doubles champion I mentioned below, didn’t go so well.  He annihilated me in the first game 15-0 with a level of power and accuracy I’ve simply never faced before.  He hit one backhand passing shot that I could theoretically have gotten to, but by the time I could get my racquet around on it the ball was already past me.  I’ve never faced someone who could shoot faster than I could react — reaction time is kind of my thing in racquetball.  Not against this guy.

I don’t know if it was fatigue or charity — probably a little of both — but I did manage to score 5 points against him in our second game.  I suspect that if he had gone full out he’d have held me scoreless in both games — he was that good.

I had my folks down for the weekend as it was Thomas’s birthday, so my folks and Robin and Thomas got to watch me play.  Thomas was pretty pumped afterwards and wanted to hit the ball around some, so we did.  He’s got good natural talent; it didn’t take long for him to be hitting the ball pretty reliably with the racquet.  We’ll have to see about getting him some lessons at some point.

Anyway, it was fun and very educational.  Mainly what I learned is that I need to step up my playing a lot if I want to get to a point where I can even make this guy break a sweat against me.  Maybe when I get 100% confident in my knee again I’ll try to sign up for another league.

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Qualified!

May 19

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | 2 Comments

I won my match against Stan, so I will be competing in the Corporate Challenge racquetball tournament for the first time in at least 3 years.  I’m looking forward to it, despite the fact that the opponent I’ll face in the second round (if I get that far) is a former national doubles champion and plays singles at the nationally-competitive level as well.

So unless he shows up injured, or drunk, or (hopefully) both, or he’s been fired or is out of town the day of the tournament, I’m not likely to last beyond the second round.  But I am looking forward to playing against someone at that level of skill.  It should be very educational!  Probably humbling, too, but certainly educational!

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Who Moved Robin’s Cheese?

May 17

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Family, Humor | 3 Comments

The upgrade to Windows 7 has been mostly straightforward, but while getting rained on at Thomas’s soccer game on Saturday I got a text message from Robin:

I HATE THIS NEW OPERATING SYSTEM!

It seems that in the process of installing Windows 7 and reinstalling iTunes that her music files got moved around to various unintuitive locations.  While I feel that iTunes and, frankly, myself deserve as big a share of the ire as Windows 7, it was Windows’s overintelligent search algorithm that actually drove Robin off the edge.

She was trying to set up a Gmail account for Thomas, not realizing that he was too young to qualify.  After attempting and failing to set up the account, she found herself locked out of several pieces of Google functionality, so she thought Google had dumped a cookie on our machine that was blocking functionality.  She tried to search for “cookie” on the Start Menu search field, and although it searched within Outlook for every cookie recipe email we’d ever received, and gave her an option to clear all cookies, it didn’t actually show her any individual cookies.  It took me about 5 minutes of trolling through 3rd level menus in IE8 to finally locate them and confirm that there wasn’t a rogue cookie.

I’m firmly of the opinion that Windows 7 is the best O/S Microsoft has come out with, and I think it’s great, but I think I’ve got some work to do yet to clean up and relocate some files before Robin gets truly comfortable with it.

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