Hello? Hello.

Yes, I know. I've been neglecting things around here for a long while. I never even posted pictures from Thanksgiving, and now New Years is just around the corner. But I have a bunch of good excuses, I swear. First of all, we moved. Let me rephrase that, we moved quite a bit of stuff. We still have several car loads to schlep from the old house, including my main computer which houses my pictures, my music, etc. Not only that, we closed on the house, my parents visited and helped move, and we spent 5-6 days at my in-laws' house. We spent several days with no internet whatsoever.

So... 2011 is ending, and boy what a year. My second son was born. My wife and I turned 30. We purchased and moved into a single family home. I deliberately took a six month leave of absence from making/producing/recording music, and my time is almost up on that (January 1). I am getting the itch to make some music!

I haven't been taking enough pictures, so I don't have very much to share. Hopefully I can get to my backlog of pictures soon enough. Maybe when we get this place in a little better state, I can record a video tour of the house and post it on here. We are now trying to watch tv via a good old fashioned tv antenna and I am liking it so far. I ordered the leaf plus amplified indoor antenna today. I've honestly never seen such a well-reviewed product. The $40 antenna that I have now can pick up all the channels that I need, but I have to adjust it (move it, spin it, fiddle with the antennas) to pick up different channels, and the leaf antenna is supposed to eliminate the need for that. For $80 and no cable bill for life, it's certainly worth a try.

In our 5-6 day stay at my in-laws' house, Stephen and Henry got to spend some time with their cousin Finn. Everything went very well with Stephen and Finn. They were pretty funny running around like maniacs. We all went to a big playground in a park less than ten minutes away. It was a nice, big playground and Stephen absolutely loved it. He went down one of the biggest slides I've ever seen about 50 times the first day we were there.

Hopefully I can get back into the swing of things pretty soon, but I'm not making any promises. I hope your Christmas was as good as ours.

Henry finally got a tooth--actually three of them. He now eats two tubs of baby food and about 6 Mum Mum crackers a day. So, now that his teeth came busting through, he's eating more, and he's nine months old (tomorrow), wouldn't you think he might be sleeping better? No. But that's okay, he's generally pretty happy these days. We'll take what we can get. He's just about eliminated "spitting up" from his repertoire, which is very nice for the laundry situation.

Stephen's development seems to take one step forward and two steps back. His verbalization of letters and words is worse than it was a month ago for sure. Somewhere along the line, every letter became pronounced like the letter T and the word "me" is now pronounced "be." We call Stephen the fun police nowadays, because he follows Henry around and takes away all of his toys, pulls him away from his activity table, or says "no" (which sounds like doh or dow) to everything he tries to do. It's fairly annoying, but it's not mean-spirited or anything and we should be thankful Stephen is such a good and loving big brother.

We packed up the dogs and a lot of stuff and spent two nights at the Youngs' for Thanksgiving. The first night, both boys slept 11 consecutive hours without making a peep. The next night, Henry was up for maybe 5 or 7 hours when he should have been sleeping. Fortunately he did that on a Thursday night of a four-day weekend, so Jaime had days to recover from that nightmare before returning to to work. Things went very well besides that, though. Good food. Stephen helped make ice cream. I have a couple pictures from Thanksgiving that I need to post, but with packing and doing Christmas stuff and making my annual calendar, I'm a bit behind.

Stephen helped churn some ice cream with us. Now he gets to reap the rewards...