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So… I think that Katie loves me. This past summer she made me an embroidered note expressing her love for me. Throughout the past three years she has always done randomly cute things and been insanely supportive of me. She’s been willing to move out east and leave her family in Arizona to help us work towards saving up to buy a house, and many other countless things I won’t list to save on time.

The one thing I will bother to list is that she gets to show me just how much she loves me for the next little while before life gets back to normal. For you see Katie is:

This means that for the next 9+ months she’ll need to remember just how much she loves me to off-set her remembering that I caused the morning sickness, food cravings, insanely heightened sense of smell (like seriously - super hero levels!), and random crying (Katie just doesn’t cry except when she’s pregnant).

We didn’t exactly expect it to happen in our first month of trying, so it kind of appears that Paisley is going to have a little brother or sister with a birthday almost the same time as hers (my iPhone apps predict a due date of 24 Sep. 2010 and Paisley’s birthdate was 25 Sep. 2007). Yay for close siblings!

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Katie left for Springfield, MO yesterday to go visit her friends at Red Velvet Art. I hope she comes back with lots of pictures!!! She ended up traveling on my favorite kind of planes (the small ones!):

Here’s a snapshot from FlightTrack when she was flying to her connection in Ohio:

Paisley didn’t cry the whole way home from the airport like she did when I left, but I think it helped that we walked Katie to security and had a chance to go back and forth a lot of times on the walking escalators (for lack of knowing what to actually call them). Distractions are a life saver with kids I swear. It has helped a lot this trip that Paisley already knows that “on a plane” means we’ll be back eventually. I’m sure Katie went through much more difficulty with Paisley than I did - so far she’s been pretty much normal for me (phew).

After dropping Katie off at the airport I started working on my weekend project: cleaning the house as much as possible. Unfortunately I was only able to get a few projects in before my body just shut down. Pretty sure I’ve got a little flu/cold going on this weekend :(

I was able to take Paisley out for dinner last night. We went to Hana Japanese Cuisine (one of my favorite local sushi shops). Paisley ate almost all of her miso soup (I was SO proud of her!):

And I devoured my sushi (as well as my seafood fried rice):

I woke up insanely exhausted and pretty much done nothing all day today. It took all my energy just to get outside so Paisley could play in the snow for her first time (and I’ll have you know that I _love_ snow - my Burton tattoo on my foot serves as proof). I don’t even think I’d go snowboarding today if I had the opportunity to go for free - I just feel crappy :(

On that note, to keep this short so I can put P down for a nap and probably take one myself, here’s the pictures from Paisley’s first time in the snow :)

And just some photos from throughout the day:

And a few special ones Paisley and I did just for Katie cause we miss her:

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I suck at blogging so I figure a quick blurb of text will be better than nothing.

I’m thankful for (in no particular order):

• Katie and her constant love, support, understanding, forgiveness, and encouragement. Her belief in me and how valuable and special I am is more than I ever thought of myself and has helped make me the confident, cheerful, and kind person I am today.
• Paisley for her smile, laughter, hugs, kisses, pain, crying, and growth. Watching her grow on a daily basis helps me realize how much we take for granted every day and how there is always room to do more, learn more, and be a better person.
• A job that provides a stable income for my family and allows me to grow professionally.
• A boss who cares about his employees and takes the suggestions we have to heart and really listens to our needs.
• Ruby for making my life as a programmer enjoyable.
• Rails for providing the easiest web development framework that just gets it right the first time.
• Friends for being there even when you haven’t talked to them in months.
• Online friends for getting you through the months when you never make time to talk to your old friends. For meeting up to eat sushi when you’re in town. For teaching you new skills, experiences, and helping you realize how important a random stranger can be to anyone.
• Google Reader, Twitter, and social networking in general for distracting me from whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing.
• My iPhone for making it so much easier to get distracted on the go.
• Vacations for forcing me to take a break.
• Impromptu trips for reminding me that family is always more important than that blog, website, side-job, or house project I wanted to work on right then.
• Shopping for making Katie look gorgeous no matter the time of year.
• Eating out for saving me from having to find energy to do dishes.
• Vocelli’s pizza for giving me an easy pre-planned meal (even if they always get it wrong) at least once a week.
• Katie’s baking for satisfying my sweet tooth and helping me keep my tummy she loves ;)
• Computers for providing me a way to make a living without having to be a “real man” (e.g.: cars, hunting, manual labor, hardware, and hammers).
• LOST for being the most amazing television show ever!
• Snowboarding (even just once a season) for reminding me about the beauty of the Earth we live on and giving me that rush that nothing else quite can.
• My savior and constant example, Jesus Christ, for reminding me to turn the other cheek, bite my tongue, forgive others, and be patient.
• Life for helping me to realize that there’s always a reason to keep going even when it seems like there’s no point to it at that specific moment in time.
• Being a girl and being able to express my emotions freely not caring about what others may think of me.
• Portland, OR, Japan, and San Francisco for giving me places I would one day like to live because of their community, beauty, and kind people.

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Katie has had a busy week.  She’s had to deal with a financial roller coaster from a publisher, creating several felt fruit projects, mentally prepare for turning 21, take care of a very emotionally uncertain 17-month old, and discovered that her font was actually published along with her layout.  We also got to take some time and do things together as a family including a fun walk around the neighborhood. Read the rest of this entry »

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Some of you may know that I’m a huge fan of LOST (thanks to Katie).  If you don’t, you do now.  I was sitting here trying to figure out a quick way to blog about the month of December as I know I don’t have time to blog as much as I should and I realized that numbers are pretty much a representation of how this month is for me.  So here comes the explanations:

• 2: The number of years Katie and I have been married (as of December 2, 2008).
• 12: The number of hours I am trying to work on average each day to earn some savings for possible unemployment come January 1, 2009.
• 15: Paisley’s age in months currently.
• 20: Katie’s age in years currently.
• 26: My age in years (as of yesterday).
• 75: The number of lightbulbs we replaced on our Candy Land tree in order to get one of the two missing strands of lights to work again this year.

I’ll take a quick moment to go over some of these in more details.  Read the rest of this entry »

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