Well, everyone, it’s the first time I have posted on here for a very long time — I had been leaving the blogging duties to Mr. Ben.  Tonight, though, I HAD to post because Abby hit a major milestone last night:  she slept through the night!!!  She went to sleep around 9:30 last night.  She woke up at 5:15 and was a very hungry girl!   Now, if only Ben and I had gone to sleep when Abby had gone to sleep, we would have been really happy!  Our little baby is getting so big so fast…

P.S.  Also, I am writing this post from my brand new MacBook Pro.  Happy Birthday to me – thanks Hubby, Abby, Ted, Julie, and Colin!!!!

Our little girl is getting so good at holding her head up! Kirsten caught these pictures of Abigail with her Blackberry this morning while Abby was having tummy time! At least she is tolerating this position now almost to the point of contentment. She used to shriek if you left her on her tummy.

Her neck is getting very strong! When you hold her up against you with her head on your shoulder, it doesn’t stay there for long, she picks it up and loves to look around!

Just a quick preview of more photos to come. We had a great weekend in the north country – North Dakota. We visited Kirsten’s grandparents, aunt and uncle, and some cousins over the holiday weekend. It was Abigail’s first big car trip and she was a champ, sleeping all but around forty five minutes of the almost ten hour car ride on the way up and all but around two hours on the way home.

Another big development this weekend? Abigail is starting to smile up at us as we interact with her! This photo was taken while we were outside shooting off a few fireworks in the backyard. She has her sun hat on for protection because the weather in North Dakota was gorgeous for us the entire weekend.

More pictures and fun to come from the weekend, so stay tuned!

Last week we had our carpets professionally cleaned in our living room and we had all our furniture moved out of the area. It was the perfect time for me to get access to that wall, take the TV down (first time since it was mounted, a bit scary, not going to lie), and get the outlet installed. Thanks to my handy dandy Black & Decker’s Complete Guide to Home Wiring I was able to accomplish the task.

I’ve never done any electrical work by myself in the past. I was a little nervous, but everything went smoothly and both the original outlet that I branched off of and the new outlet behind the TV worked great afterwards. Here I am pig-tailing some wires together.

A little crooked, I know, but it just needs a small adjustment and it will be level and ready to go. The other hole in the wall is an access to conduit that runs down the wall and has a similar hole by the baseboard. The builder had put this in and it’s for running HDMI cable, CAT6 Ethernet, etc. I just don’t have the right face plate for it yet.

Having a blackberry with a *decent* camera on it is a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because I find that I have a small device with me almost at all times that I can use to take photos and upload them from wherever I’m at. It’s a curse because sometimes I fall back on it and don’t want to carry my DSLR or my point and shoot camera with me.

I leave you for the long weekend with these two photos. The first is of Abigail’s first smile in response to interaction with someone! Lucky Uncle Andrew! The second is of Abby napping with me a week ago or so. Such a precious moment that I got to spend just cuddling with her, feeling her breathe, sigh in her sleep, and wiggle around!

I hope that everyone has a great fourth of July weekend!

VS.

Kirsten went to the University of Northern Iowa for her undergraduate schooling. I went to The University of Iowa. Thankfully, Kirsten also went to Iowa for law school, so we’re not often actually a house divided.

Kirsten found these items at a local boutique the other day and couldn’t resist. The UNI onesie, though perhaps hard to tell in the picture, has rhinestones all over it. The Iowa burp cloth is, well, just awesome. Go Panthers and Go Hawkeyes!

What a beautiful site, my three girls! In the past when I would day dream about my future family, it didn’t really occur to me that I’d be in a household full of girls! I grew up with my dad, my brother, and my mom. My mom affectionately referred to it as “the frat house.” Now that I have started a family of my own, and it happens to be all women (albeit, ones a dog, but still), my mom likes to tell me that I’m getting poetic justice for her years of torment.

Ah well, if this is what I get for my time in the “frat house,” then I’m A OK with it!

So, after going on under these conditions for about a week, I decided finally that I should just run some Ethernet cable from the basement internet connection, through the floor, and up to the entertainment center area of our living room. To set the stage a little bit here, I had been planning a project like this for over a year, but I’d just not ever gotten around to it. No more procrastination, it was time to do something!

I had the perfect opportunity on Saturday, when Kirsten and Abigail went to a shower for our wonderful friends and I was stuck home alone with Mattie:

I removed the baseboard from the wall behind our entertainment center using a putty knife, flathead screw driver, paint scraper, and a 12oz claw  hammer. Then I was able to drill through the floor underneath the drywall but behind the baseboard with a long wood boring bit. I would say those two steps were the “scary” part. Once they were done, the rest was slowing going, but not hard. Simply running four CAT6 Ethernet cables from my bulk supply down through the hole in the floor, into the basement, along the floor joists and into the soon-to-be-network closet. Here are some pictures:

Here you can see the hole I’ve drilled through the floor down into the basement, along with one CAT6 cable running down through the void.

Here are the four cables after I was done running them all through the floor. Notice the conspicuous absence of a baseboard.

This shot is from the basement and is of the four cables tacked to the wooden flooring for some semblance of organization.

Here are all four cables at the entertainment center end (notice the baseboard back in place). They are all terminated in CAT6 punch down jacks. The four jacks will pop into a “keystone” wall plate that I have on order, but isn’t quite here yet.

And here is the shot of the tools I used to get the job done. Drill, wood boring bit, fish tape, several sets of pliers of various types, screw drivers, hammer, putty knife, RJ-45 crimping tool, punch down tool, flash light, and utility knife, to name a few (and not in any order, sorry).

If you’d like to see more pictures of the project, you can find them in our Flickr account. More pictures coming soon too after the wall plate is in, the network patch panel for down stairs, etc.

This comes a few days late, but it’s close enough. Abigail Joy has reached (and now passed) the 1 month old mark. It’s hard to believe that Kirsten and I have known her for that long. It simultaneously feels like a very short month and a very long month. At the time this picture was taken, Abby weighed 9.5lbs and was about 20 inches long. We’re very happy that she is growing and is healthy (even if she wasn’t happy at us for taking this picture of her).

Abigail, we love you, and we can’t remember what life was like before we knew you!

I couldn’t resist posting these two photos I snapped this past week with my Blackberry’s camera. They were both in relatively low-light situations, so I’m surprised that they turned out at all, a testament to the camera on the Blackberry, I guess.

In the first, Abby spits out her pacifier to have dad retrieve it again. What a fun game! In the second, she is smiling in her sleep. I know they aren’t really smiling on purpose at this age yet, but Kirsten and I like to think they are!

Have a great weekend everyone!