We’re not complaining though. Despite those moments, most of the trip made for some great memories and fun times with the kids. Here are some of the highlights:

Caleb Learns to Ski

The “Super-ski” board has been in the family for about 30 years, and I was five years old when I first rode it, so it’s cool to see Caleb enjoy riding it. He rode it over and over and over.

Andrew’s first time to see the beach

Visiting the USS Alabama

We took Caleb to visit the battleship. July is not the best month to visit the ship since most of it isn’t air conditioned, but enough of it was air conditioned that we didn’t pass out. He loved it, and it’s a great way to tell him a little more about the incredible people who sacrificed so much for our freedom.

Now, we really need a vacation :)

You can see a few more of our photos.

It was an amazing program, and much better than any swim lessons we have done. The coaches all swim for their high school or college, and most of them were former Dolphins themselves.

Day one was cold and scary. I watched Caleb stand in position on the other end of the pool from me after nine months of being out of the pool. He was suppose to jump in and swim the length of the pool. I felt a sense of panic and it was like watching him in slow motion. I didn’t take a breath until he was safely on the other side of the pool. It was the first time that Andy or I had not been in the water with him. It felt like a total loss of control for me.

Each day got easier with less and less grabbing onto the coach or the lane divider. It eventually warmed up, although Caleb never once complained about the cold water. He learned how to dive and swim freestyle and backstroke. He started not being able to swim the length of the pool without holding on, and now he can swim back and forth 6 or 7 times without thinking anything of it.

Since we opted for the developmental team this year Caleb did not have to swim meets against the other neighborhoods. He had his first and only meet the other day. He swam three heats. He totally had the concept of taking off as soon as he heard the buzzer, and he was the first one off of the blocks in all three races. Halfway through the first race I started crying. He was swimming like his little life depended on it.

He ended up winning second place in freestyle, and he took two first place ribbons in backstroke and freestyle relay. We were so proud not because he won but they had all improved so much. It really was amazing to watch. He is already talking about moving up to the “real” team next year. Hopefully Caleb can help the Dolphins stay undefeated again next year!

We love to eat out but are looking to save some money by not doing it as much, plus, as you know, an 18 month old in a restaurant is NOT fun.

That’s a good question. I should start the meal talk by saying I am blessed with kids that aren’t the least bit picky. They eat anything, so it makes my life so much easier. I never cook anything separate for them.

I am a big time planner. I work outside the home about 4 mornings a week before Andy goes to work, so I have to be organized. I plan my meals at least a week in advance. I sit down once every week and a half with the calendar, my coupons, and recipe books and plan the next 7-10 days in meals. I make my grocery list at the same time I plan my meals so I know that I have everything I need listed out. I hate having to drag both boys out to get one missing ingredient!

We usually will grab lunch out once a week and dinner out once a week. Other than that I cook. We don’t eat a lot of nice restaurant meals now because Andrew is still a handful eating out.

The cost of living is much more expensive here than what we were use to in Fort Worth so I try to be good about spending money. I usually make two trips to the store in a week. One is a Wal Mart run where I buy everything I need except produce and meat. I buy those things at Publix just because the quality seems so much better.

I save quick meals for days we are busy and more involved meals for slower days. That is why I use the calendar when I plan our meals. I also never leave town without having my meals planned out for the week we get back and the grocery list ready for when I get home. I am very Type A personality if you can’t tell.

So her it is in action. This is what I have listed on my magnetic refrigerator pad for this week:

Sun 6/14 – steaks, baked potatoes, salad
Mon – Quiche, blueberry muffins, and fruit salad
Tue – chicken pot pie, salad
Wed – hotdogs, corn on cob, carrots, watermelon
Thur – tacos, mexican rice, chips and salsa, fruit salad (both boys love Mexican food! We so miss getting good Mexican food like we had in Texas!)
Fri – pancakes, bacon, cantaloupe
Sat – chicken spaghetti, crescent rolls, green beans

Sun 6/21- spaghetti soup, garlic bread, salad
Mon – PaPa John’s pizza, salad
Tue – chicken and rice, peas, cornbread
Wed – quesadillas, chips and salsa, watermelon
Thur – corkscrew chicken ceasar salad
Fri – roast, potatoes, and carrots, cornbread
Sat – waffles and sausage, fruit salad
Sun – Ravioli with meat sauce, garlic bread
Mon – maple mustard pork chops, sweet potatoes, corn on cob
Tue – cheddar macaroni beef casserole, carrots, and fruit salad
Wed – scrambled eggs, biscuits, cheese grits, and bacon (breakfast for dinner is a once a week thing for us)

I know this seems over the top, but it works for me. I save my lists so that if I have a hard time thinking of what to make I can look back and get inspired.

I do love the Pioneer woman’s website but more for special occasion meals. Some can be time consuming. My mom was a great cook so I use all of her recipes, and I google all kinds of things that I want a recipe for. I’ve put a few links to some of our staple meals.

Good luck with your meal planning!

Tiffany

PS Here are some of our favorite recipes from the Pioneer Woman:

• Maple Mustard Glazed Pork Chops
• Monday Night Stir Fry
• Perfect Pancakes
• Chicken Spaghetti

Breakfast

Breakfast on the deck is often a good calming way to start the day, watching birds, bunnies, and squirrels. This morning’s menu: milk, oatmeal, blueberry muffin, and banana.

First Tantrum of the Day

Tantrums are a normal part of everyday life with a toddler. It’s just the way it is.

Soothed by his blanket

Andrew’s blanket is like a fifth member of our family.

Wrestlemania

If Andrew could talk he’d likely say, “”You want piece of me, Dada. I take you down to Chinatown.”

Dad off to work

It’s a daily ritual that Andrew waves goodbye to me as I drive off to work. I suppose starting next month, he’ll have to wave goodbye as I descend the basement stairs.

At the Pool During Caleb’s Swim Team

Crackers help him cope with not being allowed in the pool. I think he’s pondering whether or not he could throw this cracker at the lifeguard and get away with it.

Working at the Car Wash

Andrew “assists” in cleaning the car. He also makes a really good target for Caleb (aka “the Hoser”).

Water. water. and more water

A sprinkler a day keeps the insanity at bay

Andrew’s Very First Popsicle

It was love at first lick.

Nap time

Rest time for Mommy? Hardly! Dishes to clean. Laundry to fold. Dinner prep to begin. But, at least she can do it without a kid hanging on her leg.

Lunch
On the menu: mac and cheese, sweet potatoes, nectarines, and milk

Indoor play

Quick break for hug with mommy

Managing the Stairs

One of many times in a day that he slithers down our stairs. We have a split level house with three sets of stairs, so he’s mastered this technique.

Car Rides

One of his least favorite activities

At the Library

A toddler in a library can be like a bull in a china shop. Don’t get him within arms reach of a shelf of books or they’re all coming down.

Dad’s Home

And time for Jedi Knight training with our light sabres.

And Hand to Hand Combat Training

As you can see, a lot of wrestling goes on at our house.

And Yet More Wrestling

Dinner Time

On the menu: maple mustard pork chops, pasta salad, corn on the cob, sweet potatoes, and watermelon.

Still Dinner Time

How sweet, he’s offering to share his cookie. I respectfully decline.

Teeth Brushing

Bedtime

And that’s the show. Good night!

The last eighteen months have flown by, and it’s so fun to see him growing and learning and becoming his own person!

And for that reason, I can no longer retain them as a freelance client…because they’ve asked me to join them full-time. So that’s my announcement. At the first of July, I’m joining the crew at LifeChurch.tv with the official job title of—I’m not kidding—Digerati Jedi, which is always a good title when your last name is Knight. That Terry Storch is very persuasive!

Though this decision may come across as an easy one, it was anything but easy. My time at Right From The Heart is coming to an end in a couple of weeks, and it will be hard not getting to see Jim, Lyn, Barry, Fran, and Mary on a daily basis. With this new job, I’m going to be working from home instead of moving to Oklahoma where LifeChurch.tv is based. So, I’ve warned my RFTH family to beware because I’ll be popping in with my two loud boys when they least expect it.

I’m really excited about this opportunity. Please pray that this work-at-home experience works out well.

Caleb with our former pastor in August 2003. Look out Brother Al!

Then somewhere along the line I realized that lots of people have (or have had) little babies, and everybody’s baby does funny things, and everybody thinks their baby is the smartest and cutest.

Then for some reason, people started reading my blog…people I didn’t even know…people who had never met me or my children.

Then I read that to have a good blog you had to write about stuff your audience wants to hear about. Since I’m a web professional, and a big chunk of my audience seems to be web designers and developers, then I thought that maybe I should write about that. I was told that this would establish me as an expert in my field and bring in more career opportunities. So, I wrote a few articles here and there about web design and recent projects I’d been working on.

Then I didn’t feel like writing. I love my work, but after doing this kind of thing all day and even at night on freelance projects, the last thing I wanted to do was to spend more time writing about it. Consequently, today I’ve almost stopped blogging.

Then Twitter came along. I’ve heard others talk about how Twitter killed the blog. Perhaps there is some truth to that. The stories I used to expand into a couple paragraphs for a quick post are now crammed into 140 characters or less. So, I blog less and Twitter more.

Then when you go a while without blogging, you feel like the next post you do has to be something really, really good. So I’d have an idea of something to write about, but I usually felt that it wasn’t big enough or original enough.

Then, finally, I realized that this is not everyone else’s web site. It is mine. And I want more articles about funny stuff my kids do. Not so much for you, though I hope you don’t unsubscribe, but for us. Sometimes I go back through the archives of stories we wrote about Caleb, and just smile and laugh. I don’t care if anyone else ever reads it. It’s a way for me to remember the little things…

...the little things that I don’t remember about Andrew. He’s almost a year and a half now, and I have so little memory of the funny little things he does all the time. The reason is because I stopped writing about it. Oh, I may have briefly Twittered stuff here and there, but it’s not easy wading way back in time through your Twitter archives to find a post you wrote about your baby’s birth. And with Twitter, I don’t get the rich details that allow me enter into that memory and relive it.

I’ll still write occasional web related articles, but Tiffany and I also want to go back and blog more about our family life, the way we used to. I hope you’ll understand and want to keep reading what we write, but if not, that’s cool too. I understand. Personally, most of my blog subscriptions are about web design. I don’t subscribe to any other mommy/daddy blogs myself. That’s because my kids are the cutest, smartest, and funniest :)

Caleb

Andrew

With that in mind, LifeChurch.tv created YouVersion a few years ago, and I have been blessed to be a part of this project almost from the start. Fast forward to now, the team recently released YouVersion 2.0. Once again, I’m proud to have played a role in its release.

In case you don’t know, YouVersion is an online Bible site that allows readers to keep a personal journal or share public content with other users of YouVersion. Not only is it a great tool for Bible Study, YouVersion facilitates the worldwide Church community.

I wanted to share a couple of parts of the project that I worked on and know about.

The Early Wireframes

With most sites, the final design that you see is very different than the designers first rough drafts. I assisted with some of these initial design comps. This was before Chris Merritt was also pulled in to really make it come together and shine!

The YouVersion Blog

One piece of the site that I labored over was the site’s blog. The main idea was to keep it clean and focused. The purpose of the blog is to announce new features and offer ideas on how to best use the site. With that in mind, we stripped away the ability to leave comments. We also didn’t see a need for complex archiving. Simplicity was the goal with the YouVersion Blog:

The Mobile YouVersion Site

If you’re carrying an iPhone or Blackberry in your pocket or purse, you can disregard this one, because you should be using the YouVersion iPhone app that’s simply entitled “Bible” or the YouVersion Blackberry app. For the rest of us, if want to access the Bible from our mobile phone, then this version is for you. LifeChurch.tv asked me to redesign the basic mobile site. It was fun to do. This stripped down version is also served up to visitors using older versions of Windows Internet Explorer (ver. 6.0 and below). Simply go to m.youversion.com, and you’ll see this:

I let Caleb plan the day.He wanted to spend the morning at the Bass Pro Shop and the afternoon was for ice skating. Oh the things you do for your children.

For almost two hours I pretended to enjoy the Bass Pro Shop. Caleb sat in every boat and on every 4 wheeler. We rode the glass elevator over and over and studied how they worked. Caleb tried to convince me that he needed a paint gun, but I compromised with a water gun. During check out the man behind me was holding a pink camouflage shirt and Pro shop mug for a Mother’s Day gift for his wife. He’s probably still in the doghouse today. What was he thinking? I’m surprised he didn’t get some beef jerky to go with it.

After the Bass Pro Shop I talked Caleb into lunch at Somer’s Place, my favorite restaurant in Montgomery, so I could fill up on crab claws—without a doubt, my favorite food.

Then we went ice skating at the mall. Caleb has always wanted to ice skate. He really wanted to see the Zamboni in action, so I called the rink the week before to find out the Zamboni schedule. It usually only runs when the mall is closed, but the man offered to run it just for Caleb prior to our skating session. He even let Caleb sit on it!

I knew how ice skating was going to go. Caleb is a perfectionist. He gets so mad if he isn’t good at something the first time he tries it. I kept telling him that no one is good at ice skating the first time they do it. He didn’t believe me. He thought he could do it.

Meanwhile after I got my skates on I had a panic attack. I’m almost six feet tall before putting on my skates, and it looked like a long way to the ground if I fell. You know you are getting old when you start worrying about breaking a bone when you fall.

Here’s how it went:

Lap 1 took 15 minutes to get around the the rink (and no it isn’t a big rink). Caleb fell 4 times. He had a meltdown half way around the rink that involved screaming, “I am totally never doing this again”.

Lap 2 took 10 minutes with only two falls.

Lap 3 took 5 minutes with no falls, but he did still have a death grip on the railing. He did complain about my not falling down. It wasn’t a good idea to see the Zamboni before we skated since the ice was so wet. Caleb was wet from the waist down.

Then he was done. We paid twenty dollars to go around three times, but I didn’t mind. I just wanted off of the skates. Caleb still says he’ll never skate again.

Despite the ice skating he still enjoyed the day. Caleb is at such a great age to hang out with, and he is so proud to be out alone with mom. It’ll break my heart when he is too cool to be seen out on a date with me!

I got to thinking about the importance of my boys having their mom in their life. Caleb and Andrew don’t just need their mom, their life depends on her. Seriously! On more than one occasion, I’ve come to this conclusion. She keeps up with the medicines, pays the bills, makes sure our clothes are clean, and prepares the meals. There’s no way I could keep up with all those details. We’d be dead… or nearly so.

In fact, we’d all be in big trouble without our moms!

When he was interested in airplanes, we took him to an airshow. When he started asking question about where the stuff in the toilet went, we visited the waste-water treatment facility For a while he was on this kick about meat-eating plants so we attempted to grow a venus flytrap and pitcher plant habitat in our living room. Once put a jar of caterpillars on our kitchen counter and watched them spin cocoons and break out into butterflies. We’ve also taken tours of the “Money Factory”, the Hyundai manufacturing plant, a dairy farm, a peach farm, and the Mayfield dairy processing plant.

When he’s on something we know we may have a dozen library books on that topic at any one time. I mean just tonight at bedtime, I read him a kids book at bedtime about how the study of bionics is being applied to artificial limbs. Very fascinating. Who knew they had kids’ books about this stuff. I’m learning right along with him.

Most of their best learning takes place miles away from the books and classroom. For example, for the past several weeks workers have been repaving a road we travel on every day. These big asphalt paving machines are to him what caffeine is to me. So yesterday (Sunday afternoon), we happened to see where they were parking these massive machines, so we thought, well…why not?

We never set out to do weird things with our kids. It just sort of happened. His little mind is all over the place. Why just today, he asked Tiffany, “Are you ever afraid we’re going to run out of gas?” Tiffany responded that she wasn’t afraid because the fuel light will come on if we ever get low. Caleb said, “No I mean our country. Are you afraid our country will run out of gas?” That led him to talking about solar and wind powered cars. So maybe our next trip will be to a natural gas platform out in the gulf…oh wouldn’t we all love that!