Father in Training

Princess Lilly Saves the Dragon

2012-10-26T11:48:00.001-07:00

Once there was a kind princess named Lilly, and she was going to marry a prince. But the prince was trapped in a big building. The princess had a friend dragon, whose wings could make the wind shake the trees and bushes. She flew with her dragon up to the top of the building to where the prince was trapped. When Princess Lilly arrived inside the building she was attacked by a ghost. The dragon blew his fire breath at the ghost and scared him away. The prince cried, "Oh no! A dragon!" The dragon said, "Don't be afraid of me. I'm a nice dragon." The prince didn't hear him. He took his sword and cut off the dragon's wings. "No, no not my dragon!" cried the princess. "It's okay," said the dragon. They called a doctor on the phone. He came out right away. He took out some tape and put the wings back on the dragon. The dragon brought them home, and they lived happily ever after.

Checking in Again

2012-08-25T22:31:00.000-07:00

It's been almost two months since I last posted anything. I've got three quarters of school left until I graduate. Graduation cannot come fast enough as far as I'm concerned. I've also picked up hiking as a way to get back into shape and continue losing weight. It's been great exercise and I've been able to see some beautiful places in the area.
I've done a few small hikes on easy trails with the family. Lilly has done much better on these hikes than I would have thought. So has Faith. She really likes sitting up in the backpack we have for her and seeing everything from Dad's level. I've also set out on a few difficult ones on my own. I did Mount Si a few weeks ago and destroyed my heels from wearing the wrong boots. The hike felt like it was much harder than what it really was going up. Going down was fine since I was able to get all of my weight off of my heels and onto my toes. I definitely will not be making that mistake again.

Lake Serene on Mount Index

Today I went up Mount Index to go see Lake Serene. I loved every minute of the hike. Finally reaching the top and seeing the lake for the first time was literally breathtaking. I cannot remember seeing anything that beautiful in person.
These hikes have also been great at helping me continue on with losing weight. I've been on and off the diet several times in the last few months, but I have changed my overall eating habits so that even while I'm not officially dieting, I am still slowly losing weight.
I reached the 30 lbs. mark today, which means I only have 20 left to go. I have really noticed the difference in how I look. Clothes that I haven't been able to wear in years magically fit again. Clothes that were almost too small for me a few months ago are not almost too big. The only complaint I have with dropping all of this weight is that I don't have any money for new clothes. I'm just glad I held onto some of the stuff that I grew too big for.
Faith had her first birthday a month ago. She is an expert walker now and is learning new words everyday. We have been teaching her parts of her body and she has a really good handle on nose, eyes, ear, and mouth. Lilly seems to be getting even more dramatic as the months go by. Not in a bad way (mostly), but she has really been getting personally involved in movies and stories. That girl is so much like her mother in some ways.
That's about all that has happened since the last time. No promises I will be able to spend a whole lot of time keeping the blog updated, but I will at least try to until school starts back up again.

So long for now

How Fast They Grow

2012-07-01T14:55:00.001-07:00

I grew up hearing my parents day things like, "You grew up so fast," after reaching different milestones in life. I never thought I'd be saying the same things so soon after having kids. Faith will be turning one year old this month, and she is already surprising me with how much she knows and how fast she is learning. Yesterday was a big eyeopener for me in this regard. I found her moving Lilly's old training potty next to a her play pen so she could climb up it to try to reach a toy. Later that evening, I saw her reaching desperately for a ball sitting on the cat tree while she was standing on the cardboard insert for the tree. I wasn't expecting her to catch on climbing trick for quite a while. Lilly was nearly two by the time she started moving things around to improve her reach. I went be able to look away from this girl for a minute now.

Lilly's New Camera

2012-06-07T19:38:00.001-07:00

We set up a reward system with Lilly some months back as a response to her constantly leaving her room after bedtime. We set up a chart and have her stickers to place on the chart each morning when age stayed in bed all night. We would buy small prizes at the dollar store and give them to her after she earned five stickers. Last week, as I was buying some printer ink, I saw a cheap digital camera in the discount box by the check stand. Lilly loves cameras and taking pictures, so I knew this would be a good present for her. This last week she was absolutely determined to get that camera. She made sure each night to let me know that she wasn't going to get put of bed, and except for one night, she didn't leave her room once. Today she earned enough stickers to finally get the camera, and she couldn't be happier.

A Story from Lilly

2012-05-06T08:38:00.003-07:00

So I had the idea the other day that I would help Lilly write a story. She loves stories and reading and she loves drawing pictures. I thought it would be fun to get her to make up her own characters to go on an adventure then draw about it. The story went well enough, but I wasn't able to get her to draw any pictures about the story. Here is the story we made:

Once upon a time, there was a Princess named Lilly. She had a magic spoon named Spooner. One day, Princess Lilly was walking in the forest. She was hungry. She took Spooner, the magic spoon, and made a princess tent with a kitchen. She crawled inside the tent and thought about what she wanted to eat. "I am hungry for mac and cheese," she said. She collected some sticks for firewood and then used Spooner to make pink princess fire to cook it over. When she finished cooking, she ate it all up. Now Princess Lilly wanted to play. She took out Spooner again and made Play-Doh and a Play-Doh popcorn maker. She spent the rest of the day making Play-Doh popcorn and pretending to eat it.

The End

My Diet

2012-05-03T09:30:00.000-07:00

My starting weight

I love food. I have loved food for as long as I can remember. This got to be a problem when I left the military and returned to school. Working full time and being a full time student with a wife and two kids does not leave you time to exercise. I also had the ability to eat more often than when I was in the military. Not just more often, but more often and less healthy. And I wouldn't eat breakfast, except on some weekends. Before I started my diet I was eating fast food at least once per day and getting the largest size they had. I would sometimes eat the same meal twice, just to pretend that I hadn't had any fast food earlier. My eating habits caused me to put on almost 50 pounds in the two years after I left the military.

On April 14, 2012, at 212 pounds, I decided it was time to change. I decided to go on a calorie diet. I have heard many people go on many kinds of diets and have mixed results. The best stories of diets I have heard of are ones that only place restrictions on the amount of calories you take in each day. Examples like the movie Fat Head, a rebuttal to the movie Super Size Me, and the experiment done by the Kansas State University nutrition professor that lost almost 30 pounds on a "Twinkie diet" inspired me to focus more on how much my calorie each day is and not so much what I am eating specifically. I still occasionally go to eat fast food, I still eat pizza and have ice cream, but I watch closely what my calorie intake for the day is and try very hard not to exceed it.

My goal weight

I am using an app called My Fitness Pal to track the foods I eat and the calories I take in each meal. To start with, it asks you for your age, starting weight, amount of movement you get at your job, and exercise goals per week and returns a suggested calorie intake level. Mine was 1500 calories per day, which was a bit hard to get used to at first, but now after three weeks I am very comfortable with it. To track my food, my phone scans the food I eat, or searches the database if it does not have a bar code, and brings up the nutrition information. It has really been a great tool to collect the info for each meal with and to help keep me honest with what I eat. I am eating breakfast now, and I have almost completely cut out fast food and soda. Yesterday I hit the 10 pound mark and it was a great feeling to see these results so fast. With my goal weight being 175 I still have a lot of weight to lose, but I am confident that I will be able to reach my goal.

Fun in the Sun

2012-04-23T14:00:00.001-07:00

I don't get a whole lot of time with my family these days. At least not as much as I would like. This weekend was a little different. No projects looming for school, Kailena had Sunday off, and perhaps the biggest miracle of all was that it was sunny and warm here in the Seattle area. Saturday I took the girls to the park. We played on the playground for a while, then I loaded them up in the stroller so I could make two mile journey in my new effort to lose all the weight I gained post-military.

On Sunday it was another amazing, shorts worthy day. After church we invited a couple over and had our first barbeque of the year. I had almost forgotten how nice it is to not have to wear a coat outside every day. I can't wait for summer to finally roll around.

Spring is Here

2012-04-14T17:57:00.001-07:00

Today was the first warm Seattle day I have been able to enjoy. The other days I've been working and I have not been able to spend any time with my family in the warm sun. Today I got to go with my daughters Lilly and Faith to the creek. Here is a picture of Lilly next to the creek.

Playing Tangled

2012-02-18T11:51:00.002-08:00

I've always known Lilly was outgoing. I've always known she can be dramatic. I always knew she had good comedic timing. What I didn't realize was how well she could use all of those abilities together at once. We were having a family game of Candy Land one afternoon, which always put Lilly in a silly mood. Before I go any further, I need to explain a few things. First, she loves to pretend. She will start a game off with something like, "Daddy, I'm Winnie the Pooh, you are Tigger and baby Faith is Piglet." The character assignments change depending on what movie she has seen recently, but the game is always essentially the same. She also LOVES the movie Tangled. If you haven't seen the movie, its a variation on the story of Rapunzel. The character of Rapunzel wields a frying pan as her weapon of choice. He hits her love interest, Flynn Rider (aka Eugene), over the head repeatedly in the scene where they first meet then stuffs him in a closet. Often times I am Eugene, Lilly is Rapunzel, and Faith is Pascal (the lizard). So back to the game. We finish Candy Land, and laying on the floor next to me is a little pink toy frying pan that Lilly got for her birthday. Lilly is looking away from me as I say, "Hey Lilly, you be Eugene and I'll be Rapunzel," and then I tap her on the head with the frying pan.

Lilly, not missing a beat, collapses to the ground and stays motionless while Kailena and I laugh uncontrollably. Kailena picks up Lilly and walks her over to our little wall cabinet in the living room and places her inside. The next thing I know, Lilly has collapsed onto the floor and has her butt sticking straight up in the air, just like in the movie. Kailena and I laughed so hard we started to cry. I think we have another actor in the family.

3 Going on 13

2012-01-27T20:46:00.000-08:00

While Lilly knows in her head that she is three years old, she will often act twice her age. At my brother Andrew's basketball game tonight, she wandered around the bleachers making friends with all the people around before finally settling down with the cheerleaders (who thought she was the cutest thing ever). The cheerleaders let her sit with them, let her tell them stories and gave her a big goodbye when the game was over. The girl has never met a stranger in her life, and I don't think she ever will.
Her sense of humor is fairly advanced too. At dinner tonight, she held up a shrimp tail impaled on her fork and said, "Look daddy! It's a rocket "shrimp!"

See ya later dad! Me and the girls are going out.

She likes to try to break curfew nearly every night. Some nights it takes us over two hours to get her to sleep. She always finds some excuse for being out of bed. "I'm hungry" "I'm thirsty" "I need to go potty" (which is never the truth) "I want ice" "I want toys".

I'm Three, Under the Sea, Oh Noes! It Only Takes Batteries, and If You Want Something to Get Found Right...

2012-01-24T01:23:00.000-08:00

So it was Lilly's third birthday on Sunday, and of course things had to go wrong right before the party started. First, the cake was too small (but it still turned out great. Kailena did a great job). Then we find out that the singing Ariel doll we bought Lilly last November to give to her on her birthday was broken. It would belt out the first word or two and then just stop. It wasn't an issue with the batteries since we had turned the doll off when we purchased it. A little fun fact, the button that activates the singing apparently responds to motion along with touch. Its going to be an interesting few weeks as Lilly runs all over the house with that thing. Finally, Kailena finds out that the new CD/stereo that we got for her didn't come with any kind of wall plug, nor was intended to. She checked the manual right before wrapping and only saw six batteries as a power source (which we were fresh out of) and wanted me to go get some. Now I know how fast a CD player will go through batteries, especially if it is run for at least an hour a day. I tell her we aren't going to buy batteries. I am going to Best Buy to return it and then run to the Disney Store to see if I can switch the old Ariel out for a new one.

My first stop was Best Buy. I pull into a parking spot after circling the lot for a few minutes trying to find anything open. I realize as I'm about to exit the car that I really have no idea what I am going to say to the Best Buy returns people since I haven't actually looked in the box to check for myself. As soon as I pop the lid I see it. A black AC power cord sitting next to the player and picture on the manual that clearly shows that there are not one but two ways to power this CD player. Well, there's one less stop I have to make.

On to the Disney Store. I get there and the lady who helps me is awesome. Her manager says they have no more of the singing Ariels, but she goes to check anyway. She comes back with a doll that has a broken brush accessory and hair that has lost its style and just kinda sits over her face, but it works and I have some hair gel at home. I switch out the dolls and start to head out when a panicked Kailena calls. She has been looking all over the house and can't find the camera. I tell her that I took Lilly's first birthday picture of the day down in the office and I thought I had left it there. Well, its not there (or so she says).

I make my way out of the mall and back to my car and call her back, double checking that she still hasn't found it. No luck still. She's running late and I tell her to just leave for the party, I'll find it. "Mmmhmmm," is all I get from her. Vote of no confidence? Sounds like a challenge. I decide that I am going to get that camera at no costs, because I can't stand being told that someone doesn't think I can do something. Off topic, someone once told me they didn't think I could make it through Marine Corps boot camp. I think that's why I ended up enlisting. So I'm at the house again. Is the camera in the office? No. The basement? No. Lilly's room? No. My room? Nope. The living room? Sorry. The dining room? Nada. The kitchen? Actually, yes. Right there on the counter next to the sink. Not really hiding or anything. Now I can get to the party feeling like super dad. I make a quick call to Kailena and let her know that she needs to smile big when I take her picture later. So now I'm pretty much Superdad. I fix the present problem, find the camera so we can make the memories last and didn't even break a sweat. The party is great. Lilly loves all of her presents. Faith tried to claim Ariel as her own. She saw the 6 inches of red hair on that thing and literally jumped out of my mom's lap trying to go after it.

The only real downside to the day was that night for bedtime. Lilly has been listening to VeggieTales on my iPod since her CD player broke. We lost her favorite VeggieTales CD a while back, but is on my iPod so she really enjoyed going to sleep listening to it. However, she was not happy with the fact that she couldn't listen to it last night. We found a compromise with a new Disney Hits CD that she got yesterday, but that CD caused us an even bigger problem. After hearing the "You Can Fly" song from Peter Pan, she decided that she wanted to fly to Neverland. Being the smart girl she is, she didn't climb up on a high ledge and try to jump. She figured that since daddy is awesome and can do pretty much anything, daddy can fly her to Neverland. When I informed her that the fastest way to Neverland is by going to sleep and waiting for Peter Pan to come, she went into full meltdown mode. I guess "I can't" means "I won't." Kailena was finally able to get her to calm down by laying next to her bed on the floor. She almost fell asleep there. She got up and told Lilly she was going to bed, but she really came downstairs to say goodnight to me and watch Cosby on Netflix. Lilly, of course, gets out of bed and goes looking for Kailena in the bedroom. Kailena hears Lilly's footsteps and goes back up to put her in bed. A confused Lilly sees her mom, who was supposed to be in bed, coming from downstairs. She thinks a moment and asks, "Mommy, you sleep in that bed?" pointing to our bed. She clearly thought that Kailena might have skipped out on that bed for another one Lilly didn't know about. Lilly finally ended up falling asleep sideways in our bed, with her head hanging off the side. That's what you get for giving a three year old too much good stuff on her birthday.

Three Today and a Bit About Me

2012-01-22T09:30:00.000-08:00

For those of you who won't read my profile, let me introduce myself. I'm Steve from Bothell. I am a proud father of two beautiful girls, Lilly and Faith, and the husband of the most perfect woman in the world, Kailena. I am a student at Central Washington University studying Business Administration using the GI Bill from the four years I serve in the United States Marine Corps infantry.

Lilly on the 4th of July, 2011

Today is Lilly's third birthday. I don't know exactly how to feel about it. On one level I'm excited to see my little girl growing up. On another level I don't want to see my little girl grow up. Growing up means that I'm going to have to give up the things I love doing with her now. She won't want to dance with me before bedtime, or read her a Winnie the Pooh story. She won't want to sit on my lap while we watch a movie or let me tickle her until she laughs so hard that she cries. But all that is still a long way away. Even when the day does come, I will still have Faith to hold onto for a while longer.

Faith is a fat baby

My other daughter, Faith, is almost the opposite of what her older sister was as a baby. While Lilly was colicky and would scream for hours on end, Faith has been a surprisingly happy and calm baby. Faith was born two years and six months to the day after Lilly, so tomorrow is her half birthday. The first six months with her have been wonderful. I have been lucky enough to not be on a military work schedule with her, like I was with Lilly, so from an early age Faith was able to see more of me and has taken to me much faster than Lilly did. She doesn't sleep quite as well as we want her to, but then neither did Lilly.

Lilly and Faith get along amazingly well. Lilly was so excited about being a big sister that when Faith finally arrived she was more than ready to take on the role. There was the initial jealousy period where she found out that she would have to share her parents attention with her sister, but she got over it pretty quickly and now loves to be around her baby sister. Lilly can get her sister to laugh better than anyone else in the family, but she always has to be on the lookout for Faith's little fingers when they reach out for her hair.

Well its time to get the girls ready for the party today. Its the family party at my parents house. Tomorrow is the friends party back at my house so a big house cleaning is in the works for today to make sure everything is perfect.