welcome to spiceland.

Christmas portraits are up!

Check out this video for Rovio, a wireless robot that lets you remotely explore and interact somewhere else. I stumbled on one of these at the Mall this weekend.

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1847264/meet_rovio_demo_full/

I’ve been waiting for this same type of product from iRobot, the makers of the fantastic vacuum cleaning robot Roomba, for quite a while. It looks like these folks beat them to the punch and it looks great. I’d love to be able to log in from work or while away to check on the kids.

Good: super awsome way to interact remotely

Bad: $250

New pictures of Thanksgiving and Tru writing and playing in the bathtub.

Heidi was sick the past two days. She caught a stomach virus from Tru. She began vomiting Saturday night, and didn’t hold anything down from then until Sunday. Eventually, she started refusing her bottle out-right. When 24 hours had passed and she’d only had 2 ounces to drink, I took her to the pediatric ER at Huntsville Hospital. I caught it on Sunday, so we were both sick while we were at the hospital. They gave her some Zofran for nausea, and she was drinking again in about 20 minutes. Hooray for modern medicine! She had about 6 ounces of pedialyte yesterday, and that’s all she had to eat. Today, she’s eating mostly normally. She’s been taking 3-4 ounces of formula in a sitting. She’s eating less than her usual 6 ounces, but it’s probably just because her stomach shrank from being empty for 2 days.

Anyway, they had the cutest little baby gown for her to wear while she was there! I just had to take a picture of it. There are a couple more here.

Somebody broke into our car again! About 2 years ago, someone broke into our Accord and stole our portable DVD player out of it. The stupid culprits forgot to steal the screens, so I’m sure they just had to throw the DVD player out. A couple of days ago, my next-door neighbor mentioned her car door was open when she woke up that morning and that she thought someone had been in the car. I went outside, and sure enough, our car door was open, too. Our $350 portable GPS unit was gone. I hate this neighborhood and I can’t wait to get out of here!

Tru, Heidi, and I drove around today hunting for examples of the gorgeous landscape that is the Tennessee Valley in the fall. We found red and gold leaves and also stopped by a local man-made lake to take some pictures. Here are the best from today’s photoshoot. They start about halfway down the page, and the first ones are named “tru-with-leaves.”

Get the Flash Player to see this video. If you are seeing this from facebook or some other site, click on the link to watch the video on our site.

Tru got ahold of some scissors today and hacked her hair up. She cut it in about 4 different places, but didn’t cut it to the scalp, at least. I had to cut 3-6 inches off in different spots, and I may have to do some more shaping tomorrow, depending on how I feel about it in the morning. The pictures are here.

Heidi has developed a rash as a result of some of her clothing being outfitted with tagless labels. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission released an advisory related to this, but Heidi seems to be reacting to clothing not included in that avisory, too. I filed a report with the CPSC and with Carter’s, since her reaction doesn’t exactly fall within the bounds of current reports, but I don’t know if they will do much about it. Carter’s has offered to take the clothing back and send me a refund. Any of you considering purchasing baby clothes for anyone should be aware of this and specifically look for clothing without stamped, stenciled, or ink labels on them and buy clothes with regular cloth sewn-in tags instead.

New photos up! It’s so easy to publish photos with our new photo program that I have forgotten I still need to announce them here! Halloween pictures here. Tru was Little Red Riding Hood to Seiko’s Hungry Wolf, and Heidi was a baby dinosaur. So cute! Touch-a-Truck pictures here, VeggieTales Live pictures here, and the most recent pictures of the kids, starting at the bottom of that page and continuing into page three of that album.