welcome to spiceland.

Hello, all, if anyone is out there anymore. I see that we have only had one new comment in the past month and a half. I’ll try to do better about posting updates if you guys will post comments so that we know this website is worth keeping!

Tru and Heidi both had regular checkups last week. Tru is 39 inches tall and 36 pounds. She had her first vision and hearing tests. She performed perfectly on the hearing test and did very well on her vision test, too. Dr. Zbell was very impressed that she could jump on one foot (a 5 year developmental milestone) and praised Tru for becoming involved in soccer. Tru proudly told Dr. Zbell about the two goals she’s scored in the last 3 games. Tru got her first set of shots in the last 2 years and her last until she is 11 years old. Tru developed a fever in reaction to the shots and had to miss two days of school. She’s fine now, though!

Heidi was 23 and a half pounds and 31 inches long. Dr. Zbell was impressed by how quickly Heidi can walk and by how many words she can say. Heidi also had to have shots and reacted badly to them. She developed a fever, a runny nose, and spots. The spots were a reaction to the chickenpox vaccine. She is still a little sick, and I am going to call the doctor tomorrow to see if she needs to be on antibiotics from an infection secondary to the reaction. Hopefully we’ll have that all cleared up before our vacation on Thursday! Heidi can say many, many words now. She can say Mama, Dada, Tru, dog, cat, bird, flower, water, baba (bottle), night-night, bye-bye, cheese, Cheerios, car, that, light, get down, up, cuddle, and more. We’ve enrolled Heidi in a very nice educational daycare facility, and she will start going there after we get back from our vacation, at which time I will also begin working more.

US News & World Report has named our hometown of Madison, Alabama as the second best place to grow up. The article, published on August 19th, puts Virginia Beach, VA just ahead of Madison in the number one slot. The author says about Madison:

“Madison, Ala.: Of the roughly 43,000 residents in the friendly, churchgoing town of Madison, Ala., about 12,000 are under 18 years old. And this bedroom community of Huntsville, Ala., offers no shortage of outlets to keep these young folks active. “There is an event almost every weekend—whether it is in Madison, Huntsville, or Madison County—that families can attend,” says Paul Finley, the mayor of Madison. Children can take advantage of the area’s expansive outdoor amenities: watching beavers plunge into Bradford Creek or rabbits dart through the 130-acre Rainbow Mountain Trails park. And if they behave well enough, perhaps some lucky children can even persuade their mom and dad to send them to Space Camp at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in nearby Huntsville.”

Author Luke Mullins finishes out his list with:

3. San Jose, CA
4. Overland Park, KS
5. Boston, MA
6. Denver, CO
7. Rochester, MN
8. Cedar Rapids, IO
9. Plano, TX
10. Edison, NJ

New pictures of Tru and Heidi in matching outfits, Tru’s first soccer practice, and Tru’s first soccer game. Both teams did great, scoring about 4 goals each, and Tru scored one for her team!

Have we become lazy? Are we being taken over by our kids? Probably. But that isn’t the only reason we’ve neglected our blog.

We’ve been using facebook for a while now. It allows us to automatically send updates to the people who have noted that they care to hear (by ‘friending’ us). On this blog, we ask people who care to ‘subscribe’. They can do this using the link on the left side or by putting the RSS feed into their news reader. Who does this? Noone! This is one of the reasons we tend to favor facebook. By the very nature of it, people subscribe to get your updates by friending you. The end result? .. no posts here.

Another unfortunate trend is ‘micro updates’. We normally don’t log into facebook and do posts within facebook. We use a Twitter. For the 73% of you who don’t know what that is, it is a sevice that lets you send small little messages to your fellow twitter’ers. Also, we have ours set to update our facebook pages with any twitter updates that we give. The end result? … little micro messages as updates instead of long detailed blog postings with pictures.

What should we do? Well, for now it looks like we are sticking with facebook. We’ll still try to update you all here but we get less of a response. Should you all join facebook? No! In fact, there is something kinda strange about the parental generation being on facebook. We need to be goofier there (yes, we can get even goofier than we do here). You all keep doing what your doing and we’ll try to do better about posting updates here.

Stay tuned for some pictures of Tru’s first soccer game. Erin, by the way, when is that coming about? Normally I don’t get to see the pictures unt