Recently in Parenting/Family Category

When Pete was born in October of 1997 it was a real shocker. Not that she was born, but all that we had to go through.

We had gone in to the doctor's office to get the wife an ultrasound, and they noticed some weird stuff on it, so wanted us to go down to Northside and have one there. Originally we had planned on birthing with a midwife in Carrollton rather than being in a big hospital.

We got down there and they wanted to do an internal ultrasound. Apparently there was way too much fluid. Long story short, it broke her water. The wife ended up giving birth the Pete at Northside hospital, and apparently things weren't looking too good. For awhile they weren't even sure that she was going to live or not. It was all pretty damned scary.

Some of the details are pretty fuzzy now, but that could be that I just woke up too. I may add to this when I get home from work this evening. My wife has posted about tthis before and probably remembers much more.

Anyway, They decided that the thing to do was move her to Scottish Rite, which is across the street from Northside. Had the wife's water not broken at Northside Hospital and given birth to my daughter there, if they had moved her at all, it would have been to send her down to Columbus. It is extremely unlikely that she would have lived at all.

If I remember correctly, the surgery itself too somewhere around eight hours. We were on pins and needles all day. I don't remember ever having been so scared or worried at any point prior or since then.

A portion of her small intestine had never opened up, so everything was trying to go back the other way. She was full of myconium. They ended up taking out about ten centimeters of it, and they moved some stuff around that was in the wrong place.

She ended up being in Scottish rite in the ICU for 40 days or so. When we brought her home, it was still on monitors. We had to feed her every couple of hours, as the amounts she was getting were so small. She still had tubes and whatnot hanging out of her when we brought her home as well. It is just amazing to me that she is living a normal healthy life.

In 1998

This is her at one or so.

With her NEW little sister (at that time)

Halloween 2002

2006 Softball Season. She is playing again this year. Practice has already started but I think we have a couple of weeks before the first game.

The Scurvy Dogs!

One thing I set up when the Boy was first starting to get online was a watchdog program so that I could monitor his Internet usage. There are just too many pedophiles and other bad folks out there not to, not to mention the fact that just going to his game sites he can pretty much access any type of porn he wants.

It is particularly important for me to watch what the girls are doing. RePete is still young enough that the only thing even remotely close to computers she gets is playing on my iPaq, but Pete is online quite a bit, at least an hour a day and I want to be able to track what she is doing, but not be intrusive about it.

One way for me to take care of the internet monitoring is with SpectorSoft computer monitoring. It allows me to know every single thing that they do on the computer. Spector Pro records emails, chats, MySpace activity recording, even key logging. That way if they join a site without my permission, I have the passwords and can get in and see what is going on.

My children's safety is just too important for me to leave to chance, and if I have to feel like I am spying on them to make sure that they are safe, so be it.

Just woke up from my nap. I managed to get about an hour between phone calls and Pete getting home and asking if she could go out and play. My wife calls the girls Pete and RePete, and I am tired of calling them "the oldest girl" so am adopting it. RePete is still sleep, but I will be getting her up shortly so that she will sleep tonight.

I fixed the code at the bottom of each entry that shows the time of my posts. It is supposed to say "Posted xx minutes/days ago by Richard". Half the time it works, half the time it says 31 days ago, and in the case of the one that I have dated for 11:59 PM tonight it says 30 days ago. It's a big pain in the butt is what it is. I just used the code from the default movabletype template for that.

Amazon is doing this thing where users can vote on what is going to be on sale, and then on Thursdays they offer 1000 of them at a pretty decent discount. Last week it was for the Xbox 360 Core System. I was a pretty good deal at $100. Christopher is dying for one, so he got himself set up at the computer and prepared to get one. I think it shocked him that he couldn't even get the page to load. Well hell, 50k people hitting a site all at once to purchase took up an awful lot of bandwidth. Personally I think that the number was MUCH, much higher than that, but it's a pretty good round number.

I was checking out some of the forums over there and there are a bunch of whiners claiming that Amazon did a bait and switch, or that the people who got one used bots or were hackers, and even one claiming he is filing a class-action lawsuit. They are all dumb-asses. The whole thing is akin to Wal-Mart at 6am on Black Friday. Lot's of people there at the same time, pushing and shoving and all trying to get the same five toys that are left in stock. Most people left disappointed. That's life. I thought that the whole thing was a pretty darn good idea, and even if Chris didn't get the system, at least he tried. No loss, other than a few minutes of sit-down time at the computer. Much better than people clubbing each other over the head for a few damn toys.

Technorati : Amazon.com, Christmas Gifts, Xbox 360

I managed to sleep through the kids getting ready for school today. I vaguely remember at least one of them waking me up, but went right back to sleep. Managed to nap until about 8:30 or so. Very nice.

Since Divx converter does not work in Windows Vista, I am experimenting with Xvid and AutoGK on my PC to see if I can compress a couple of shows that I want to keep. I also have several movies from Netflix that I want to rip and compress that we have not seen yet. Seems like an awful lot of work just to watch a couple of videos that I will end up deleting later anyway, but space is at a premium on my entertainment PC, and I will keep a couple of them for the kids to watch. over and over and over again. Then I will get sick of them and delete them.

I had thought about decorating the house for Christmas today, but I am going to skip that. Maybe next week when I actually have two days off. Today I am going to plan Ruth's birthday party. Kind of late, but I haven't had much time away from work due to the holiday. Just a few friends and some beer for the adults as it is my birthday as well. I am looking at the links that my wife sent me and still don't have a clue what to do, but will find something cool. Maybe I will drive to the party store in Carrollton tomorrow afternoon for some more ideas. Cheap is always good.

I did order her a birthday gift, should be here Wednesday. Some game called Cranium Hullabaloo and an Aquadoodle drawing mat. Hopefully the wife hasn't already gotten her anything, or else this will be a Christmas gift instead.

Speaking of Christmas, we are going to take the girls to see Santa on Sunday afternoon. One of the cooler things that we do as a company each year is something called Santa's Sleigh. We will set up at one of the restaurants in the parking lot. Some years we have rented an RV, others we set up a tent and stuff. We have food and Hot Chocolate for everyone, and all of the kids get to sit in Santa's lap and they each get a gift. All of the children of our employees that are under ten years old participate. It's pretty fun, and for a lot of them, it's the only trip to see Santa that they will get. I damn sure won't take my kids to the mall to see Santa Claus. That's one of my childhood memories that is really cool, but nowadays it is a great big goat fuck that I try to avoid like the plague.

Technorati : Birthdays, Christmas, Goat Fucks, Sleep

Finally got Quicken 2006 to install correctly and get my unlock code to work under Windows Vista. I have had some issues with getting it to run properly, and with the system crashes I was having my most recent backup is a couple of months old. Damn, have some updating of the old check book to do.

Now if I could only get my hotsync to work properly, I prefer to use my iPaq as my register rather than having to write it down and transfer to my PC later.

Technorati : Money, Quicken