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Happy Birthday Will & Joe!

Our newphews celebrated their 7th birthday while we were visiting them in Iowa . They got some cool stuff. Uncle Matt and Aunt Debra might have even played with a couple of their toys…

[I proposed to their Aunt Debra at their 2nd birthday party (at the time, they told me it was okay for me to steal some of their thunder as long as I did NOT steal any of their birthday cake)---that means Deb and I have been engaged or married for over 5 years now! :grin:]

(1) (2) (3)

In any event, Will & Joe wanted to have a big ol’ summertime water fight at their birthday party. Dad (Mark) acquired a veritable arsenal of super soakers to equip a bunch of 7-ish-year-olds for a one-hour showdown. Grandpa Carl and—for a brief moment—mom (Suzanne) were recruited to run the refilling station (1). I had the brilliant idea to get the kids to gang up on Mark (2) and get him good! Expectedly, it was about 20 seconds before he’d explained to everyone why it was a better idea to get me (3)…

(5) (6)

Aunt Suzy helped me get Colin in on the game (5) after Deb tried (twice!) to gently squirt him only to have a strong super-soaker-sized blast hit him in first the ear then the face. I think that’s why, despite the decidedly-weaker sprays Aunt Suzy was getting him with, he was still a bit suspect of the whole thing. Afterwards, though, we enjoyed drying off in the sun (6).

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8 Months Old

On Monday Colin will be 8 months old. I can’t believe how close he is to his first birthday!

We meant to get pictures at his 6 month, but I’m glad we waited because he looks so much more like a little boy and less and less like a baby. Kiddie Kandids inside Babies R Us did a fabulous job! The photographers actually fought over who got to photograph Colin, I guess because he is just so darn cute!

While at Babies R Us we also help our friends Wendy and Joe register! Only 4 more months…

Don’t forget to click for larger versions. The larger versions here are about 50 to 100k.

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One Red Paperclip

Has anyone else heard about this? I just stumbled onto it (slow day, I guess—lots of random stuff on the web) and think it is, umm, amazing? This guy started with the aforementioned (red) paperclip and ended up with a house in Saskatchewan. Click on the paperclip to read the guy’s one-year (to the day) odyssey.

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Copy What You Like

Came across an interesting essay that—among a few other things—gets down to the separating things you are “impressed” with and things you “like”… I thought the paragraph from the full “Copy What You Like” essay was particularly interesting.

It can be hard to separate the things you like from the things you’re impressed with. One trick is to ignore presentation. Whenever I see a painting impressively hung in a museum, I ask myself: how much would I pay for this if I found it at a garage sale, dirty and frameless, and with no idea who painted it? If you walk around a museum trying this experiment, you’ll find you get some truly startling results. Don’t ignore this data point just because it’s an outlier.

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Colin’s Most Recent Adventures…

We had a great trip to Iowa (and Colorado for mommy and daddy—congrats, again, newlyweds Ed & Denise Sealover!) with lots and lots (and lots and lots [and lots]) of photos. But, I’m a bit tired and won’t be posting them all this evening. But rest assured, we got all the requisite photos:

• Grandparents and Baby [check]
• GREAT Grandparents (both of ‘em!) (at the same time!) and Baby [check]
• Four-Generation-Picute [check]
• Baby and Cross-Eyed and Odor-Challenged Cousins [check] [HUH!?!?!]

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Sky Cradle Club

We have proof!

Signed by a real Captain and everything!

Colin really was a great flyer on our trip to Iowa and back over the 4th of July holiday, but as we were getting off (err, “de-planing”) the first leg of our flight from Des Moines to New York, the Captain of the plane saw us and pulled us aside. As he produced the attached certificate from his briefcase (I always wondered what they had in those! I kinda hoped they weren’t maps and such…) he told us a wonderful story about how his mother had gotten one of these certificates when he was a baby flying on American Airlines. He had actually sent along a copy when he applied to become a captain at American—and it worked!

So, Colin, if you ever want to be a Pilot, I think you’ll have no problem “landing” your first gig with American…

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Comic Book Babies

(Fun with Photoshop filters and a new program that came with our new Intel MacBook Pros called “Comic Life“…)

(The “un-Comic-book” version of the photo is also very cute and viewable here.)

(Thanks Michelle for the great photo!)

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