CoolestFamilyEver

Liam decided to play a prank on me tonight. He was eating (or, more accurately, not eating) dinner and kept asking to get down. Since he hadn’t eaten anything of measure, I kept telling him no and that he needed to eat at least some of his chicken. Naturally, he wasn’t particularly happy with this, but I went about cleaning up the kitchen in spite of his sullen glares. Looking out the window, I remembered that the lawn was getting a bit dry in this one spot and could stand getting watered before it got too late. I got the sprinkler in place and turned it on, then went to open the back door to get back inside.

To my surprise, the door didn’t open. Then I heard Liam giggling on the other side. The little stinker had run over and locked me out of the house, then run back to his chair to look like he hadn’t gotten up at all. I ended up having to undo the deadbolt via the dog door, mocked by my three-year-old the entire time.

Little does he know that I’m a vengeful person and don’t exercise restraint when getting even with children. He’ll rue the day (who talks like that?) he tried to out-prank his old man.

Written by: Jesse | Filed under: Liam on May 6th, 2012 | 2 Comments »

Peeps, I am super proud of Liam’s new room. If you’ve been over to our house any time recently, you know this since the first thing I do whenever anyone comes over is squeal, “Come see Liam’s awesome new room and super cool bed! (Oh yeah… over there is my new baby if you want to see that too.)” I’ve finally got some good pictures though and I’m ready to detail the process to you all.

Here are a couple of shots of the room before we got started:

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Written by: Shauna | Filed under: Pictures, Projects on April 25th, 2012 | 4 Comments »

To say that our first newborn experience was stressful would be a bit of an understatement. As much as we love our little Martian, he was a handful as an infant. He wouldn’t breastfeed, he was constantly puking up what he did eat, and he was an almost non-stop screamer until 3 months. About the only times he’d sleep is when he was wrapped up tight and held, so Shauna and I had to take turns making him get some sleep.

Nathan has been a total departure from all of these things. He’s a breastfeeding champ and keeps it all down. When he does cry, it’s just long enough to get our attention. And the super-duper bonus bit? He’s not even two weeks old and is already sleeping through the night. I think we maybe earned this one.

Written by: Jesse | Filed under: Liam, Nathan on April 5th, 2012 | 2 Comments »

For a long time now, I’ve wondered why God sent Liam to me. Not in a “why me?”, feeling-sorry-for-myself kind of way, but I wonder constantly what makes me uniquely qualified to be Liam’s mother because I believe the children we get are sent to us for a purpose. Especially when almost daily I feel completely inadequate to deal with the unique challenges that being Liam’s mom brings, I wonder what qualities I possess that made Heavenly Father say, “This quirky little martian? Send him to Shauna! She is the perfect mother to handle that.” Now, understand that I will NEVER feel like I am the PERFECT mother to handle Liam’s challenges, but I will say that today I feel like I understand a little bit why he was sent to me.

Maybe it’s the redhead in me, but I have very strong opinions about things. And, much to the chagrin of my husband, I ALWAYS think I am right. Now, I’m not saying this is a great quality of mine, but I will say that it helps me to be a better mom for Liam. When doctors wanted to amputate his fingers, I didn’t just say “Doctors know best.” I got online and researched my butt off on the subject and I fought for what I felt was right for my son. We had to fly clear across the country and spend a ton of money that we wouldn’t have had to otherwise (we were originally accepted to Shriner’s Hospital in Salt Lake, so Liam’s surgeries would have been completely free), but we don’t ever regret our decision and know that it was right for Liam.

Fast forward to today. Many of our friends and family know about Liam’s developmental delays, some of you do not. Basically, Liam has been working with therapists since he was 11 months old, teaching him how to do everything from roll over on his own to walking and most recently speech therapy and social skills. Liam doesn’t just pick up on things and develop skills the way other kids do. Everything that he knows how to do, it has been an uphill battle to teach him to do it. When Liam turned three, he was evaluated by the school system and it was determined that he qualified for special education services, so he started a special needs preschool. Now, when you have a child in the special ed program, they have a little meeting called an IEP (Individualized Education Plan) to determine what that child’s needs are and then make specific goals. Because I had no idea what to expect, I just assumed that the specialists from the school would know what services he needed and create appropriate goals from there. When Liam’s IEP was created, these specialists kept checking boxes right and left saying that Liam didn’t need this service or that service. It seemed to me at the time that he was not getting nearly enough services, but every time I raised a concern, they’d tell me that that part of the program didn’t apply to Liam. Well… this has not sat well with me. I have now done my research, talked with a couple specialists outside of Liam’s “team” and am now prepared to go to battle with the school to get Liam the services he needs.

Even though I feel inadequate (what mother doesn’t, amiright?) to be entrusted with such a special little boy, I know now that I do have unique qualities to be Liam’s mother. Liam needed a mother that could fight for him. Despite all my faults, I am not a person that can be steamrolled by “policies” or pushed around by doctors and specialists simply because they ARE doctors and specialists. I am that mother that will not shut up or back down until I get what I want. And as annoying as that can be for all of you that have to deal with me on a regular basis (Sorry, Jesse! I love you!), I’m glad it’s the way that I am. Because I finally feel like I have something unique to offer my son. A reason why he was sent to me. Heavenly Father said, “This little boy has got a long, hard road ahead of him, send him to that feisty redhead!”

Written by: Shauna | Filed under: Liam, Liam's Macrodactyly, Life, School, Special Education Program on February 23rd, 2012 | 5 Comments »

Everything I post on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ is set to be visible to the public. A lot of people would call me nuts for doing this and wonder why I don’t do a “better” job at managing my privacy. After all, both Facebook and Google+ give you ample privacy controls, and you can restrict Twitter to only those people you approve. This, however, is offering up only the illusion of privacy, and it’s better to embrace the reality that privacy barely exists online, if at all.

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Written by: Jesse | Filed under: Blogging, Geek on February 13th, 2012 | No Comments »

I don’t often choose to single out companies for bad behavior around here, but when I do, they’ve usually managed to screw up to a point where there’s no hope of redemption. Congratulations, Furniture Row (also known as Sofa Mart, Oak Express, Bedroom Expressions, Denver Mattress Co., and Big Sur Waterbeds), you’re on The List.

A few weeks ago, I stopped in their store in Draper (across the street from Ikea) on my drive home to pick up a waterbed fill kit. This is kind of a hard to find item as waterbeds are about as popular as disco balls these days. (But ask anyone who slept on ours and they’ll tell you how awesome it is.) Finding one locally was a score, or so I thought.

The kit itself was about $17, not a hugely extravagant purchase, but a bit inflated by the chemicals included to treat the bed and keep it in tip-top shape. I pulled out my Mastercard to pay and they asked to say ID. As part of my long-standing policy of enforcing my cardholder rights per the merchant agreement, I declined. Of course, they dug in and said they couldn’t accept it. While they attempted to reach the manager, I tried calling both Mastercard and my issuing bank, but being 4:30PM, everyone who could do anything was gone. I left without getting the kit having spent 45 minutes just trying to get them to take my card.

When I got home, I immediately filed a complaint with Mastercard and with Furniture Row. Neither of them sent a response. Well, until today. In the mail, Furniture Row was kind enough to send an ad for their Veterans Day sale. That’s right: instead of responding to my complaint that they were in direct violation of the Mastercard merchant agreement (repeated violations of which can result in a suspension of your merchant account), they instead took my complaint information and added it to their marketing database. What the crap is that?!

Needless to say, I will never patronize a Furniture Row business again, and I would encourage all of you to avoid it as well. Disregarding the merchant agreement, ignoring my complaint, and having the gall to try selling me stuff based on it? Three strikes, you’re out.

Written by: Jesse | Filed under: Rants on November 7th, 2011 | 4 Comments »

Dear people who keep on trying to put science and religion at odds with each other at every opportunity,

Stop.

Sincerely,

Religious people who think science is pretty darn awesome and don’t intend to change their minds anytime soon.

PS I’m a member of a church where the second in charge has a bachelor’s degree in physics in addition to his PhD in business administration. They don’t hand those things out in Cracker Jack boxes, you know.

Written by: Jesse | Filed under: Church, Tender Lumplings on October 24th, 2011 | No Comments »

I’m a fairly “public” person. I post a lot of things in the public view on teh Interwebs and harbor little expectation of privacy when I do so. I’m also a bit selective as to what I share as a way to help reduce the noise I create for others, not necessarily because of any desire for privacy. I assume that anyone who wants the “firehose” will follow my shares on Google Reader and my posts on Twitter, thus capturing almost all of my public social activity. I do, however, have a problem with forced sharing.

This is the direction Facebook is going in, to force you to “share” anything you do on other sites as a condition of using them as an identity provider. Look at what they’ve been doing with Yahoo News and Spotify and you’ll see what I mean. I’m not okay with this and you shouldn’t be either. I don’t particularly care that a lot of it may be public (it doesn’t matter to me much though it may matter to you immensely); I care that it creates even more noise in a redesigned interface that’s already too noisy and gives you inadequate and confusing controls for controlling that noise. Go look at the ticker. Facebook made an assumption with the redesign that we care about everything our “friends” do. The sad truth is that we don’t.

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Written by: Jesse | Filed under: Geek on September 25th, 2011 | 1 Comment »

One of the biggest problems with all social media problems is noise control. You will inevitably end up with a lot of content that just doesn’t appeal to you at all. Despite the various ways that platforms attempt to address it, none of them manage to really figure it out.

Inevitably, the problem is that you have to categorize people rather than the content they produce. Facebook’s Lists feature requires you to push people into one category, making no distinction between the pictures of their kids and the celebrity gossip they post. Google+ has the same problem; you can put people into several Circles, but it just means their content shows up in multiple places. Unsurprisingly, Twitter creates the same problem with Lists. Some clients can apply per-column filters, but they aren’t persistent.

A similar problem shows up when you publish content. Both Facebook and Google+ make the assumption that you want to publish content to specific people. While this can often be a good option (especially if you don’t want your co-workers seeing that you went to that ball game), what about when you just want to give people the option to partake of your various types of content? Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense for the people you know to self-select the content you categorize?

We already have a system that does this: blogs. WordPress lets you tag and categorize all of your content. A subscriber can then pick a category- or tag-specific feed to get just that content, or they can take the whole shebang from the main feed. Why can’t we get a similar system from social networks? Shouldn’t we be able to keep functionality that’s been around for years? It would certainly help cut down significantly on noise, decrease user fatigue, and increase user participation. Right now, I have to guess if someone wants to see content of a specific type while in the process excluding everyone else from acting on it.

The rumor mill says that Google+ is working on this right now. I sure hope so. If they can’t find a good way for us to control noise from both ends, we’ll be right back to FarmWars crapola.

Written by: Jesse | Filed under: Geek on July 26th, 2011 | 2 Comments »

It’s been about two weeks since Google unleashed its latest effort to “get” social networking and I must say that I’m very impressed. After such huge duds like Orkut, Buzz, and Wave, I was beginning to think that The Big G didn’t quite understand how to do the whole collaboration and sharing thing. Google+, however, seems to really understand how to make the tools we want and correct some of Facebook’s larger shortcomings. I’ll warn you now that this is going to be part review, part tutorial and will get really lengthy.

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Written by: Jesse | Filed under: Geek on July 13th, 2011 | 1 Comment »