CoolestFamilyEver

Shauna and I are normally very excited to have 11AM church. It gives you just enough time to sleep in and be lazy in the morning without spending all day waiting until it’s time to go. When we got the switch this year, we thought it would be a good thing. There’s just one problem: Liam.

You see, his normal nap time is between 10AM and 11AM and he usually goes down for about an hour and a half to two hours. You don’t have to be a math major to figure out that this doesn’t jive too well with a church meeting block from 11AM to 2PM. We used to be able to take him into the hall and get him to nap between blocks, but he’s outgrown the carrier and has gotten a bit pickier about where he naps.

The last time we took him to church, we had to leave before the end of sacrament meeting because he was acting up so much. The problem with sticking it out with him is that we’re basically just trying to keep Liam from freaking out and distracting everyone else in the room. One of us is always with him in the hallway trying to get him to doze just a little bit with very limited success. So what do we do about the crazy kid?

Basically, we’ve decided we have to go to church in shifts. I take a week, she takes a week, the other stays home with the kid to make sure he gets his nap. If he wakes up in time, we join the other at church. And I hope he grows out of it sometime soon.

Posted by Jesse | Filed under: Church, Liam, Life on February 7th, 2010 at 12:30 pm | No Comments »

Like 7 million other people (literally), I tuned in to watch Conan’s final episode of The Tonight Show last night. I even re-watched it this morning on Hulu because it was that good. If you don’t have the time to watch the full thing, at least watch this clip of his closing speech to fans.

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Posted by Jesse | Filed under: Entertainment on January 23rd, 2010 at 5:24 pm | 2 Comments »

Dear NBC,

Look, guys, I know you can’t help but screw up, but you’ve pretty much put the icing on the cake now. It’s not very surprising, though. You made Heroes suck for two seasons after a mind-blowing premier and making “save the cheerleader” a popular meme, ABC stole Scrubs right out from under you and ended up with an amazing season 8 finale, and you just about canceled The Office, now one of your most popular shows, until someone clued you in about a little thing called iTunes. Heck, all any of the people I know can talk about is Chuck and you seem hell-bent on sending that one into the garbage can as well.

I guess I should know better after you fumbled your late-night lineup almost 18 years ago. The Tonight Show was run by a living legend, Johnny Carson. I remember staying up until entirely irresponsible hours on Friday nights and all during the summer just to catch his hilarious sketches and monologues. Meanwhile, David Letterman was being just as funny in the time slot right after and would have been a natural fit. Even Johnny Carson thought Letterman would be the  best replacement. But no, you instead get that giant sack of unfunny chin, Jay Leno, to take over, losing Letterman to CBS in the process. About the only saving grace is that you had the good sense to grab Conan O’Brien and gave him a few seasons to find his own.

It almost looked like you were on the way to making some good choices. You put O’Brien in charge of The Tonight Show and he’s been on fire. A week doesn’t go by that some major website doesn’t link his sketches. He’s an Internet sensation in an age when that means something. All the same, you had to counter that good idea with the lame-brain idea that Leno should have his own prime time show, and we know how that’s been working out for you. You should have just sent that horse to the glue factory.

Now you realize that keeping The Chin on staff wasn’t a terribly good idea, but you’re about to “fix” that mistake by making an even bigger one. I mean, you’re seriously going to not only let him keep a show, but slap your best decision in the face to do it? Do you remember at all what happened when you did that to Letterman, or is your memory just that short?

You’re about to take your best late-night asset and chase him off to another network, splitting that coveted late night audience even further. NBC, pull your collective heads out of your collective rear ends and realize you’re about to goof up big time yet again.

Posted by Jesse | Filed under: Entertainment on January 13th, 2010 at 12:36 am | 1 Comment »

Due to a crawler that thinks sending hundreds of requests at a time is an acceptable practice, something that effectively results in a denial of service attack on the web server, Yahoo’s crawler has hereby been completely and totally banned from indexing any of our websites. While I may lose a visit or two every day from this, it beat losing the dozens of other visits because the web server is effectively tanked. I even tried to play nice by using a robots directive to limit requests without any change.

You suck, Yahoo. No wonder you’re becoming so irrelevant.

Posted by Jesse | Filed under: Rants, Website on January 6th, 2010 at 1:46 pm | No Comments »

For Christmas, Shauna and I took Liam to Alabama to meet my side of the extended family. All of my living grandparents and most of my aunts and uncles (as well as both cousins) live within the state, so it was a great way to get to all of them at once. Even the ones from further away were in town, an added bonus. Everyone gushed over him (predictably, he is a pretty cute kid) and we had a great time.

Liam was a great traveler. Considering that we were more-or-less asking him to sit still in cars and planes for 12+ hours, he was barely fussy at all. I guess those long road trips to California conditioned him to that kind of activity. It still took him a day to bounce back from it all, but we were not that family with the screaming baby right behind you.

It was kind of a bittersweet visit with my grandmother, though. My mom recently moved back to start caring for her because she was concerned about her mental health. After a week, I can see why. She would forget that she’d recently told us a story just minutes prior, sometimes recanting the same anecdote several times a day. (Apparently this is a early sign of dementia.) I noticed that she was also having trouble moving around, often hunched over by the end of the day, yet she refuses to consider a wheelchair. I really enjoyed seeing her and spending time with her, but I fear she may not be around long.  I made sure to get pictures and video so that Liam will get a chance to remember his grand grandma if he doesn’t get a chance to see her again.

Posted by Jesse | Filed under: Family, Holidays, Travel on December 30th, 2009 at 9:13 pm | No Comments »

The best part of a roasted poultry is the inevitable soup you can make with the carcass. A lot of people get intimidated by making a soup, but it’s one of the easiest things you can do. If you can fill a pot with ingredients, you can make this soup.

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Posted by Jesse | Filed under: Food, Recipes on November 30th, 2009 at 4:00 pm | 2 Comments »

We hosted Thanksgiving this year and I was put in charge of my very first turkey. Thanks to sage advice from the guru of Good Eats, Alton Brown, it was a great success thanks to a good overnight brine and properly thermal management. Since we did an 18-pound bird, we were left with a lot of leftovers and needed some ways to manage them. This is one of the two recipes I came up with.

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Posted by Jesse | Filed under: Food, Recipes on November 29th, 2009 at 11:02 pm | No Comments »

So tonight was my first night “out on the floor” as they say in cosmetology school. Out of the classroom, and into the salon where I will now perform a variety of heavily supervised services on brave individuals too cheap to go to a real salon. Actually, I wish I would have known that you could go to a hair school and get your hair done. I really had no idea. I figure a lot of the time it probably turns out better than it would if you were going to a salon. At the salon, no one is supervising your stylist, checking the cut, etc. So I actually think it’s a really good idea to go to a school (provided it’s a good one) to get your hair done. In fact, Monday night (as kind of a “welcome to the floor” surprise) we were given a free service night where we got to have anything we wanted to have done for free. I got my hair cut and colored and I honestly don’t think I’ve ever been more pleased with a cut or a color. Observe:

My cute new hair

So anyway, I was all nervous to be out on the floor tonight for the first time. My stomach was in total knots as I heard my name over the intercom when my first client was assigned to me. Turned out to just be a brow wax and tint which I am super comfortable with, so I was way relieved. And then? Total and complete boredom. That was my ONLY client of the evening. Which is going to be sort of a problem. Not only will I be bored out of my skull, but I’ve made a tiny little goal (that is mostly out of my control anyway) to get $10 in tips a night. That doesn’t sound like much, but my plan is to save up all of my tips and use the money for the Boston trip. Little by little, I know it will add up and get us what we need. I’ve already got almost $50 saved up (I got a few tips while doing services before technically being out on the floor) which is almost enough for two nights at the hospital’s inn. Did I tell you about that? Apparently, the hospital has an inn that is for family members of patients and it’s only $30/night. I’m not sure yet how long our trip will be, but Liam will likely have to be in the hospital for a week and then they’ll want to do followups and such so it’ll likely be one long, expensive trip.

And so… in closing, please make appointments at the school with me or send people my way. I promise to do a good job. And if I don’t, I promise that my instructor will fix it before you leave.

Posted by Shauna | Filed under: Life, School on November 11th, 2009 at 11:54 pm | 7 Comments »

Well, folks, it looks like we’re going to be going to Boston after all. I got a call from the hand surgeon at Children’s Hospital Boston yesterday. It was so nice to talk to someone who seems to know what they’re talking about and yet, doesn’t act like they know everything. Basically, he told me that NO ONE has seen enough of these cases to be able to say they know what the right answer is. The reality is there are several different approaches that can be taken and he said that my opinion as the mother will determine to a large extent what approach he’ll end up taking. We seemed to be right on the same page in terms of what we’d like to see happen in the first surgery (separate the index and middle finger, drill the growth plates to stop the large fingers from getting any longer, and then debulk as much as we can). After that, he said he’d like to focus his attentions on making Liam’s thumb more functional before we even talk about the index finger. I like this plan because it means that we can make a decision about amputation AFTER we know what the nerve structure and so forth looks like inside of Liam’s hand. It just seems ridiculous to decide to amputate without knowing for certain what we are dealing with. This surgeon confirmed my feelings even more by telling me that apparently there are two types of macrodactyly. In both cases, fatty tissue builds up causing decreased function in the affected digits. BUT, sometimes nerves are affected (and therefore enlarged) and sometimes they are NOT. I didn’t know that, but now that I do, I can’t believe that anyone would recommend amputation before knowing what type we’re dealing with. If the nerves aren’t enlarged, de-bulking the fatty tissue will be much less complicated, so that’s what I’m hoping for.

At this point, I need to gather up Liam’s x-rays and other medical information to send out to him. After he’s had a chance to review Liam’s case thoroughly, we’ll decide about a meeting. I’m not even sure at this point if we’d just schedule the surgery, or if we’d have to go out there for a consult in person. I’ll keep you updated.

Posted by Shauna | Filed under: Liam, macrodactyly on November 11th, 2009 at 12:27 am | 6 Comments »

We’ve been kind of lazy parents. When it came time to get Liam started on solids, we reached for the Gerber instead of the Vitamix. It’s pretty easy to get caught up in the convenience, but homemade baby food isn’t all that tough to figure out. This isn’t to say we haven’t had our misses. My first attempt at making macaroni and cheese didn’t go over with him so well, nor have some of our attempts at pear. (And don’t for a moment think that freezing pumpkin is a great idea; the water separates like nobody’s business.) But if you have a little persistence and are willing to experiment, your pocketbook will thank you for it.

Tonight’s menu? Pureed carrots. After a 15-minute steam, I tossed them in the Vitamix with some water and ran it until smooth and slightly runny. Liam gobbled up the entire bowl that I fed him. And the cost? A mere $0.15 per container. The pre-made stuff runs about $0.50 a pop. That doesn’t sound like much, but figure that he’s eating a good four containers of food per day and that adds up. Over a year, you’re talking serious money for the convenience of not spending a whole 5 minutes a few times a week to make the stuff. Not bad, eh? And bonus: we know exactly what went into it.

So far, we’ve had success with pears, carrots, canned pumpkin (when not frozen), and a pear/pineapple blend. There’s some squash on the counter just waiting to be roasted and pureed. Maybe I’ll have to try some meats next.

Posted by Jesse | Filed under: Food, Frugal Living, Liam on November 9th, 2009 at 8:34 pm | 2 Comments »