I'm 10 months old today!

A lot has happened this month. I have a total of 4 teeth so far, I can crawl and sit with the best of them, and I've started pulling up on things. I predict that by 11 months I'll be walking.

Transportation day

One of the local churches has a transportation day where they have over 40 different vehicles that kids can check out. Lauren is checking out a fire engine in this picture.



The real star of the show was the helicopter. You can see the helicopter coming in for a landing which sounded cool until you realize that it's landing on a gravel dirt area. We didn't actually get to see it land because I was shielding Lauren with my back from the blowing debris.



You can see the dirt patch and all the family and kids on the perimeter.



Lauren was really excited to sit on the school bus.



There was even a flyby.



Good old fashion transportation. Lauren was excited about the horses although she wasn't the only one.....



She had a helmet on but it kept falling off. This particular shot was a staged photo after they had already removed her helmet.



Unfortunately time was running short so not all the "kids" could check out the vehicles.



Future pilot?

Happy Chinese New Year!

Watch out Dole!

Slicing fresh pineapples is a pain. You have to make so many cuts and then you have to remove the eyes etc. so I bought this pineapple slicer/corer. I wasn't sure it would work when I bought it but after using it, I'm glad I bought one. You cut off the top of the pineapple and then just turn the slicer into the pineapple. The slicer removes the core and slices the pineapple as you turn it.


Then you just pull the pineapple slices out. If you wanted to do a fancy presentation, you could fill the empty pineapple with some food.


Perfect pineapple slices just like out of a Dole can. :)

New car seat

We recently bought another car seat, Sunshine Kids Radian65SL from Albeebaby.com since Cole is starting to outgrow his infant carrier. We really like our Britax roundabout but the one bad thing about them is that they are really wide. You can't fit 2 of them side by side. The Sunshine Kids car seats are highly rated and have a slim profile. They are also really heavy since they have a steel frame. In this picture you can see the Radian65(left) next to the Roundabout(right). Notice how high the Roundabout sits as well as how bulky it looks.

Would you do it again?

The answer is no. We decided this time around to put up a temporary pool fence instead of a pool net like we did in our last house. The net is great because once it's on you never have to worry about the kids getting past it. But the problem is that you need to have the discipline to put it back on every time you take it off. This didn't always happen. The other issue is that you can't clean the pool when it's on. So now our old pool has a nice ring of algae around the edge.


Here's the before picture without the fence.


Here's the other side. The pool fence is by Pool Guard.


Here's the before picture.


One of the reasons we went with this company was that they were going to make an additional fence piece that would jut out from the wall a few feet so that you couldn't swing around the fence. You can see the extra fence in this picture.

Telephone or Network.....

Our new house was wired with Cat5 wiring throughout the house but unfortunately they were all connected for telephone lines. Who uses a land line these days? Since we don't have a need for a telephone, I converted the wires to be network lines by adding some connectors and plugging them into the router.


Here's the Ethernet cable crimper I had to buy in order to put the connector on. It's surprisingly easy to do. One problem I ran into is that there are 2 standards for how you arrange the wires in the connector. You can see the standards here. I wired one outlet with the wrong standard but it still worked fine. I'm not sure why but as long as it works, I'm not complaining.


Here's a before picture of our network panel.


Here's the after picture.