The Pool

We got a pass this year for Cedar Rapids pools. It has been a lot of fun for the kids. We have typically gone to either Lake McBride or Palo every week or two in past years but are now ready for more frequent and shorter trips.

Gabe and Asher are both at about the same swimming level, which is that they really don't yet. They dunk and jump and splash around, but so far no more. Hopefully going there a lot more will help, as well as seeing other kids they want to play with in the deeper water. Isaiah loves to run around right in the entry of the zero-depth part. He will only go about a foot deep before turning around, but he has a blast and can be allowed to play there while also keeping track of the other two easily.

Cedar Rapids has five or six pools and two of them are great. The one in our neighborhood is small, but fairly pleasant. The two gripes I have are the rules and the closures of the deep end. Never before in my life have I heard of a pool closing the deep end for "cloudiness." Apparently after a few hours of laborious exertion the lifeguards (ave age of 13?) get to decide that "cloudiness" prohibits them from manning that extra position and they shorten their rotations. The only part of the pool that is enjoyable for anyone over 8 is off-limits. I looked into that cloudy abyss and saw the bottom vividly. If someone had dropped a coin I could've told them heads or tails.

Think about the unmanageable complexity of watching one person at a time jump into the water and then making sure they reach the ladder about 30 seconds later. It's unfathomable that we don't have an intellect test for hiring that position.

Someday my grandkids will hear my stories of diving boards and backflips and say "yeah, but that was back in the dark ages..." That's unfortunate.

Home with Isaiah

We have settled in at home for a few days now. I still have another week off of work while Elizabeth recovers. We have been getting meals from family and church friends, and that has been much appreciated. I can cook a little, but I have enough other things to do that it is nice not to have to.

Today I bought blank CD's to start mailing the video of baby out. I am posting some new pics we just got developed today as well.

Everything is going very well. Baby slept almost the whole night last night already. We have been lucky with that on all three boys. He never cries for more than a minute and that is rare. He is a hungry little guy, though. He nurses a lot.

D-Day

Well, here we are at the hospital preparing for Elizabeth to have the C-section. Mercy hospital is by far the "other" hospital after St. Luke's in everyone's perception, but we find it to be nice and quiet. There are three of twenty rooms occupied in the recently remodeled birthplace. The nurses read your history and bother to get to know you pretty well. It's very nice.

We left the boys at Elizabeth's parents' house last night. That was not fun. We were trying to get home to get some sleep, but we also wanted to stay until they fell asleep. They were whining and crying and getting out of bed. Finally, Elizabeth's dad went down to keep them company in the basement bedroom and that seemed to be going well when we left.

I'm about to search for some coffee and get into scrubs. I've got the video camera battery charging and my borrowed Tablet PC is obviously online and working. Elizabeth has been flipping channels since her IV was put in. I have been reading Michelle Malkin's In Defense of Internment.

The Night Before Zayza

Lord willing, Isaiah will be born at 7:30am tomorrow. His brothers are staying tonight at Elizabeth's parents since we will have to be at Mercy hospital at 5am. Asher has successfully nicknamed him Zayza already using the talent for nicknaming passed down from his father. We will be posting pictures several days afterwards since we scan photos taken on film still. We will edit a short video to burn to Video CD as well if any friends or family are interested.

Third Carseat

We just bought a new carseat since our old one was in rough shape. We expected to put Gabriel in the rear bench seat in his booster since he can operate the seat belt latch on his own now. Then Asher and Isaiah would go in the middle row buckets, right? Then each one can be easily accessed from outside the van using the sliding doors on each side. Well, it looks like that doesn't work so well anymore. The new carseat has a handle that protrudes farther than the old one, and it is illegal to leave it up and not fold it back while driving. In order to fit it into that middle bench, the front passenger seat has to be so far forward that it would be uncomfortable for most adults. This carseat stuff is getting ridiculous. We have one of the largest minivans on the road and we still have space problems? The only reasonable solution looks to me like removing one of the middle row benches. This allows easier access to the rear bench where Gabriel and Isaiah will go. Then Asher will be in the lone middle row bucket.

This is typical liberalism at work. They want gas to be $4 per gallon so that we will be forced economically to conserve it and use alternatives. They want everyone to ride a moped or drive a Prius. At the same time, however, they legislate Big Brother laws that require monstrous carseats for babies and cumbersome boosters for kids until they are old enough to drive themselves. You'd think that in this technological age there would be superior performing carseats that would be smaller than the old ones. You'd also think rear seat access in cars would have improved. So here we are with Big Brother trying to figure out why we won't drive our families around in 1/2 scale cars with carseats that barely fit through doorways. Maybe the real problem is that liberals rarely have more than one kid, and they drive their Lincoln Navigators to their tree-hugger rallies anyway.

King David

Gabriel and Asher have taken well to their Bible stories. We read to them every night before bed from a Children's Bible that gives the main stories at a level just slightly above Gabriel's comprehension. Asher just picks out phrases and enjoys the sound to fall asleep to. They also have a movie they watch about David. They are obsessed with it. All day long the only thing they like to talk about is David killing the lion, David killing Goliath, and Saul throwing spears at David. They swing their homemade slings and swords around and fight all the time. It is amazing how quickly they learn the stories. Of course, the most interesting ones right now are the ones with weapons or animals.

New position for Paul!

I received the offer and accepted it. My boss is agreeing to a Feb 5th transition date, which will likely be right when I get back from my week and a half of vacation watching Gabe and Asher while mom nurses baby and regains strength.

I am reading up on t6he Ada programming language right away to prepare for the move. I'll be going from a nasty steel production warehouse from the sixties into a new single-story office building with huge windows. That will be nice. I'll be around a lot of other engineers my age and will just have a much nicer environment. Exciting!

New position for Paul?

I interviewed for another position within Rockwell Collins today and am very excited about it. It is a software engineering position. If hired, I will be writing test software for Rockwell Collins government systems products such as cockpit displays. The job requires hardware knowledge, which is most of my background, and is a low-level software position with some application writing. I will get to use some C, but most of the software will be written in Ada. I have never used Ada, so I am reading up on it now. It is only used by flight critical applications for the most part. It is very readable and structured. I am really looking forward to this opportunity, and based on how the interview went today, I think I'm going to get it.

Two weeks until baby time

Boy number three is scheduled to be born by C-section on the 24th. We are pretty sure he will named Isaiah. Asher has already nicknamed him Zayza. Gabe is looking forward to having a baby brother around. It will be a major adjustment for Asher, but he will be good just by imitating Gabe.

Elizabeth is ready to get this boy out. She has had contractions every evening lately and she is not very comfortable.

Camcorder Shopping Experience

We finally decided this holiday season that the extra several hundred dollars required to purchase a video camera is just not going to magically appear in our budget. We've been discussing the strong desire to have one for several years, but have just never felt like it was a convenient time financially. The amount of one-time expenses we've incurred since moving to our house has been staggering. However, with Isaiah coming in January and Gabriel and Asher getting bigger, I just couldn't wait any longer. I painted the picture, for Elizabeth, of us sitting around middle-aged wishing above all else that we'd just spent that pittance on a camera so we could cherish the invaluable memories of our boys. Then I went and did several hours of internet research before departing for Best Buy.

What I found in my research was surprising. With the new DVD and hard-drive camcorders out, I just assumed they were the desirable ones and that the extra money they cost over the older digital tape style would be easily made up by their convenience and performance. The reality is much different. The DVD and hard drive cameras run about $500 right now, while the DV tape units are $300. The tape has a higher quality recording due to less compression, and fare at least as well in size, weight, and battery life. So then what I was expecting to find was that the tape units don't interface to a computer as well. Wrong. I bought a Panasonic that came with a USB2.0 port right on it. I play the tape in the camera while the free Windows Movie Maker software captures the video. I've heard that if you feel bound to spending more you should go hard drive and avoid DVD like the plague. There is very little ability to edit the video, the DVD's aren't cheap and have a lot of compatibiltiy issues, and they are only 30 min long. They are apparently for the user who just wants to shoot an event and keep the DVD as is. I intend to shoot a lot footage and then save the good parts. Who wants to end up with boxes full of unedited video to search through for days to find that one funny moment you have in mind?

Movie Maker allows me to cut the video into clips and add narration, screen titling, music, pictures, transitions, and decent video effects. The black and white effect is nice, as is slow motion and one that makes the video look like it is from an old film. The editing looks to be a lot of work, but it is amazing to have such tools for such little money. I imagine that purchased software is a lot more intuitive to use, but I think that starting out with Movie Maker will provide me with more features than I'll ever use for home videos. The plan is to make highlight videos with it that edit out the boring footage, add some background music, and then to record them to Video CD. Eventually we will probably make DVDs, but right now we don't have the hardware for that. Video CD's play in most DVD players, so I think that will work out fine for now.

Initial Post

Check one, two... Is this thing on?

This is my very first blog post. I'm excited about the idea of becoming a famous blogger one day like AllahPundit or Michelle Malkin, but the reality is that I'll probably put a few pics of the kids up and let months pass between posts about nothing. We'll see. I'd love to write some posts about politics, education, economics, and theology. I'd love to share some homeschooling experiences when that begins in the fall of 2007. I'd even like to see Elizabeth do some posting, too. I guess we'll start with some pics of the kids and see where my time and energy lead.