Busy Summer

We have been very busy having too much fun so this post will mostly be a bullet list of what we have been doing. If you ask Trey, he will say that July is only about his birthday. Every morning in July he has told us how many days until his birthday. He turned 6 years old on Wednesday. We went as a family to Applebees to celebrate.

On Friday we had some of his friends over for his party. He had a great time running around with the other boys.

We live next to a couple of lakes so we like to go and swim. We tried out a new sunscreen that is advertised as waterproof. Unfortunately for our whitey white son Trey, we found out the advertising was false. Marisa felt so bad that she made a lifelong promise to never use anything other than bullfrog on him. After three attempts we were finally able to hook up with our friends the Chapmans. The picture below is the 40 pounder club. All three kids weigh between 39 and 40 pounds and their ages (from L to R) are 6/2/4.

Last week Trevor had a girlfriend, it looks like this week it was Beckham's turn.

• we had lunch with some distant cousins of Marisa's family. Last time we hooked up with them it was fun back in 2002.
• Marisa (AKA - sugar momma) must have taught the following to Trevor because I know that I didn't. He had eaten some ice cream and then was going to get a couple of skittles. Before eating them he got a drink of water from the sink. Then he ate his skittles. I asked why he did that and he told me it resets your taste buds so you can taste the sugar in the skittles better. Good thing this family has a dentist in it...
• Trey really wanted a roboraptor when they came out. We didn't want to spend that much money on what we thought was a stupid toy. They updated that toy to the roboreptile, again $200 was way too much. Luckily Marisa found one for $30 so Trey had, "the best birthday ever!" after getting a long coveted toy.
• I did some severe damage to my right hand. Luckily I can still work, but it did make me consider raising my disability insurance. After going out to eat I was putting the boys in the car. Beckham started jumping in a puddle and then took off running in the parking lot when I told him to stop and come back. I ran after him, grabbed him mid-air as he jumped toward a new puddle, tried to stop on the edge of the water and my feet slipped out from under me. To protect us as I fell I stuck out my right hand. Unfortunately the bottom inside edge of my palm went from rib eye to hamburger, all the way to the muscle. Pictures would not be good to look at...
• I started a new blog for all my political/religious/otherwise over-the-top rants and raves. I decided the family blog didn't fit well so they have their own home now. Beware, those that are easily provoked to heated disagreement should shy away, but if you like to pontificate, philosophize or just be a silent onlooker feel free to come on over. The first post is my reasons why, future ones will be my thoughts and feelings on my sleeve.
• Trey's birthday was difficult for Beckham. He was jealous of all the attention Trevor was getting and wanted it to be his birthday as well. He found a birthday party supply catalog and picked out exactly what he wanted for his birthday. He tried to inform us every day after Trevor did his birthday countdown that that day was actually his birthday.
• After being scared of water Trevor became an official swimmer. He held his breath under water for 7+ seconds and swam a few feet all by himself. He was very proud and attributed it to being 6 years and 3 days old now.
• One benefit to being the second child is that Beckham learned to count from his older brother. He counted to 13 all by himself the other day and we really haven't worked with him on numbers more than 5 before. What a surprise that was.

Me at age almost 13. I can't believe how skinny I was...so sad. At least I am making up for it now I guess. I am the one in the red shirt, my younger cousin is in the red jacket w/ socks up to his thighs!

---

Blog Program

So a couple people emailed, 1 person asked in person and a couple commented about help on using the Blog feed program. I don't know if everyone was serious, but here is a step by step program on how to use one...

1. First get the RSS Feed program (AKA RSS agregator) by going to http://www.sharpreader.net/
   
2. At that web page click on "To get the latest version (0.9.7.0), either download the installer..." this is near the top of the page.
   
3. It will have you save the following file "SharpReader0970_Setup" to your computer.
4. When it finishes downloading, open it.
5. This will start the "setup wizard."
6. Run through the installation and open the program when done
7. when that happens you will see the following on your screen...
8. The program works like an email program. You have a list of folders on the left, a window on top to view what is in a folder when you click on it and then the majority of the window shows what a blog post has when you click on that post in the upper window.
9. I would delete all the blogs that come with the program by right clicking on a blog and choosing "unsubscribe"
10. To add a blog:
11. go to the blog you want to add and scroll to the bottom of the screen.
12. You will see something like this (on our blog)...
13. In the red circle it says, " Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)"
    
14. Right click on the "Posts (Atom)" part and choose an option that says something like, "Copy link location," or "Copy shortcut."
15. Go to the new program you installed and click on the address bar on the top. It will be the same type of box you type a web address into.
16. Right click in that box and paste the address you copied from the blog
17. In the case of our blog it should paste the following..."http://calderwood.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default"
18. After pasting it, hit enter on your keyboard
19. This will load the blog feed into the program.
20. To the left of the address bar there is a button that says "subscribe."
21. Click that and it will add the blog feed to the left window of the program.
22. Now every time a new post is made to the blog it will show up in this window by changing the font of the blog title to BOLD.
23. The blog posts will appear in the window to the right. Ones you have not read will have a closed envelope next to them.
24. Once read the envelope will change to open
25. If you want to add the RSS feed of the posts made to a blog do the following:
26. Paste the regular blog feed address into the address bar...again, for our blog it would be "http://calderwood.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default"
27. Before hitting enter change the word "posts" to "comments"
28. Now the address will look like this..."http://calderwood.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default"
29. Hit enter
30. Click on the subscribe button to the left of the address bar
31. You change add folders for organization, you can change how often the program updates (default is 1 hour), you can add RSS feeds from anything that has one. Most newspapers, blogs, etc have one. Just look for a button that says "XML," "Atom," or "RSS" and copy the link to the program.

Let me know if you have problems. BTW, you need your computer turned on and connected to the internet ;)

Blogalicious part duece

Here is the promised picture of Caeden's teeth for my mother...not a good smile, but that is as good as we have for now.


Here are a couple pix of each boy to see how they compare at six months.



Bex at 6 months...





Trey at six months...


This is Beckham eating his favorite thing in the world..ice cream...and loving every second of it.



Marisa has really gotten into her flowers this year. She took a BUNCH of pictures so I thought she would like to have a few posted here.





Now to the blogalicious part. Many friends and family have started blogging over the past few months. I previously put all those w/ RSS feeds on my MY YAHOO home page so that I could see when they updated. That sometimes didn't show updates for a few hours to a couple days and it took a while to scan over them all to see which ones had new posts. As usual, someone created a program to do that for you. I searched around and the best free one that I found is Sharp Reader that you can download and check out here. It is nice and makes it easy to keep up an all the blogs.

Marisa and I often post to others people's blogs and they sometimes even comment-back to what we have said. I think the comment-back often gets missed because I don't frequently recheck comment sections once I have commented. Most blogs have a link to add an RSS feed for a specific post and all the comments that get added to it, but not all comments made to the blog. I found out a way to get the feed of ALL comments made to a blog. To do it you must do the following:

Look at the RSS feed for your blog. You can right click on the link near the bottom of the blog that says something like the following:

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)

and then right click on "Posts (Atom)" and choose something like, "Copy link location." You can paste that somewhere and see what it is, mine is http://calderwood.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default. Just change the word "posts" to the word "comments" and add that to whatever you use for your RSS feeds. My blog post feed is http://calderwood.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default. Now you will see all comments made to that specific blog. By the way, this only works with Blogger blogs, but 95% of the blogs out there are from Blogger. If you want to do it, but are having problems just shoot me an email.

Laissez Faire

First off, a couple quick updates before I get to my lengthy post...

Caeden got his first teeth (O/P for all the dental geeks) this past week. He was a little fussy as most kids are, so we are glad they came in quickly. It will be frustrating to not easily pacify him with a finger in the mouth anymore. Those sharp teeth can hurt! The above pic is him sleeping on the beach after having too much fun for a six month old. Since he won't open his mouth very often to show his teeth we have the following, over-closed mouth picture.
This is crazy Bex jumping off of the playset, soda in-hand, without a spill. He loves to do it, and is...as I just said...crazy!
More crazy stuff. For the first time Caeden used his rolling skills to try and roll out of the swing. Luckily Marisa noticed before he did it and watched him while I grabbed the camera for a quick pic.

Now to my soap box...we had a couple of big decisions to make this past week. One of which was to seriously consider moving to a different house in our neighborhood to get off of our street that has become too busy w/ speeding cars going into the development. Anyway, we decided no, but the process made us take a serious look at our last few years deciding to live where we now live, and how we get spiritual answers to big decisions. I have come to learn that my original assumptions were backwards as to how the Lord helps guide us. The term Laissez Faire came to mind. My new theory is that the Lord is more "hands off" on things like big decisions and more non-laissez faire on our day to day activities than I originally thought. For example...in dental school we spent a lot of time thinking about where we could possibly live to satisfy the many things we wanted in a ward/neighborhood/economy/school system/outdoor activities/temple/family/etc... Eventually we settled on Maple Valley, Washington and more specifically the Maple Woods development. We felt good about the decision when we made it. Two years later we look back on the past few years and the decision process for this major choice we made in our lives. Hind sight is definitely 20/20 because I can see various points along the path that we received a little nudge here and a little guidance there to help us make the correct decision. We feel very strongly that this was the perfect location for us to be, for many reasons.

I used to think...or maybe just hoped so much that I mostly thought...that big/important decisions deserved a larger spiritual guidance due to their large importance. I guess they still do recieve a larger portion, but not a direct hit-you-in-the-face answer like I wanted. Listening to my new favorite podcast today, I heard a great reference to this. The interviewed guest said that revelation (this was for Pres. David O. McKay and the priesthood to all worthy males issue) is a process with events along the way, not a specific event in most instances. Too true.

Speaking of this podcast and spiritual guidance on difficult questions...
I heard a great episode that answered some questions that have bothered Marisa and me for a long time. We know of a few people who have sadly left the church lately. Most of them for issues that we ourselves have questioned in the past. I guess the main difference is that no matter how disturbing some questionable new information may be, I KNOW that at one time I received a spiritual manifestation through the Holy Spirit that the Book of Mormon IS the word of God...no question. That being said, I didn't see an angel or feel fire in my veins...I have experienced emotions/feelings that were soft, peaceful, satisfaction and love on many instances reaffirming this to me. THEREFORE, I know that despite how bizzare some issue may seem, I know that with more information and explanation in the future I will come to understand it. Difficult things roll of my back rather than knocking me off the tracks, or in Mormon lingo...away from the Iron Rod.

So, for both Marisa and me the biggest problem that we have dealt with is the awkwardness of the temple ceremony. I won't speak of anything that is sacred so don't worry. The clothing...we've always wondered...will we really wear that in the Celestial Kingdom? The ceremony, is that really what happened in ancient temple ceremonies (like in the time of Adam)? Why is it so very similar to the Masonic ceremony? Etc, etc. Well, this well done podcast had an episode on just this issue. It answered every question I ever had on the subject and as the podcast author (interviewer) said, "this is now a non-issue for me." We both very much enjoyed it and thought we would post about it here for those of you that may have had similar questions. There isn't a very good organized place for direct, honest, non-biased answers to questions like this. A few people associated with things like this podcast, bloggernacle.com, ldsblogs.com and my long time personal favorite fairlds.org are trying to make a localized, easy to use place for just that. As many of you know, if you google an lds subject trying to get info for a talk or personal research, the majority of what you find is information on anti-lds websites. I guess the saying is true too often..."you can leave the church, but you can't leave it alone!"

Now, I'll get down from my soapbox.

July fun

After having two quick years go by, which was way too long, we were able to spend some time with our old college friends the Runyan family. It was nice to catch up and see how our families are changing. The kids had a great time getting to know each other all over again. Just like last time they had lots of fun with each other. By the end of our time together Trey and Morgan started doing anything they could to be "closer" and have fun together. Here Trey was combing Morgan's hair for about 15 minutes because they both felt that it needed to be smooth ;)


We took everyone to Snoqualmie Falls to see the great sight and went on a hike that turned out to be too hot and long for all those little legs.


Someone looked like he could hike for a long time w/o getting tired...



As usual...the dads worked hard w/ the kids and the mothers just talked....


Although Caeden isn't as big as Bex was, it looks like we are going to have another chunky baby that likes to eat.

Bike Ride

You may remember from a previous post that I see elk frequently on my drive to work. That usually happens about 5-10 minutes from our house, but never right by our home. I went for a bike ride recently and saw some this time in our neighborhood. The picture below shows our development and where I saw the elk (the map is from google and taken a couple of years ago as they were building the houses). In the middle of the development there is a little road that goes off through thee trees and goes to what looks like a little golf course. They built two drainage ponds and made a trail for walking and biking. I went down there at dusk (which is 10pm here this time of year) and saw 4 elk, 2 deer, 1 rabbit, 6 ducks as I rode. The elk were just walking out of the trees coming from Ravensdale lake. I went back last night to see if I could see any and take some pictures, but with all the fireworks going off at someone's house for an early celebration I think they were too scared to come out to the ponds from the forest and I didn't see any.