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 ;)