Hello Folks. A while back I came across this feature in Google and thought it may come in handy as a means of communicating with family and friends about our latest adventures or misadventures as the case may be. Hopefully, we can keep this updated a bit more frequently than we do our website. Feel free to leave comments by clicking in the comments section below.

Anyway to bring folks up to speed, I'm still working at the university and working toward a doctorate in Quantitative Research, Evaluation, and Measurement in Education. Interestingly, I've learned more about economics and finance as a student in Education than I ever did during my brief time as an Econ major. Go figure.

Cindy is loving life as a stay at home mom and earns some extra money doing occasional programs for the library system, as well birthday parties and takes care of a couple of other kids a few days a week. Oddly enough ever since she left the traditional work world she's been a lot busier.

Abby is now in first grade and mostly loving life. In a lot of ways she is a bevy of seeming contradictions. She loves princesses, fairies, and a number of things considered "girlie" and will rail against things that are too "boyey". Yet, she loves to hike, camp, and, as we are finding out, fish. Last week we took her out to fish for just her second time. I was a bit tentative to use live bait since I wasn't sure how she would react to impaling living things. But after an hour or so of not getting any bites using artificial bait someone gave us his leftover worms, and Abby, with an almost disturbing amount of enthusiasm, grabbed a handful and begged me to put one on her hook. Though we didn't catch anything we certainly got a lot more bites. Maybe someday we'll beat this record.

Sam is 3 1/2 and quite a little character. He is constantly playing jokes on us, mostly hiding things, or saying things to be funny, and a good number of times they actually are. Like his sister he seems to enjoy being outside especially if there is water around. He likes swimming, splashing around and generally being wet oft times to our despair. Homer Simpson meets vegansism would best describe his diet. He likes fruits and vegetables and were it not for bacon and donuts he would eat them almost exclusively. He also likes to watch golf and baseball on TV and gets quite excited when someone hits a ball, regardless of what happens to the ball-- foul balls get the same cheer as homeruns; balls in the drink get as a big a cheer from him as do holes-in-one. I'm hoping to work on that.

Anyway, that should bring you up to speed on us.

A few random thoughts:

• Boys and girls are fundamentally different and those who suggest otherwise are frankly daft.
  
• In an ironic complaint, elementary school is too academic. I question whether it's necessary to keep first graders in class for 7 hours a day, or how much value is added to their education by the 1/2 hour or so of homework we're doing nightly. Considering that Abby gets on the bus just before 9 and gets home around 5, it all seems excessive for a 6 year old.
• Pandora.com is the greatest website ever.
  
• The "Wallace and Gromit" shorts are hilarious, as is the movie.
  
• College football is starting up and this makes me happy.

Chris