Joyce is checking my blog daily, despite
the fact that I’m with her every day this weekend!! So I’ll
post and tell her that it’s awesome getting drunk with her.
Even though she is cool and hip and I’m old and mommy-ish, it’s
awesome to party together :) And extra awesome that my parents
are so cool to babysit my babies until 2am.

And I love my friends! (and Mike’s little secret) It’s
awesome to get together with friends from forever ago and it
seems like just yesterday. That’s the sign of true friends. I’m
so happy to be together again. It’s a bummer that we only
manage to get together for weddings, but at the same time it’s
also so fortunate that we are all able to get together for
weddings!

Life is good.

I drove our new (rented) minivan to get a
manicure this evening. So, what does that make me… so
excited!! We’re goin’ on va-ca-tion!!!

You know those cards they have at the
grocery store checkout that you can buy to donate money to one
cause or another? Lex likes to play with them. Last week I
bought one and put his name on it while he “helped” by putting
lots of dots all over it. This week he took one, put in on the
credit card signing platform, grabbed the pen and wrote his
name (see picture). As he wrote he said L-E-X and then he
handed the card back to me. If you look closely you can kind of
see the letters in the scribbles. He also decorated this card
with some lines and dots too. He’s so smart. :)

Eve is such a great sleeper! As I sit here
listening to Lex trying to settle himself down for a nap (by
jumping around, turning over tables, climbing on the changing
table, etc.) I wonder if she will always be a great sleeper.
She already sleeps more and more easily than he ever did,
though I suspect we’ll have our share of sleep-related problems
with her in the future too. I am very much enjoying our easy
sleeper for now :)

Lex has started blowing the minds of those
around him again. Just about anytime some one says, “careful,”
he’ll stop, look around, see the danger, and when appropriate,
lookup, and say as clear as a bell while shaking his head, “I
don’t want to fall and get hurt.” It literally sets people back
on their heels. God bless Love and
Logic.

He also shocked our
neighbor with his “applied physics,” as she puts it, when I
asked him to right her wheel borrow he had just tipped on its
side. It was empty, but it is one of those heavy metal ones
(ours is plastic and Lex could probably lift it over his
head).

So, he tugs on the handle he used
to tip it over, found too much resistance there. Immediately,
he walks around to push on the top-side, lifted it up enough
that he could get his other hand under the bottom-side, and put
it right up. He did it as smoothly and as easily as any adult
might have done with a proportionally sized wheel borrow.

She gushed for about 5 minutes strait. She
gushes about everything though. She’s great for the ego. Having
Lex for a son doesn’t hurt either. ;)

That’s right. I said it. My patent. It is
not pending anymore. It is now approved.

Tessa said I should post to the blog more and I confirmed
that it has become a family blog, not just a kid blog, so this
post is allowed. =)

Anyway, now we just
need to find $1000 to pay the USPTO to make it permanent before
July, and $5000 to file some extensions, but we’ll find the
money some where. We always do. DATDEC should be able to cover
most of it.

I’m still hoping to build a
prototype this summer, but getting DATDEC back into a
profitable state takes priority. We are setting up a server
farm but have to keep paying to host our servers else where
until that is ready. As soon as we have our servers in our own
space, I think I am going to put improvements to that business
on hold for a while and bang out this prototype.

We got about 1/2 hour at the pool today
before it started thundering. It was a lot of fun though. Lex
is such a water baby! Eve got her toes wet and seemed fairly
indifferent, but awfully cute!

The following photo contains me in a
bathing suit… consider yourself warned! :) Notice how I’m
hiding behind my tiny children? I get a kick out of bathing
suites that claim to reduce bulge, make you look slimmer,
lighter, flatter, etc. The bathing suit covers so little of
your body… no matter how slim my stomach may look, I think my
upper arms and thighs will give away the secret :) Oh well.
Swimming is fun anyway!

Lex was mad that he couldn’t get
back in the pool so he refused to smile for a picture. We took
several and this is the best of them. The promise of swimming
again on Friday didn’t seem to help. Friday is probably forever
to him :)