January 24, 2004

Twins' birthday

Posted by Scott at 07:18 AM

Twins are three years old - Last Thursday was the twins third birthday. Three years ago Michelle lost more weight in five minutes than she ever will again in her life. Unfortunately, since it involved a caesarian section, she didn't feel very light on her feet the following day. The delivery occurred about 7 hours before my mom was already scheduled to arrive by plane for an extended visit. You can argue over whether Michelle delivered too early or mom arrived too late. Mom speculates that Michelle just didn't want to have any family see what she looked like that pregnant.

Our friend, Kathy, came over with her son who is a year older. Together they took the kids to downtown Milford for the Tot Drop In that occurs on Monday and Thursday mornings. When they returned there was a small celebration at the house. Later that evening when I came home, we put candles on a homemade cake, sang, and let the boys blow them out. Daniel gets a real kick out of blowing out candles so we later had to let him do it again on his slice of the cake.

Chinese New Year - Coincidentally Thursday was also the celebration of the Chinese New Year for the year of the green monkey. At work I've been joking about it being the year of the lemming. Every so often when working in customer engineering support, you feel like you're going to all fall off the edge of a cliff.

Abortion - Thursday was also the 31st anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling of Roe vs. Wade legalizing abortion. Since that decision about 40 million babies have been lost in the US due to direct surgical abortion (not including pharmaceutical means). If they were alive now, that would be a huge voting block who candidates might pander to. Unfortunately since they can't vote, it is pushed to the back burner -- unlike the senior prescription drug benefit. Seniors do vote. About 3,000 people died in the World Trade Center collapse on September 11th. It totally turned around US policy and caused the spending of billions and incited us to controversial wars in the Middle East. Over 3,000 are surgically aborted every day but we dare not try to do anything to stem that number for fear of interfering with abortion on demand for any reason. This past year NH tried to get a parental abortion notification law on the books. Notification, not consent, just notification. It was soon struck down by our state courts.

Abby's second tooth - As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, Abby had an adult tooth that was coming in behind one of her bottom baby teeth. Since the development was far along, she needed to have the baby tooth extracted. This was the first time one of our kids needed to have a tooth pulled. I took her to the dentist Friday to have them pull it. She was a little teary eyed when they administered the Novocain shot but overall I was proud of her. She held still, opened wide, and kept her eyes closed. The dentist gave her a cute little plastic treasure chest to keep her tooth in for the tooth fairy. She also got a purple balloon and a "best kid of the day" award for being a good sport. As another consolation I bought her Super Mario Advance 4 for GameBoy. She has always been our best super Mario player in the household so I thought she would enjoy the latest incarnation of the series. Abby, Claire, and I played if for about an hour that evening. Let's just hope that Abby's adult tooth now drifts forward into the gap.

Mom's night out - Friday night Michelle joined several other moms from the Souhegan Valley Family Connection for a mom's night out. This time they chose the new Panera Bread on Amherst Street in Nashua. While I've been there several times because it's close to work, this was her first time there. As cooped up as winter can make a stay-at-home mom feel, the mom's nights out are a nice break.

Comments

Scott,
Did you get the gameboy adapter for the gamecube, so they can play on the tv? It is funny that quite a few of the games for GBA are just old Super Nintendo games from about 1992. I think i got rid of my SNES a few years ago to the Tarpeys. Now that whole system fits into a gameboy.

Posted by: Chris at January 24, 2004 07:27 AM

Hi Chris,

It's funny you should mention the GameCube's GameBoy Player module. That was our original motivation for buying the GameCube. Claire and Abby were enjoying their GameBoys and I thought it might be nice to play the games "on the big screen". This way Michelle might know what Abby is talking about when she describes various levels of the various GameBoy games. We bought the 'Cube a few months before the adaptor came out and then picked up the adaptor the week it came out. At the time the only fun 'Cube game for the whole family was Mario Party 4. Luckily since then there's been Mario Party 5, Mario Golf, Mario Kart, and a few other decent titles. But we still spend a good deal of time just playing GameBoy games on the 'Cube. The graphics are cheesy by comparison, but the games are still quite challenging. The downside is that most of those games are single player, but that works well with Abby for those times Claire is away at school.

Michelle just told me that we got your gift for Timothy's upcoming birthday. Thanks so much. She said that it looks like the Cubs outfit should fit great this spring when he'll need it most for going outside. By then he should be walking -- scary, eh? How will we reign him in and keep him out of the street?

Posted by: Scott at January 24, 2004 09:31 AM