It seems like its been forever since I put up any news! The
past few updates were oriented toward adding to the
Sights and Sounds area. There are
tidbits of news on many different fronts. If the pieces come up in a
disconnected manner, please forgive me. I'm editing this in the
living room on my
Psion handheld
computer while Claire, Abby,
Mom and the boys are resting and relaxing. It seems so odd to
be editing web pages on a 3 year old computer that fits in your pocket
and runs on AA batteries!
As I hinted at several entries ago, the boys did very well at their baptism.
I love this sacrament. As my friend, Paul, says, "if only we could see
what is
really happening at a different level!" The boys were complete
pills as Michelle and I prepared for the morning but calmed down
completely as we headed out the door. From that moment on they were
quiet and cooperative for the next few hours. Several parish members
came to the baptism and hung around for the breakfast afterward.
Overall the event was another good example of Infant Jesus Parish
building a sense of community.
Overall our nights haven't been as bad as some folks think they must
be. The boys typically wake up between 11PM and midnight, then later
between between 2AM and 3AM. They nurse, burp, sometimes get diaper
changes, and then fall back to sleep for a few more hours. At least
they don't want to stay up. So no, we don't have major bags under our
eyes.
Now when the babies were still in the womb, ultrasounds showed that
one of the babies had fluid on the kidney. It was diagnosed as
"hydroneuphrosis" (don't quote me on that spelling). It's not a major
deal and it usually clears up but they watched it with those regular
ultrasounds. Well the babies were ultrasounded last week and they saw
the symptoms on Daniel and a bit on Michael. A more exact diagnosis
a week later showed that it had cleared for Daniel but still existed in
Michael. They will keep on eye on it but expect it will be gone within
a year.
Michelle went to the dermatologist to have a couple of moles looked at.
He thought they looked normal but did remove them for cosmetic
reasons at Michelle's request. They went for biopsies and we haven't
heard anything negative, so that should be the end of that. Michelle
goes for her 6 week postpartum checkup on Wednesday. I imagine
that after she gets a clean bill of health, she'll be eager to get back to the
YMCA.
I've been enjoying experimenting with the new camera and manipulating
the pictures. I'm now looking into various online services that help you
build online photo albums and let you have them printed. This way I
can get paper prints for our photo albums. More importantly it will allow
friends and relatives to browse and order prints of their own. There are
several good services out there I want to look over. Stay tuned.
The big news was that Claire was accepted to register for 1st
Grade next fall at Infant Jesus School. We missed the major open house
and registration that occurred near the delivery of the babies. Michelle
went in after the deadline and was told of the waiting list. About a week
later the letter came in about the acceptance. Claire is not sure what to
think about going to school after two years of home schooling. I think
she is certainly academically prepared for 1st Grade. I do wonder, though,
how she'll handle the environment change that first week.
Work has been busy. I have a bunch of trainings and meetings to attend
this upcoming week. Unfortunately one of the mandatory trainings occurs
during the Infant Jesus School open house. Michelle will go but I don't
think I'll be able to go. I have a few projects that have relatively short
deadlines. An interesting one is to reverse engineer the data that comes
out of a 3Com USB WebCamera so that we can read it on one of our
embedded processors. The goal, for the technically inclined, is to come
up with a demo of our Turbo186 processor, USB, and ethernet cores by having the
186 read the camera via USB and display the results on a web page via
ethernet. It should be cool when done, but it won't be exactly easy. I
imagine that after I get this working, it'll be ported to run on our ARC
processor, which also has our ethernet and USB running on it. If you didn't
understand those last few sentences, I apologize.