Hands and Splashes

Last weekend my mom came down and spent some time with us. Also during that time, Keagan had her first official bath with splashing. She had a jolly time. Smiling and splashing around. It was quite cute.


Keagan also uses her hands now. Around the 15th, she would slowly move her hands toward objects, sometimes getting them, sometimes not. Then if she did get it, she'd try to put it in her mouth, but usually miss and get it in her eye. Since then, she's pounced on objects. She'll go real slow, then all of a sudden jerk both hands towards the object, almost always hitting it. And then she could move things to her mouth just about every time. But around last Friday she starting being successful in grasping something in front of her and then getting it to her mouth. Now she will even grasp for things not in front of her. She gets ambitious and leans towards things, staring with her little upper lip making a fish face as she tries to get the thing she wants.

We've also been working on teaching her a trick. But I'll wait until she can do it before I try to explain it.

Here she is entertained by a candle. It looked pretty neat flickering through the jar.


We also bought the game Wasabi. Its quite fun!

Happy Birthday, Nikki!

But I don't have any pictures from this weekend of her. :( Our camera's battery died and I didn't bring the back up. So, others have pictures, but not me.

Instead, I do have a description of what we did. Saturday was Nikki's 4th Birthday party. She had a beach theme and it was cute. There was 3 pools, the largest was 2.5' deep, the smallest was about 24" in diameter and about 4 inches deep. Guess what pool Keagan, Cassidy, and Raegen went in? :) Oh, I wish I had a picture of it.

Nikki got lots of gifts. Shannon, Jenette, Chris, and I got her Kids of Catan. I want to know how it works out. It looks pretty good.

Here are some pictures of Keagan, looking cute.


She's stylin' in a Student's t-rex onesie. :)


She likes to chew on things and drool and suck. Things like pacifiers, her hands, her clothes, Shannon's fingers. Like this:

Dominion or Small World

I had my 6 week doctor check-up last week. And he said it looks like its healing well. I feel like its healing well, too. One spot on the incision did bleed a teeny bit on the 3rd, but it is all good.


Last week I worked on thing for my Etsy shop. I got some more things posted, but no other exciting news from there. If you haven't been in a while, you can go check out my goods for sale: Nausicaa Distribution.


We had a friend/coworker and his wife over for some games on Saturday! That was fun. We played Dominion and Small World. Keagan was pretty good during the time, too. It was nice to have some people over. :)


I also tried to make some apricot jam with the apricots we brought back from Jayme's house. I cooked it too much and it's very, very thick.

Last Weekend Sans Baby

So, this is it. This is my last weekend with my family consisting of two people, Shannon and I. Even if she doesn't come on her own, Tuesday night I will be induced and one way or another she'll probably be here on Wednesday the 19th. Crazy.

So what are we doing you ask?

Just chillin'.

So far I've taken a nap, wonderful. Played Gladius with Shannon, also wonderful*. I've made coffee cake muffins with coffee, yummy. I weeded and trimmed some of our backyard "landscaping," looks much better. We planted two blueberry plants, sweet. I've done some random cleaning and laundry as well.

And it's only 8pm on Saturday. :)

*This game, Gladius, is awesome! Probably my favorite video game ever. We have the Game Cube version. It was released in 2003, so it's 7 years old. I'm sure other people won't like it as much as we do, but it's really fun. The story is lame, which is fine, I don't play video games for the story (generally). But the way you battle is what is cool. Instead of both people fighting at once, or pushing a button to kick or what not, you have to push the right button at the right time. So in the picture below, the bar on the bottom is the attack bar. You want to time it just right so that you hit the A button when the little slider is in the red. The orange is okay, and the blue is a miss.


But there are more versions of the attack bar. Sometimes you have to hit 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 buttons one one bar like above. Sometimes you have to aim for a green section in the middle of an entire orange bar. Sometimes you have to match the order of buttons shown in a certain amount of time. And each type of character's bar moves at different speeds. It's fun. I like it. Shannon and I beat the game once a few years back in Jardine. Last week or so we decided to play it again. :)

Trans Siberian Orchestra

This past Friday, Shannon and I, joined by some friends and family, went to watch Trans Siberian Orchestra at the BOk Center!
We've been the past two years, but in Wichita. This time we didn't have to travel (but other's had to go further). It was fun. The show was pretty much the same, but still entertaining. The lights and lasers are fabulous as is the music. They played a lot from their new album after the Christmas show part. That was fun.


Andy, Jenette, Chris, Michelle, and Coleman all came down Friday evening to watch with us. That was nice, so see friends and family again! Michelle and Coleman had to leave early on Saturday for Michelle's going away party (she's studying in Europe next semester!!).


The remainder of us watched Zombieland at the dollar (fifty) theater. I really enjoyed the movie. It was just entertaining. Not trying to be all realistic and stupid funny and love-story based. Although there were glimpses of all three, the movie wasn't driven by any of them. Just fun. Shannon and I would definitely like to own that movie. Good zombie fun.

Andy left after that and dinner at Cafe Ted's. So, the four of us (Jenette, Chris, Shannon, and me) went to Old Navy (who has no maternity clothes... half the point for going) and Barnes and Noble. We bought Cranium Party Playoff. It was entertaining, but not fabulous. It was also only 25$, which is cheap for a game.


However, we also played Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game. That was more fun (also more game-like, less party-like). Chris and Jenette played the heros and won on the very last turn. :) Good times.

Monday was basically just fooding and then saying bye to Nette and Chris. Shannon and I (some together, some not) cleaned, sewed, trimmed hedges (and cut the extension cord...I'm too careless), put up outdoor Christmas lights, and hung out. A nice weekend at home.

The Lone Star State

This weekend I made my first trip to Texas. I've never been before and K-State Hockey scheduled a weekend of games down there. So, Jenette, Shannon, and I went down to watch the team. Michelle rode with us too, but she goes to every weekend the team plays (I mean she is a coach).


Michelle and Jenette got here Friday night and we at at Abuelo's and then went back to our house and played Pandemic with 4 people. This game is really fun. Newgen bought it for Shannon for Christmas and we've only been able to play it with the two of us. That has been fun, but everytime we play we want to try it with more people. So we got our chance and it was really fun. We played about 3 times and lost all 3 times, but were SO close the last time!

Then Saturday we left for Texas. Before we went to watch the games, Shannon, Jenette, and I went to Fort Worth to see Audri's new place. Her and TJ (her husband) just got it 1 week ago after a few months of chaos. But thanks to a really nice guy who works with TJ they got a HUGE house. I mean, huge! It's got like 5 bedroom all with walk-in closets half the size of the bedrooms. The master suite has a bathroom that is substatially larger than our upstairs bedrooms. Plus there are 3 living areas, a big kitchen, and a nice sized back yard! It's pretty groovy.


While there we also saw Brenda and Audri and TJ's two kids. One of which is 1 week older than my niece. It was fun to see how similar yet different they are.

Okay, then to the rink to watch the team. They played Texas Tech first and pretty much stunk. They looked slow and not together. It was rather frustrating. Plus it was the first time I've watched the team and not played on the team. I'm sure that helped in my opinions.

The second game Saturday night was against Univeristy of Texas. We played really well. We were tied 1-1 for a long time and then we were down 2-1 for the rest of the second period (I think). But then UT scored a bunch and we couldn't match. We ended up losing, but the team played together and I think they matched/out-skated UT in the game as well.


After that, we met up with Lyndo at Applebee's and had some un-impressive food. Applebee's really isn't that good. Everytime I go I am just disappointed. But, not many places are open past midnight.

Sunday we woke up and watched 2 more games. We played Texas A&M and University of Texas Arlington, lost both. But again, they played pretty well. In the A&M game, one of our defenseman covered the puck in the crease, which resulted in a penalty shot. C-r-a-z-y. You never see penalty shots.

Well done, goalie.

Besides not having enough shots on goal, there were a number of absurd penalites. The refs in Denton called a totally different game than the refs in St. Louis. Plus it seemed to be incosistent at times. In one game, one of our guys got called twice for roughing while using his body on the boards to get the puck. Totally clean at St. Loius. In the same game, one of our guys got elbowed against the boards and got his upper arm injured a bit, but nothing was called. And we weren't the only ones a little taken by this. A few players and fans from other teams commented to us that it should have been called, but eh. What are you gonna do?

It was a good weekend. It was awesome to see the team and talk with old friends. I didn't realize how much I missed friends and family until I saw how nice it was to just sit and talk with them in the bleachers.

Happy Graduation

For my graduation my Aunt Diana gave me a gift card. Shannon and I finally used it, 8 months after I received it. We did an excellent job of spending just under the amount without really trying. After we paid and used a 1$ off coupon, we had about 1.50$ left on the card. What did we get?

Well, basically we got some shelves. We needed another bookshelf for Shannon's office. No pics of that, but you can probably guess what it looks like. We actually could use one more.

Then we got some shelves for our games. We bought one a while back in Jardine, but it was looking quite full.


So we wanted to get another one. You know, so all of our games could fit on the shelf without having some on the floor and stacked almost to the ceiling and well, just randomly put in a spot where they would fit.

So we did. And they were on sale to make it even sweeter. So now all of our games are nicely organized onto two large shelves, with a cute little one next door for other random gaming things, like scenery.


It's nice to have things organized and stowed.

The Second Half of Christmas

In Tulsa's Whole Foods, we met up with Chris and Jenette. We bought some foods and began to celebrate Christmas Eve and day again. We made lots of yummy food and played some games and did more gifting! It was rather fun.


On Saturday, we ate at Casa Bonita in Tulsa! Crazy! It's not as big as the one in Denver, but it's done in the same fashion. It was groovy. I would really like to go there with Nikki, Jay. So, we need to get on planning a trip. Like I said, we played games. We played Ticket to Ride twice over the weekend (pictured below) and Formula De once. Both good games. Although TtR is a really good game.


Sunday was hockey, a ref vs. player fight (including hockey stick to the head accompanied by blood, I'm making it sound a lot less big-of-a-deal than it was), Boomer-Q, hanging with Rhonda and Michelle (because Nette and Chris had to head home), and some poor Bronco football.

Theif

Michelle stole my title.


Merry Christmas it was, twice! Shannon and I headed up to Wichita on Tuesday after a quick 1 hour side trip back to the house to get the gifts for our moms that had been left by the front door by the delivery man.

When we finally made it to Wichita, we did a bit of shopping and went to bed. Shannon and I started off our Christmas Eve by getting lost in Wichita trying to find Old Town and eventually meeting Andy 1/2 an hour late for lunch at Hana Cafe. Then, later on that day, Mom decided she would get all nauseous and make her daughters cook. So Maria, Shannon, and I made some crab sauce with pasta, Caesar salad, mussels, and shrimp scampi. There were 10 adults and 2 toddlers for dinner. It was a good time and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, except for Mom. She didn't eat and kinda didn't have a good time.

We then slept and eventually got up on Christmas morning for some breakfast and gifting. Nikki is adorable.

We had some more good food. This time, Jayme and Charles made it.


Shannon and I bought ourselves Ticket to Ride: Marklin edition. That game is very good. We played twice at Mom's. Carcassone was also played and a poor black meeple was fed to and partly eaten by Atari. I tried to save him.


Friday we ate breakfast at Charles & Jayme's place then met up with Rhonda & Michelle for lunch with my mom. After that, we said good bye to Mom and drove down to Tulsa. But this post has enough pictures for now. I'll post about Christmas #2 laters.

Proto-Hagus

Lookie whose home and on the computer! Here are some pictures of what I've been up to.

There was Thanksgiving with Mom, Jayme, Maria, Charles, Nikki, Tommy, and Shannon.


Then there was Thanksgiving at Rhoda's with about 17 other people.


The following weekend, Shannon and I returned to Wichita for the Trans Siberian Orchestra concert. Awesome.

The next day (which was 3 days after my mom's 50th birthday), Jayme, Maria, and I threw a surprise birthday party for Mom. At Laser Quest. Yes. That was awesome. Mom had no idea and everyone (almost 30 people) seemed to have a good time. Jayme made some foods, Maria got some drinks, and I brought the cake (with 50 candles). It was great fun and Laser Quest has their show organized. I mean, there were I think 3 parties going on and it never got annoying. Plus everything ran on time and was fun! Not to mention that Wichita's Laser Quest is the best laser tag I've been too. I've also visited one in Olathe and one in Colorado Springs.

"Second Place"

For lunch today Shannon and I participated in a ping-pong turny at the office. Jen ordered Hideaway pizza (mmm...salami) and we played some games. Shannon and I actually got 2nd, but that is only because we won the for fun bracket and then got to play the two gents below who won. The prize was the Hulk gloves.

It was fun.

H20MELN

watermelon watermelon

It's Time...

I set a goal for myself while in Garden this break. I decided that I could and would beat DDR Hottest Party before school started again. The last thing to do was to beat a boss in a battle. I had to get 3 or fewer boo's on basic or higher. The song was a 6 (out of 10) flame song. I had not done great.

Being the dork I am, I kept track of my number of boo's the last few time I tried to play. I got 28, 14, 6, 20, 9, 7, 6, 11, 11, 9, 22, 7, 8 14, and 16. Not good enough. So today I played some more. I got 6, 10, 11, and 2! Woo hoo! Low enough.

But my score didn't beat his. So sad. But, not a quitter I tried again.

Again 2 boo's! And this time I was good enough! Woo hoo! I got the credits, I beat the game!

Christmas Part 2

While in GC, we didn't take many pictures. We had a great time with extended family. Christmas was fun at Rhonda's. Then we headed to Grandma Fuller's for lunch and family. There was ham loaf, rumors of undercooked ham loaf, doodle bears, Wii, dog piles and more!


The kids are all getting so big. It's fun to talk to them and watch them play. The next day we went to Bobbie and Jeff's for some chili and some more games. There were many games to be had in Garden, on the Wii and off.

We left of Friday and headed to Wichita for one last Christmas celebration with my mom and sister this time. Oh, I almost forgot!! For the Christmas Eve service, Shannon wore his black suit from Rhonda and Dave's wedding. He hasn't worn it in a while so, we checked to make sure it still fit.

It did.

Food and Games

Shannon has been giving me many fun things for my birthday week. So far I've gotten nifty-gifty "The Office" pens, Big Brain Academy, blueberry almond oatmeal, yellow curry rice mix, asparagus risotto mix, My Sims, dark angels green paint, and a garlic press.

Now some of it is just stuff we needed/ran out of. But some of it is purely fun! The two games are very fun to play and I have put in about about 11 hours between the two since Monday evening.

School on the other hand, has been rather hard. We have a really nasty STAT 860 test on Wednesday that was last Wednesday moved to Friday moved to Monday moved to Wednesday. Jeepers. I just want to get it over with.

Oh, and the weather has been real nice lately. It's cooling off and raining a bunch. We have finally had reasons to make soup and our new Hot Apple Cider Tea. That stuff is good.