December 2010

I know we have not been posting a lot but a walking baby is a lot of work!

We had decided to give our family some portaits for Christmas and these are 2 of our favorites we wanted to share with everyone.

We may not post again until the new year by our track record so far, therefore we wanted to wish everyone a MERRY CHRISTMAS and a Happy New Year!

This IS happening

This post directed to my readers in TX. All you northers, keep your comments. Thank you, you may now return to you fireplaces.

Rupert hug

One Year Ago Today

We saw this face for the first time...and our lives have never been the same. We love our little Izzy B! Happy Birthday!

Steppin'

Labor Day in Louisville

During Labor Day weekend we decided to go up to Louisville for the long weekend. Our good friend Josh lives there and so do some of Amy's family.

We just went around town enjoying the nice weather outdoors and ate some good food. Louisville has a nice park right next to its downtown and the Ohio river where they have some fountains around for people to enjoy. The kids love this place in the summer.

Izzy also really enjoyed watching the water shoot out of the ground.

Until mom got her a bit too close and she pretty much took a bath in public.

Close to downtown is an eclectic little area on Bardstown road that is very trendy and hip with lots of local shops and eateries. We had lunch here on 2 different days and also found a homemade pie and ice cream place. It was very good ice cream and a nice treat for the warmer afternoon.

I gave Izzy a taste of my peach ice cream.

I think she liked it...

Guitar Pickin'

Isabella loves to go over to the guitar to pluck and bang on the strings.

She's also been working on her solo shredding face.

I encourage this 100%

Party #2

Party #1

Pic of the Day 9-1-10

Pic of the Day 8-31-10

She loves strumming the guitar and has started using these plastic rings as picks. I can't play the guitar within her reach anymore because she'll want to "help me play." And no, I don't play that bad!

8-30-10 Pic of the Day

Cheesin'

My Girl

On this day, 29 years ago, the world had gotten a little sweeter.

Happy Birthday to...
-my wife
-my best friend
-the best mother for our daughter
-the woman who laughs at me but mostly with me
-the one who keeps me sane
-the cook who keeps us fed
-the woman who keeps a warm home
-the girl that loves the simple things in life
-the woman who has the biggest sweet tooth, especially for chocolate
-the girl who stole me heart
-the woman who lets God mold her and is always open to the way God wants to use her
-the one who is a voice of God to me and Isabella through her actions, her words, and mostly her love
-the woman who I cannot imagine a life without.

Happy Birthday AB, I love you so much!

The Most Beautiful Girl

Amy snapped this gem of a photo while I was at work last week.
A beautiful shot of a very beautiful girl.

(Maybe I should start collecting guns, knives, or some type of intimidating weapon)

Photos from Houston

Here are some random picks of some time with my family in the Houston area over memorial day.

Bones

While Amy was in Texas with Isabella they were spending time with all the grand parents. The last stop was with my family and I joined them a few days later for the long Memorial Day weekend. On Thursday afternoon, I am at work and get a text with a picture of Isabella with something in her hand that she is putting in her mouth.

This is video of it as it happened and they sent me the text during it too.



These kinds of weird things happen with grandparents grew up in another country. Things are just different and it's something that is common in Mexico. Don't worry, if you get weirded out by it, I did too, at first.

I turned out OK under my mom's care, guess there's some reason to her rhymes.

1st Party Invite

Our little Isabella received her first ever birthday party invite for her little friend Salem. We received it in early May even though Isabella would not be able to attend because she would be in Texas with her mom visiting the g-rents. But I wanted to post the pics of her with the invite. First thing she did was put it in her mouth, typical baby.

Packing for Texas

Swing Swing

Isabella is really enjoying her time in the swing. And if it is a good night we can put her in there for quite awhile and she is very content. As is the case with this video.

We put her in there while we prepare dinner or clean up afterward and we usually have some music on. I think she really liked these tunes this night.

She has been more active in the swing, but this is what we captured for now.
My favorite part is the 24 second mark.
Enjoy!

Out at the Park

Ultimate Frisbee season has started yet again and therefore every other Sunday morning we go to the park to play in the sun. After some crazy storms yesterday, today was beautiful and it was a blast hanging out at the park. Amy played but I did not because I was nursing a bit of a headache and I knew running around would not help me.

Here's a close up I snapped of Isabella in her new sun hat.

Here is a pic of everyone out on the field. Just a glimpse of what today held, weather-wise.

My headache went away after lunch and when we got home I took advantage of the awesome weather and mowed the yard and pulled some weeds. It was a great Sunday!

Belle of the Boulevard

Last Saturday we had beautiful day and got out to do some yard work. We were finishing up as Isabella woke from her nap so we brought her outside to join us. Then we grabbed the camera and here are the pics...

Baby Food Monster

This is what she does when she loves the food. Some of the viewers of the last blog thought she was just full from the Peas video...but what we didn't show were the load of sweet potatoes she devoured after the camera stopped rolling. Much like these green beans.

Patron Saint

I work in the security/alarm business and we just had an update on the 1st quarter of 2010. One thing that was covered was the discussion of being very selective in the choice of new commercial installs because of the way the economy is still unstable.

All of that to say, the company has looked at trends of accounts that default or are very slow/late payers. If I were to ask anyone on the AR team who are the clients that are late payers, bad clients, or clients not willing to cooperate …they would all say day cares and CHURCHES!
I was shocked to find this out.
I know not all churches would be or are bad clients…but it only takes one bad apple to ruin the whole basket , right? How disheartening.

Now there are running jokes about churches not being good payers. “We should go to these churches and during the passing of the plate take our pay and leave the invoice.”

I know I have had my rants on how some churches and Christians dig a hole for the rest of us climb out of and I don’t want to be negative all of the time. But the bad always out runs the good that churches and Christians do and this is yet another example.

Maybe I should get this list and try to speak to the leaders of these churches about our responsibilities of patrons and how we should be setting the example as Christians.

First Peas

We were fortunate enough to get a handheld video camera to shoot the little moments that we knew our family would love to see. So we figured we'd shoot most of her 'firsts'

This video is of Isabella trying peas for the first time.
And she likes them as much as her daddy does, not at all, but it takes a little while for that to sink in.




I tried using the video upload on here but b/c our handheld camera records in HD it was taking forever to upload. So i started a YouTube account, since it is google linked it easy to have that setup, and you can subscribe to our account and watch any videos we upload.

How I Remember

How I remember when I used to update this ‘ol blog regularly. I was talking to a co-worker and we were discussing our houses and what we like and don’t like about them when I remember that I had an old blog post where I had posted a picture of the house. So I looked it up then I started scrolling through some of the old posts, some of them I totally forgot happened and some made me smile and giggle a bit. Oh the good ‘ol days.

I want to blog a lot more, I really do. I want everyone to see how fast Isabella is growing and developing. But I know that staying off of the computer while at home is beneficial to me as a husband and a father. I know it doesn’t take too long to type up a post, load pictures, and publish it…but I am a undisciplined man who can’t get online to do just that. I will start reading other news headlines and go to my google reader and just spend so much more time than what it takes to just blog. So if that’s a hindrance to me a little bit…I try to stay away from it as a whole. So there is my explanation in a nutshell. It frees me up to spend that quality time with my daughter and wife. The two things that I should invest my time in, aside from my spiritual feedings, of course. My iPhone is also kind of a distraction since I can do everything on the friggin’ thing…but I try to be good about that too. Not only have the blog posts slowed down but so have most of my activity on FB and Twitter, which are easily accessible via the iPhone apps.

So just here to inform you all that I am not signing off or quitting this site and I do want to post more frequently about Isabella, after all she is our little celebrity. Everywhere we go, she is a hit. But I also don’t expect any less from my own offspring ; )

Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise

During our Christmas trip to Texas Amy pulled out the Macbook to show her mom some pictures of Isabella late one night and it would not boot-up. It would boot-up to the gray screen with the apple logo but the revolving circle would just keep revolving with nothing else ever happening. I logged onto some apple forums to see if I could remedy the issue myself...but no luck after trying quite a few things.

After we got back home I booted up from the OS X start up DVD and still I could not get the computer to work with me. So I figured I should try reinstalling the OS and it should fix the issue and as I started the process I accidentally selected 'Erase and Install' instead of 'Archive and Install.' Yes, that 'Erase' meant erasing my hard drive. All of the photos, music, and tons of other misc. files and programs gone...without me ever getting the chance to back it all up. On top of that the install failed, but only after it had already erased everything.

After two trips to the Apple's Genius Bar the macbook is up and running but with a blank hard drive. I was able to find a program to transfer the music from my iPod classic (which wasn't all of it but 27 gigs of most of what we listened to anyway) and the pictures I had saved on my iPod. Luckily, Isabella's pictures from the hospital and her birth were taken with my iPhone and I had never erased them from my phone. So we still have pictures that were on our iPhones and the SD card from the camera and all the photos from our sites like Facebook and Flickr that i will transfer over. One of the trips to the Apple store included me buying a backup hard drive with 1TB of space...oh yes.

With our Christmas money we ended up buying a Canon digital SLR Rebel XTi from a very nice woman off of Craigslist. We got a great bargain and immediately took a few photos with the 2 lens included in everything we purchased. We really like the 50MM lens we got...here is a preview of what it can do.

The reason for this purchase was for the baby. And here is one of the best pictures that I took so far of Isabella. Enjoy.

Settlers of Catan

I just played this game on Tuesday and have had a fever to play again.
Last night we went to dinner with friends then we went and bought the
game to play. It is a lot of fun and even Isabella played. She played
good luck charm to Adam and Julie.

Here she is trying to decide to build a road or upgrade to a city.

The Way Life Is Supposed...

Last time I had written out a significant blog post was the day after Isabella was born.
Tomorrow my little girl will be 3 months old.

I had not really let people in on what had been happening the few weeks leading up to her unexpected birth.

Through me getting laid off in August we did not know what to expect to happen with a baby on the way. I had blogged already about how I was humbled by our mighty God and how He kept us looking toward Him alone. I just wanted to list a few things that happened from our perspective...

-The week after I was laid off our newer of the 2 cars had the "Check Engine Light" come on and was acting very squirrely. We had to take it in and we expected the worst. Christian Brother's Automotive looked at it and stated to us that the main computer in the car was bad. Never a good sign. However they went out of their way and researched the issue on our behalf and found out that it is a common problem with our year model and there was an extended warranty for the car and that if we took it to a Toyota dealership it shouldn't cost us anything. We took it to a dealership and a few hours later we had a new computer in the car at no charge! Amazing...we were thrilled!

-My lawn mower busted a huge oil leak right in the middle of me cutting the yard. My neighbor Andy saw it smoking and let me use his machine to cut the rest of my lawn. My other friend and neighbor Brian let me know use his lawn mower on another occasion to cut the yard. But then my neighbor from across the street had an extra mower and let me use it until we our grass went dormant. So I was able to not have to spend money to repair or have to buy a new machine...yet. I have until Spring now.

-We had a few baby showers where people showed us that we were not alone with our baby coming. We still have quite a bit of money in gift cards to last us a while longer which will help. We are so thankful and blessed to have great friends and family.

-When we thought we were going to have to pay huge amounts for insurance with COBRA, President Obama set out a legislation to make COBRA cheaper for qualified families. We qualified and were able to not have to spend so much money on that health care expense.

-Speaking of health care, this was a huge way God showed us He's watching over us, we were on an HDHP and our renewal year ended in Oct. We were about $100 away from meeting our deductible and after that everything was covered 100%. If the baby had been born on her actual due date our deductible would have started from scratch on November 1st.
She was born on Oct. 19th and we did not see one hospital bill for the delivery.
That is the one thing that we cannot fathom...Isabella was born 6 weeks early with no complications and she left the hospital with us within the 48 hours.

-I was still just working a temp job during her birth and I did not tell anyone there that I was expecting a baby. So when I told them the morning of Oct. 19th that I had to go because my wife was going into labor...they were shocked that I had not mentioned it to anyone. But I figured that I didn't know anyone there very well and that I didn't know how long I would be around or they would keep me around. They let me have 2 days off and when I got back they had all pitched in for a huge gift basket. I was almost in tears...until someone in back said "You better no cry Isaac!" So I laughed it off and thanked them over and over.

-I was given an opportunity for another interview for a company I had applied for. The interview was on Oct. 30th and my parents had been here all week with us and the baby. At this point I was not expecting anything from this interview. Ever since Isabella had been born I had been at peace with where God had me and knew that I could not do anything to my liking because He had total control. So I was not nervous and just went about it calmly. I remember my mom telling me not to be nervous that morning and I honestly just felt like nothing special was going on. My interview lasted almost an hour when she said I was a definite call-back for a second interview and if I had the time...we could start it then. All went well and I was told I'd hear something middle to end of the following week. The next Tuesday at lunch, Amy's dad and our step-mom had just gotten here and they picked me up for lunch, I received an email with an offer letter! It was a huge blessing.
As soon as I gave up trying to be in control. God let us know everything would be fine. Amazing.


It was a crazy time for us. One that we will never forget. Amy and I matured a lot through all of this and we believe it was something we needed before we had Isabella join us.

Also a reason we have not updated much...the urge to always be online or messing with electronics has been subdued through all of this. Our parent's are not too pleased because they do not get a lot of picture updates from Isabella. But I also want to utilize my time on family time and hobbies that do not require the use of a computer. (even though geo-caching is using a GPS and logging everything online) I have been playing the guitar a lot more and Isabella loves it when I play and sing to her.

This is a long post but I hope that I got the point across that we are changed people. I am a changed man and even though what I went through was not pleasant it has turned me into a better man, husband, and father. I hope I never lose this humility and hope that has been re-lit in me recently.

The Smiles

Isabella has been smiling all the time now. Last night she was starting to throw a fit because she was hungry and then Amy picked her up and held up up high and we captured this little gem. Then she remembered she was hungry again and immediately put on a grump face to let us know she was still hungry.
Gotta love the drama. Ironically the bib she was wearing yesterday is one my mom gave us that says "Reina del Drama" which translates to "Drama Queen." It's only just begun.