The most annoying sound in the world (not really)

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When he did this, I immediatly thought of one of my favorite movies. But to me this sound was cute :)

Hey Babeee!

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Jack Bauer watch out!

Being a Nard, Videos 3 Comments »

I missed video Friday this week, so I am posting one day late. The last time I shot a gun I think I was 10 years old, I have never shot a hand gun. From the video, you can see I do not do this very often, but it sure was fun!! Thank you Doug for taking me to do this. It was A BLAST!


Crackers in the Barrel

Being a Nard, Memories 4 Comments »

My wife loves her some dessert, and I am not talking about me. I am talking about ice-cream and sweet things like that. So last night at about 8pm we thought it would be a nice treat for us to go to Cracker Barrel. Just her and I together to have a nice dessert out alone. Desmond was in bed, and a sleep for the night, her folks kept a listen out for him, we would only be gone an hour tops.

As we pull in we noticed it was busy for being so late, we approach the “host” but he really could have been a hostess if you now what I mean. He was polite to us. He reached for the menus, we told him we did not need any as we were just going to get dessert. He seats us, and we wait, and we wait some more, we play a few games with the little golf-tee games they have on the table. We wait, we start to look pitiful, so we try to catch the eye of some wait staff as they scurry around helping others. We sit, and sit, and finally I start waving my hands to a manager who walks by, she waves back and keeps going. Wow lady, I am not waving at you because I want to say HI, I am waving because I want my dawg’on Frosted Mug Sundae with Carmel Swirls, this ain’t social hour lady! This is “I got no kid to claw at my food and screaming at me and I can eat in peace finally!” She must have saw that look, because she comes over.

I am a soft spoken person, and really very polite when it comes to pointing out a problem with service. I tell her, “Hey we have been here a while (15minutes), and no one has seen us yet, no drinks or anything”.  I am an easy customer, maybe too easy. Her reply was this “ohh well you don’t have any menus, if you don’t have menus we assume you have been helped, that’s how we can tell. If I was to look at you I would think you already had been serviced.”

Ohhhhhhhh really? So its “my fault, no one has seen me yet?” Of course how stupid of me to think it was not. I should have taken a menu when asked if I needed one, pretended to look it over, put it down and THEN I would have got service. I did not know there was protocol to follow in getting service. Like a secret handshake of such. I must have missed that in Eating Out 101.

So our food comes, quickly and its great I might add. With that our “Mr. Hostess” his name is ridiculously long “Quintarious” or something like that. He walks by us and all I hear is “Oh Ma Gaaawd” and snaps his fingers or whatever “Mr. Hostess’s” do when they are mad. Jackie and I look at each other, and wonder what his deal is. Later I see him throwing his arms in the air in disgust about something. It was very humorous. He makes his way over to our table and randomly says ” I didn’t seat y’all, did I seat y’all? I didn’t give you menus?” I tell him he did seat us, and we declined menus. He walked away. As we leave we both  separately get a dirty look again from him. We both are kinda in shock at this, seriously? Why the look?

This is where Jackie is better then I am, because I was ready slap the girl right out of him, but she reminded me that Jesus loves him too, and that my friends is why I love my wife so much, because she always sees the good in people. No matter how ugly they can be.

I like good service, and we got great service from our waitress when she was told to serve us, but on a management level and a host level Cracker Barrel failed last night. I guess these “crackers” crawled into the wrong “Barrel” last night.
Ok thats my quarterly rant, thanks for listening. :)

See it?

Desmond, Family, Memories, Photos, Videos 6 Comments »

Desmond with a death grip on Bert!

We won some tickets to go see Sesame Street Live from the Credit Union and some radio station last week. Last night we picked up our tickets and found our way to the Centraplex to see the show. We had to get there an hour early because we also had won tickets to go back stage and meet some of the characters, and have pizza with them. We were a little worried how Desmond might do, as he is not into Sesame Street yet, and sitting still is not something he is into these days. We decided to give it a try, it was free to us so what did we have to lose.

With that being said Jackie and I both agreed it was a very wise decision to go after all, he LOVED IT! At the pre-party we all had to line up to meet “Bert and Ernie” we let a few of the older kids go first, and one by one smiles turned to melt downs. I guess the pressure was too much, some kids freak out when they see a larger then life puppet coming to get them. That was not the case with Desmond, I set him on the ground and he went running towards them. He has no idea who Bert and Ernie are, but he did not want to let go of them, he gave them “high-fives” grabbed onto them and just had a face of pure excitement on it. It was “wow” and “yaaay!” and claps all around from him. When they left we looked around at us, and says ” see it?” and pointed to the door they just went into to go back to the dressing rooms. Seconds later he is running towards the door like a crazed fan storming backstage. I was able to wrestle him to the ground, and we moved our way up to our seats.

We handed our tickets to the lady who was helping people to their seats, she looked at our seat numbers and did not know where to seat us, those seat numbers did not exist. She went off and asked someone else, she comes back and tells us to head down front. It turns out we are up front and center, best seats in the house! we couldn’t have been any closer. This was perfect, because again, Mr. Desmond does not sit in seats for more then half a nano-second. Once the show started he was hooked, the lights, the singing, dancing, giant stuffed animals running around stage, he was fixed on it, and I was fixed on him.

Its pretty wild how much enjoyment you can get out of watching your child enjoy something new. It was a new rush of feelings for me. I have experienced enjoyment of seeing his eyes light up before. But this was new and different. When it comes to being goofy in public with strangers I tend to shy on the side of “im too cool to do that, and I hope no one is looking at me” but last night, who cares, every parent in the complex was being a kid again and acting the fool with their children, the adults ate it up just as much as the kids. That was fun to me, Jackie and I caught ourselves looking at each other a few times and smiling at how much he was loving this. The characters ran out into the crowed lots of times during the show, and each time we were always right their to get a handshake, elmo came and saw us, and yes Desmond can now say “elmo”, actually its more like “eammmo”.

So there you have it, our first experience with something on that big of a scale with a small child. Thank you Credit Union and Light Rock Z90 whatever the heck station you are for the free tickets. We enjoyed them!

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Everybody Poops!

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Its video Friday! This clip is an edited clip from a few weeks ago. Desmond and I were chasing each other around the room, and having fun. If you have little kids, you know a face expression can say a 1000 words. The funny thing about this video is, Desmond has learned to say “bye” to poopies as they go down the toilet. As you can see here he skips the potty part and the flush part and just goes right to “bye”
Have a great weekend everyone!

The Vacation Video

Vacations, Videos 2 Comments »

I am feeling generous today so I am posting two videos. The first is from our vacation. It is about 2 minutes. Just some clips and highlights of the week. The 2nd is of Desmond laughing, it makes me laugh and smile to hear him laugh like this. Have a great weekend everyone.

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Son in the Fun

Family, Vacations 4 Comments »

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Day 1:
Oh how we packed, and packed, and packed some more. We all know Jackie loves her lists, and her packing list was enough for 10 people preparing for Judgment Day (see picture). I also have this “thing” where I like to do things in one trip, like get the grocery’s from the car in one trip, or move from car to hotel in one trip. I call it  the “One Trip Hogan” and from the picture link above you can see I was testing the laws of physics and almost broke my streak, but I did it, in one trip, up 15 floors and through a parking garage. I got some looks, but I did it.

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We did the trip in about 4.5 hours with stops, thanks to some very skilled co-workers with their back road secrets, thank you Doug and Kristi. When we go there the first thing we did was hit the pool, the slides and the beach! We wore that poor little guy out. I never seen someone so excited to be in water, because this time it was about fun and not “lessons”. After the beach we ate at Sharky’s (thanks April) and walked the beach. From there we went home. Desmond slept 14 hours! Now that is some serious fun.

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Day 2:
When Desmond finally woke up, I noticed he was quickly gathering his bucket, shovel, and shoes, and putting them all by the front door, he quickly ran up and down the hallway putting each item in a pile. That boy wanted to go to the beach! So we did! I was excited to be at the beach to build me some sand castles. The thing I had not accounted for was Godzilla plopping his big fat SUMO butt on each castle I made. So I dug a deep hole and put him in it, this contained him long enough for me to complete my master piece. Of course as soon as he got free, he sat right on it, and we both had a good laugh about it. Good times.

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That night we ate Pineapple Willy’s which is now a new favorite for us, and somewhere we will be going to from now on (nice job Char). I got me some ribs, a big boy drink and I was a happy dude. Jackie got her self a nice po’boy sandwich was was big enough to feed two. Desmond tore down on some ribs himself. A wonderful night, on the beach eating dinner with the ones I love most.

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Day 3: Shell island! This was a fun time, we went and took a little ferry over to shell island. This was fun for the little guy, his first time on a boat, his thoughts on it? Vroom! Vroom! of course. Shell island is very pretty and secluded (no hotels or anything), although there was a lot more people there then I expected. There are lots of shells, but all the good ones were taken by the time we got there. I am sure if you got there early enough there would be lots to pick from. My advice on this is go early and wear lots of sun screen, because it was hot hot hot!

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Day 4: Seaside is one of our favorite places to go, its only about 20 minutes from PCB and we have stayed there lots of times. Its so clean, white and just very small beach town type atmosphere. The water was so blue it was just a beautiful setting. We walked around some gardens, walked over a bridge, and just had a beautiful morning outside.

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That night we headed to a hidden restaurant called “The Boatyard”. This was excellent! I had a hankering for a cheeseburger, and they did not fail. It was one of the best, maybe the best cheeseburger I have ever hard. Right up there with the ones in Jamaica. I was so full after it. Desmond tore down on some sweet potato fries, in fact that’s all he wanted. Delicious! We will be going there again.

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Day 5: It all comes to an end, we hit the beach one more time, hit the pool, enjoyed some sun, and wrapped it up.

I must say, this was by far one of the best vacations we have been on. It was our first as a threesome. I was worried about it with a small child, but Jackie and I found ourselves doing things we normally would not do on vacation. Stopping and taking a moment to watch Desmond’s face light up on the little things we blow right past normally. Jackie did such an amazing job packing the food, getting the things we needed together so we could go out to eat at some great places. Our meals at home on the balcony were just as enjoyable as a $40 meal out, and for that hard work on her part he got to enjoy so much more. Thanks babe for all that effort. You did an amazing job planning that.

I think PCB will be our new destination spot, it was fun, not too far and really hope we can convince some you all to come down with us sometime, because we will be going lots more often! I have posted all the pictures from the vacation on the gallery. You can follow that link here. I will have some video later in the week :)

PANAMA CITY 2009

YESH!

Desmond, Videos 3 Comments »

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It is Friday again, thank goodness for that. I have another video for you. I guess Friday is video day. So this week in the life of Desmond it has been all about talking, pointing, grunting, being sneaky or just showing his frustration.

Lets start with talking for example. I say “Hey Jackie dinner is ready” he says “KAACKIEEE! KAACKIEE!” Oh yes he knows who his momma is, and she is KAACKIE! Also “EAT” is another of his favorite words. You can also ask him questions, and usually the answer is YESH (like Sean Connery) or NUH.

When I come home from work now he wants to be picked up ASAP. As soon as he is picked up he points. Points to something, anything it does not matter, but he wants to make sure I know about it. The pointing is always followed by a questionable grunt, like Tim Allen on tool time.

Sneaky, oh yes he is learning to be sneaky. He can climb up on chairs and reach things he is not supposed to reach. If he hears you coming around the corner he will turn around sit on his butt and look innocent and smile. Very sneaky Dr. Jones, veeery sneaky.

Frustration, this is a hard one to watch, he gets frustrated when he is unable to accomplish something on his own. There is one chair in the living room he wants to get up in soo bad, but its just an inch too high. He will climb and scramble and hike that leg up, but its just too much. This is when he hulks out. This is hard to watch. Yesterday I helped him up into the chair, gave him a snack, a drink, and flipped the channels to find some cartoons. I never made it to the cartoons, because go-kart racing was on the speed channel. Immediately its VROOM VROOM, VROOM VROOM for 20 minutes. That boy loves him some cars. The picture above is him enjoying all that. The video below is from last week. We had him try his new pool and swim suit. We think he likes it. Have a great weekend!

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Desmond’s Big Day!

Desmond, Photos, Videos 5 Comments »

Today was Desmond’s last day for his ISR swim lessons. It has been a long road for the little guy, and his mom too. I have to say I am so proud of them for sticking with it. The results have just been so amazing, and I am so very proud of him. Yesterday he was to swim fully clothed, diaper, shoes the works! And he did awesome! Standing ovation awesome! Below are some pictures from that. To celebrate his big day, we went to firehouse subs! He got his 1st very own kids meal! Fire Hat included. He had a blast, and chomped down his grilled cheese and Oreo cookies. :)

I was able to get some video of today, and show all that he has learned. Some things I want to point out from this video, as I am sure I will get search hits from the ISR references. the idea of ISR is to teach children how to rescue themselves. It is not a swimming lesson for fun. It is designed to teach them to act calm when they fall into the water and float, breath, and get to the side of the pool. This whole process has taken over 6 weeks. The 1st part of the video shows Desmond getting to the steps, he stands up, and loses his balance, falling in backwards. This is a perfect example of how it happens. The instructor let him fall, and he recovered himself nicely. This is what it is all about. I highly recommend this program. You can learn more at www.infantswim.com


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