Wednesday, January 25, 2006

more pictures

thought i would share some more pictures with everyone. she's definitely got her own style and personality and we love meeting each one of them everyday! Enjoy...










"i'm not sleeping, i'm trying to wish myself out of this ridiculous outfit!"


"Patrick Swayze is SO Dreamy!"

"last one down the slope gets to change my diaper!"

"this is my daddy trying to be artsy. i don't mind, he seems like a nice enough guy"



"YEAH!! BOOBS!"

Wednesday, January 04, 2006

Happy New Years!

Christmas and New Years was a little different this year. who would have guessed?

Skyla flew out to Nashville on the 7th of December and took the little one with her. i thought i'd finally get some sleep and be able to hit the gym on a regular basis but unfortunately for me, my procrastination knows no bounds.

I flew out to Nashville on the 20th to meet up with my wife and new daughter who i hadn't seen for two weeks, but was getting updates from Skyla.

"she's smiling and using her first consonants" she would tell me. i'm not sure what that meant but i sure missed them.

my sister Leah, my brother Caleb, Skyla and little Riley B. met me at the airport. i couldn't believe how much she had changed in two weeks! when you hear the old adage "they grow up so quickly" it's true. two weeks seemed like nothing, but at this stage they seem to change overnight.

we enjoyed a restful christmas with the family and i met my new niece Celeste (my brother's daughter) for the first time. two new babies had been added to the herod family. Celeste was tiny compared to Riley, even though they were only a month apart. it was nice for Skyla and my sister-in-law Danielle to bounce ideas and advice off each other. and it was cool seeing my younger brother being a dad. last christmas there was one dad, now there were three!

i got sick towards the end of the trip and felt miserable when we were flying back to Portland. not to mention that when you have a baby your luggage multiplies to ridiculous proportions! I think we ended up checking 5 bags and a bassinet. i felt awful, but Skyla was wonderful with Riley, who was a dream to take on the plane. you're always nervous that you're going to be that family with the screaming baby but she slept almost the entire way. in fact, i got more looks from the lady sitting next to me (she actually put on a surgical mask) because i was coughing. she ended up switching seats with her husband. i wanted to casually tell skyla that the "consumption" was suppose to have been eradicated. who would have guessed that i'd get the plague and leprosy in the same week...

so we made it home, but now everyone in the house, except our dog Chloe, has a cold. my little snups Riley has the cutest cough, but it's also really sad to hear. poor little girl. daddy's sorry.

the day before new year's eve our basement flooded. probably happened all the time to the previous owners of the house, but we weren't aware of it at all. we thought it was the furnace cause it started to pump out steam through the vents. i went under the house to check it out and SPLASH! holy cow!

it's always during vacation time when everyone is otherwise engaged when something like this happens. we called American Home Shield cause we needed to get the water pumped out. they couldn't get a hold of anyone so they said that if we found someone they would reimburse us. a guy finally came out and got on the phone with the insurance. it was then they decided to tell us that the pumping out of the water was our responsibility and that they would pay for whatever it was that was broken. sweet! this is were renting comes in handy.

"Hello, Gary? Yeah, this is Benji Herod over on Walnut. Our basement is flooded and we need you to come out here and fix it. What? I know it's the holiday's but if you want your company to keep receiving rent checks, i would suggest coming out here..." or something to that effect.

so i ended up paying a bunch of money for him to sump pump the water out. by the next morning it was filled up again. not as bad as before, but definitely not good. so i called all the home depots in the portland area (lowe's too) and tried to get a sump pump to get the water out. weird that there would be a shortage of sump pumps here, i mean geez it hardly rains! i ended up buying a wet/dry vac, some sand bags and rubber boots and started slowly sucking out the water. i called a couple friends to see if they wouldn't mind helping out. i wasn't going to be able to do this myself. they came over and after about 2 1/2 hours, we got down to the bottom. that's when we noticed the water coming up from the ground through holes in the cement.

seriously, it was like our house was built on top of an olympic size swimming pool. what a feat of engineering. very impressive! after vacuuming up more water, we finally put some quick dry cement down to fill in the holes and laid down the sand bags where the walls were leaking. seriously, i wouldn't have been surprised if Tom Hanks, Shelley Long and the entire cast of the Money Pit had shown up to film THE MONEY PIT 2: The Basement Crew.

there is still some leaking from the walls, but for the most part everything is contained. I have a claim in with my home owners insurance so hopefully we'll get reimbursed for the plumber coming out and possibly for some real repairs to be made.

that was new year's day. who wants to watch fooseball when you can slowly drain a basement with a 12 gallon shop vac. anyone?

that night we went over to a friends house (the same friends that helped with the basement) for new years and played cranium and "snl" trivial pursuit. toasted with champagne at midnight to the creepy new voice of Dick Clark. then packed up my girls and went home and stayed up with a wide awake 2 month old.

i sure was glad that i had monday off.