paulandemily.com

Our real estate agent, Holly Nally, came over last night…we have an offer on our house!!!! We countered just a bit on it, and she will hear back from them today. We are so excited to only own ONE house soon! We are losing a heck of a lot of money on it, but that’s the market right now. At least it will be off our backs.

Please cross your fingers / pray / do a rain dance or anything else that you do to bring us luck! We should find out today!

*UPDATE*
They accepted our counter offer! So, now we just have to wait for inspections and loan paperwork, etc to be done and then waiting for the closing!

When Big Sean visited a few weeks ago, we got a picture of him holding Little Sean just like he did when Little Sean was just 2 weeks old. He has gotten so big!!

I recently added some new toys to my geeky collection. Back in October, Dmoney hooked me up with a new phone - the HTC 6700 for SprintPCS. I LOVED this phone, I actually used the mobile Word/Excel frequently, it was excellent for text messaging, was convenient to have a decent camera around, etc. Last week, the keyboard started to go out - requiring pretty excessive pressing to get things like the space bar and lower qwerty keys to work. It was also starting to lock up once in a while and when a reminder popped up, it immediately went away so I couldn’t disable, snooze, etc.
Anyway, our SprintPCs contract expired almost a year ago, so we decided to shop around to see what was available. After visiting a bunch of websites and spending some time in the CinciBell store, we determined our current plan with Sprint simply rocks and couldn’t find anyone to even match it. Long story short, Emily and I both got new phones yesterday. She got a new Katana and I got the HTC Mogul (the 6800). The Mogul is faster and runs Windows Mobile 6. Love the phone. Couple pics I stole from the net:

Next, I built a new computer. My previous PC was a Gateway we bought at Best Buy almost three years ago - AMD dual core 3800+ with (upgraded) 3GB RAM and one XFX 8800 GT 512mb video card.
Instead of store bought, I decided to go back to my old hobby and build one. I went to my old favorite, Newegg.com to do the shopping. I went with:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 Yorkfield 2.66GHz, 12MB Cache
Motherboard: XFX MB-N780-ISH9 LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 780i SLI
CPU Cooler: ASUS V-60 92mm Vapo Bearing
RAM: mushkin 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066
Video: XFX PVT88PYDE4 GeForce 8800GT Extreme 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 - Added this to run in SLi
Case: Cooler Master Cosmos 1000
Power Supply: ZALMAN ZM750-HP Continuous 750W Modular LED Heatpipe-Cooled SLI Power Supply

This is by far the highest class machine I have ever built. I ran the FutureMark 3dMark06 on both my old computer and new computer and was pretty amazed. The old PC was running Vista Ultimate 32 bit and the new PC is running Windows XP Pro 64bit (to utilize all 4GB ram). 3Dmark on the old PC hit 3906 marks. The new PC was around 14,567 marks!! I may go to Vista 64Bit, but wasn’t really impressed with Vista enough for the 1.5 years or so I ran it. The changes to the control panel and Windows Explorer were enough to put me off. I never ran into stability or driver issues when using Vista, even with my printers.

We started out on Saturday by attending a musical that Emily’s cousin Wes was in. It was a small theatre group introducing a new Christian musical. We enjoyed it. Sean enjoyed his afternoon with his Auntie Gamma (Emily’s Aunt Laurie).
Emily made us a reservation at John Philip’s in Crestview Hills. Its one of my new favorite restaraunts. The menu is small (wine list huge), but the selection of appetizers and entree’s is not missing anything. I went with the Filet (with a side of mushroom bourdalaise sauce) and Emily got the prime rib. Having a restaraunt of this nature makes me feel we don’t need to drive down to the waterfront anymore! The service is great as well. Our waiter was never overbearing and even remembered the last time we came in (and he wasn’t even our waiter that time!).
Ashley kept an ear out for Sean while we were out to eat - Thanks again Ash! Another advantage of the colony! Emily and I finished up the night watching the movie Jumper - although she didn’t make it through and had to finish it on Sunday. I don’t know why that movie got such a bad review when it was in theatre’s, as we both enjoyed it. Def. a renter and not a buyer though.
On Sunday, Emily, Sean, and I went to the Newport Aquarium. We got the idea a few weeks back when we visited a Petsmart store. He just stared with great awe into the little aquariums there.

We had a great time. Sean stayed up for it as long as he could. We actually got almost to the end before he couldn’t keep his eyes open anymore. He only missed the penguins (We’ll just have to catch them when we go to the St. Louis Zoo next time).
On Monday, I came home to a Father’s Day surprise! Emily and I have been looking for a small table and chair set to have on our front porch, but never got around to picking one up. I had a model that I liked, but Emily was unsure about it. Turns out, she liked it enough to make it my father’s day gift - I was quite pleased!

Since Monday night, Sean has been sleeping in his crib and his sniffles are all gone! Mom and Dad have been sleeping well (especially mom!) and Sean is back to his normal cheerful self. He went to daycare for the first time in over a week yesterday. He was so pooped when he got home, that he was in bed by 6:30pm and didn’t wake up until midnight for a bottle! I was secretly hoping he would wake up so I would actually get to spend some time with him

We traveled to St. Louis over Memorial Day Weekend to visit Paul’s family, and to attend Stephen’s wedding (friend of Paul’s). We had a great time and took a ton of pictures!

Still working on getting the wedding pictures online.

See pictures of Sean during the weekend by clicking below:

Sean’s getting so big! Just a few days ago, he started grabbing toys with his hand, then with both hands and then bringing the toy to his mouth. He loves this new skill and tends to hold on to his toys for 5-10 minutes at a time! He also is very talkative lately. He loves when people have “conversations” with him; mimicking the noises that he makes. He cracks up laughing and keeps the conversation going until you stop it. So cute.

I’m going to start getting some videos of Sean, hopefully on a weekly basis, and putting them on our youtube account. He’s doing so many new things each week, and we want everyone to be able to enjoy the milestones along with us. Plus, he’s so darn cute, who could resist a movie of him??

Posted some adorable pictures of Paul and Little Sean. Click below to see.

I have 4 weeks until I return to work and still have quite a bit of weight to lose to get to my ‘pre-pregnancy’ weight. Not that I really care about getting to that exact weight really soon, but I really don’t want to have to buy a whole new work wardrobe b/c I can’t fit into any of my clothes *sigh*. So, Paul and I have started doing the Weight Watcher’s points program. We’re not going to meetings or anything, but we’ve done the program before so we know how it works. I figured that if I post something on here I’ll have to stick to the plan more rigorously

Just wanted to mention that in the subject for those who care :)  My friend Jim sent these youtube videos to me and I laughed out loud so hard Emily almost took the baby away from me!  I’ve been a fan of Jimmy Kimmel, Sarah Silverman, and the “Ben Damon / Matt Affleck” guys as well.

The language is NSFW although it is censored.  First thing you should know is Sarah and Jimmy have been dating for years.  Both are comedians and are usually pretty over the top.  Jimmy used to host The Man Show on comedy central (before it went down hill!).  Here are the vidoes - watch them in order  ( 1 )   ( 2 ) 

We got the photo CD from Steph Carson yesterday, and they turned out great I’ll let Emily post how to get to the photos and stuff - we will have to resize them to fit in our gallery but will also provide a link that people can use to order copies of the photos. I’ll post some later this evening to the gallery.

click the photo for more.