paulandemily.com

Created by Train Horn

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I’ve always admired Chris’s Goals postings and reviews and wondered if I could do them myself. Emily and I had some discussion on things that we would like to do. So here they are, in no particular order:

1) Except for our mortgage, we want to be debt free. This means student loans, credit cards, car payments, etc. in 2009. This is very possible and I think we can do this easily. Update: just paid off the credit cards.

2) start using that gym membership I paid for. I know its a very cliche but it needs to be done. I’ll set my goal to three days a week for 30 – 45 minutes. Doesn’t sound like much.

3) Paint the two guest rooms in the house and move the office to the 3rd floor.

4) Sell the motorcycle and find a safer toy After a coworker was hit on his scooter checking his mail, I think I’ll put 2 wheel hobbies at a rest and maybe, eventually, get back into something fun with four wheels.

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Ok ok ok Uncle Sean!!!

I finally got some time to edit pictures and videos of Sean from December and a little bit of this month so far. Here are three videos:

First, Christmas with Sean. Kind of a boring video, but may be nice for those who couldn’t be with the little one on Christmas day. Notice the cute red PJ’s from Stephen and Allison!

Next, his new fascination with blowing bubbles with his spit…didn’t learn this one from me…

And of course, his attempts at walking. Here are 4 attempts. I’m sure he’ll be running around the house within a few weeks. Our boy is getting way too big. Better turn down the volume or you’ll hear my “ecstatic mommy screams of encouragement” hehe.

Then, our Christmas pictures that we had taken at a local photographer. If you got a Christmas card (sorry if we missed you…I had a 3 year old address list…) you’ll recognize two of the pictures. When I was trying to order some of the pictures for family, Paul surprised me with pictures that he secretly had taken in November by Steph Carson (did Sean’s 1 month pictures and tons for Brian and Ashley). They are amazing and of course, I bawled my eyes out.

First Light:

Steph Carson:

And here are some pictures of Sean and Opa doing manly things in the yard:

And a couple from January (in the 11th month folder):

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We can’t believe that 10 months ago today we met our little boy for the first time! He’s growing up so fast and is looking more and more like a little boy every day, instead of a baby. He’s really close to walking; he actually took 2 steps the other day toward the cat. He’ll do 1 step and then fall forward going from person to person as well. He’s also really into doing “so big,” waving, saying “bye bye” clapping his hands, and playing with his toys. Santa was really wonderful to him this year, he got some awesome toys and very cute clothes

Sean is having a great time with his Oma, Opa and Aunt Cate here in New York. It’s funny, he slept really horribly the first few nights that we were here, and my Dad and Colleen offered to take him in his room for the night to let us get some sleep. He ended up sleeping perfectly. He slept in their room again last night and slept perfectly again. I guess he’s just tired of his mommy and daddy and wants to be with Oma and Opa! They just love it

Here are some pictures of Sean from our vacation so far, along with Christmas pictures. Notice his Christmas outfit with his name embroidered on it from Stephen and Ally (Thank you!). What a cute gift. We got it for a baby shower gift and it fit him absolutly perfectly on Christmas morning. He wore it all day

Here are some more pictures of our time here, mostly of the birds and snow. We havae about 3 feet right now, although it’s packed down on itself some over the past few days. Still…a lot more than we get in KY and it made for a wonderful white Christmas.

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I took these pictures awhile ago, sorry that I’m just getting around to posting them. Here’s Sean having some fun with his Daddy; getting thrown in the air, flipped upside down, giving nose kisses, etc.

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I want to wish my wonderful husband and very very happy birthday! Here’s to another great year! I love you! Also a happy birthday to Sean (big Sean that is). Hope to see you at Christmas!!

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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!

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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!!

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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.

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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!

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