April and May Update

Posted on 16. May, 2006 by Rob in Uncategorized

Sorry I’ve fallen off the saddle a bit with the posts lately, but here’s a quick update of the last 4(ish) weeks:

Christina and Nolan arrived back from the U.S. with my parents in tow… their first trip abroad. We had a good time seeing the sights. Highlights included, Chinatown, Little India, Sentosa Island, Johor Baharu Malaysia, The Singapore Zoo, Botanic Gardens, Clark Quay, Orchard Road, Changi Prison and The Asia Civilizations Museum.
There were a few other things mixed in there too, so if you want a full account of their visit, feel free to check out the photo album I just posted in The Gallery documenting their trip. All 110 photos of it (A mere fraction of the 400+ that my mom uploaded for her lucky friends to plow through.) There are also plenty of shots of Liam and Nolan if you dig around a bit.

Speaking of the boys, they are both doing great.
Nolan is gaining weight like crazy and getting more and more smiley, which makes getting up at 3a.m. slightly more bearable.
Liam is picking up new words/phrases/songs daily. Current favorites include “Playground.”, “Oh my goodness.” and “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” He has picked up numbers, alphabet and basic shapes pretty well, but we’re struggling with colors a little. He can’t pick out the color red, but he can name about 20 of the train characters from Thomas the Tank Engine Books/DVDs… Looks like he inherited his dad’s knack for remembering useless trivia.

Christina goes back to work in a couple weeks and I am bracing for the full effect of 2 vs 1 daddyhood. Of course it’s no cakewalk for Christina either. Singapore isn’t quite as “lactating working mom friendly” as the U.S. with specially designated “lactation lounges” so I picked up some curtains and a rod that she can hang on her office window for “expression” privacy. So if you happen to call her at work and you hear something resembling a sump pump in the background, you’ll know she’s multi-tasking.

We’ve been hosting a playgroup at our apartment with kids Liam’s age (and their mothers) on a couple of recent Monday afternoons. The kids are all just starting to acknowledge and play with each other rather than just playing near each other. The socializing is interesting to watch, but mainly we just try to keep them from whacking one another with lengths of toy railroad track.

In the “you probably won’t care, but I’m going to tell you anyway” department:
My latest hobby/obsession/headache is building a Home Theater PC. A computer that can record and timeshift TV (like Tivo), warehouse and play DVDs and CDs at the touch of a button (no more scratched Wiggles DVDs) and do pretty much everything else that a regular computer can do, but in the living room from the sofa. It has not been easy. I have built computers in the past with little trouble, but this contraption is a whole new can of beans. It didn’t help that 2 of the main components (the RAM and Video Card) were both faulty which made troubleshooting practically impossible. But I am (mostly) past the hardware problems and well into the software problems. Christina is ready to toss the whole thing out the window since building/tweaking it has been keeping me up into the wee hours of the morning. I’m sure that Apple will come out with something that makes my Frankenstein PC obsolete within a month so I’m not even sure why I’m bothering with this.

Finally, here’s a link to the funniest thing I’ve read in the last few weeks:
Me no monster. Me OK guy. Me OK guy who eat cookies.