Hard to believe my baby girl is already halfway through her 3rd year of life. Seems like just yesterday she was smiling all the time, being cute as hell. Oh wait, that hasn’t changed. Well, the incessant smiling is replaced by typical toddler whining and crying semi-often, but otherwise she’s still a bundle of joy.

The biggest complaint we have is ( Read more... )

For over half a decade, I have been the proud owner of a boy…a fun, hilarious, incredibly smart, emotional, exasperating little boy, desperately trying to make sense of the world. That boy is 6 years old today, and as his time in kindergarten winds down, I find myself in complete awe of him.

Mostly that’s a good thing. His constant questioning of ( Read more... )

On December 28th, 2012, the wife and I abandoned our children while vacationing in southern California (ok, we left them with their grandparents), rented a car, and drove to Las Vegas. It was the first time we had been there together in over 7 years (6 ½ years since I’d been there at all), and was the first time in 18 months that we would have a ( Read more... )

So I realize I’ve completely neglected what once was a regular blogging occurrence when my children turned various age milestones. I even posted on the Dude’s development monthly! But today my lovely Lucy is 2, and I think it warrants an emergence from the seemingly endless hiatus of blogging.

How my little baby girl got to be 2 so fast is beyond ( Read more... )

No April Foolin’ - it was 5 years ago today that our lives changed beyond anything we could have imagined, due to the birth of a boy known infamously around the world as “The Dude.” Damian Lucas Straus was born at 3:47pm on April 1st, 2007. It was Palm Sunday, and it was opening day for that year’s baseball season. And here we are, 5 years later, ( Read more... )

One year ago today, the number of children in our household literally doubled in size. Good thing we aren’t the Duggars. No, we just went from one to two, but it’s been a crazy, life-changing year nonetheless. First of all, I can’t believe it’s been a whole year. The first year of the Dudette’s life went by so much faster than the Dude’s first year ( Read more... )

Today is the final day of the semester for me, and instead of a final exam, our Spanish class is doing presentations in class. The topic? Anything we want, as long as we cover topics and things we learned during the year. So for my final project, I will be discussing Mexican food ingredients, their history and role in Mexican cooking, and then ( Read more... )

I came across an interesting article today that described a study that tried to determine if there was some inner biological reason why people believe in god. You can read the whole article here, but what it boiled down to was that people who used intuitive reasoning as the basis for their decisions were far more likely to believe in a higher power ( Read more... )

Our little girl is 9 months old today - I cannot believe how fast the time is flying by. At this time last year, she was just a little bump in her mom's tummy. Today she is a slightly larger bump - I say that because at her checkup last week, she was still in just the 10th percentile for weight. People have remarked that she looks small for her age ( Read more... )

Here we go again. The quest for the English degree continues, and so naturally this semester I will once again NOT be taking an English class. In fact, I won’t be taking a class taught in English at all. I last took a Spanish class 21 years ago, and believe it or not, I’m very excited to be taking another one. It’s a requirement for the English ( Read more... )