Cade's New Career

Cade's Homework

Avery's Getting Around

The 4th child always gets the best toys

A little unorthodox perhaps, but it works - she's even more proficient now and is officially a threat to anything left on the ground. If it fits in her mouth and is chewable even better.

She can now sit up on her own and get to a sitting position from crawling.

Kellen's Birthday

All our little superheroes show off their toughest poses

Kellen getting to the good stuff

Kellen gets into the ice cream

All the gang and their ice cream

Avery is practicing her sitting up. She's already mastered being cute.

Avery had a fun time riding around in the slushy snow. Dad had a good time being the workhorse.

Cade, Gabby and Kellen made a snow fort and ambushed their friends with a snowball flurry. Unfortunately, as you can see, the fort didn't really provide much protection.

Avery in her Christmas outfit on Christmas Eve

What Cade got from Santa Claus.

The kids on Christmas morning. Take note of Cade's confusion and subsequent dismay - of course if you listen carefully toward the end you will also hear his return to delight.

O Canada

I was recently taking the MAX - Portland's fantastic light rail system (you are legally obligated to refer to it as "fantastic" or face a fine - it's in the city code somewhere)returning from a trip to the Supercomputer conference. The conference itself was surprisingly interesting and I, along with my colleagues, got to participate in some fascinating activities including designing our own snowflake - an exercise that produced disastrous results as our snowflake was a rectangle (there might be a metaphor there somewhere) - and riding in a flight simulator and moving buildings around in downtown Stuttgart to study the airflow and other environmental impacts and eating some Purdue popcorn. Anyway, as I returned we passed the Washington Park stop which contains the zoo, Japanese Rose Gardens, the Children's Museum and more. Just as the doors closed a woman rushed over to me and asked if this was the stop for the rose gardens and I said yes it was. I also explained that she could get off at the next stop, go to the other side of the tracks and take the next train back to Washington Park.

This was apparently a more complex conversation than I thought it would be and took a minute or two to complete. We discussed that it was very confusing for Washington Park to not have a label for the rose gardens, the zoo, the children's museum, the arboretum, forest park and all the other items in Washington Park. This also opened the door for a longer conversation in which the woman explained that her husband was in town for the Supercomputer convention and they were from "the capital of Canada." Apparently guidebooks from Canada are missing pertinent information like which stop you should utilize when traveling via public transportation. Maybe if the guidebooks didn't have to be published in both French and English they would have a little extra room for important details like the public transportation stops.
We chatted for a few minutes, I asked her if she enjoyed visiting Portland and she did. Midway through our conversation she accosted me with a question, "what's the capital of Canada?"

Well, I know the answer and I correctly conveyed that it was Ottawa. This precipitated a lecture on how stupid Americans are and how few people knew that Ottawa was the capital and not Toronto or Montreal or Quebec or "some people even thought it was Vancouver!" Really, Canada, if you want to make a good impression on your neighbors to the South, you should consider only allowing those citizens who won't accost others about their geography to obtain passports. I do tend to agree that we Americans should be a little more geographically and politically aware, but let's also agree that not knowing that Canada's capital is Ottawa is roughly akin to Californians not knowing that Oregon's capital is Salem.

Why Basketball Matters

Editors note: I wrote this originally for a quarterly newsletter for Intel Finance in Oregon. Marc thought I should share it with the rest of you.

There are really only two plays: Romeo and Juliet, and put the darn ball in the basket. -- Abe Lemons

Why Basketball Matters

P.S. Don’t call me a Hoosier, that slur is reserved for the rednecks from the wrong part of the state

I grew up in Indiana and I am tall. My fate was pretty much sealed right there. My wife knew when she married me I would always have a mistress on the basketball court. She patiently indulges my passion – why is anyone’s guess. Basketball has kept me from my wife on Valentine’s Days for most of the 12 years we have been married, including our first six; I left the hospital ten hours after our firstborn to go play basketball; my wife looks forward to her mid-June birthday not because she is excited about another birthday, but because it means the long NBA season is drawing to a close. My wife understands that this is part of the deal. I come with basketball.

When I was a boy, I would race from my house bouncing a lopsided, discolored Voit™ basketball. The ball spinning against my little fingers, I aimed for the chipped, bent hoop at the end of our cul-de-sac. Though the pavement was cracked and sometimes filled with gravel or grass, whenever I passed the Archibald’s house the court transformed itself into a basketball palace. The rim was no longer 9’10” on one side and 10’ on the other, the net was not gray and threadbare. It was a gleaming glass rectangle with a perfectly painted rim and brand new net, the kind that made the authentic swish sound and popped back through the rim like a raindrop on a pond. The Norman’s house transformed into a grandstand filled with adoring fans, the oaks and maples that filled the ravine behind the hoop cheered for me too. I was no longer a marginally coordinated kid heaving jump shots from my hip; I was Magic Johnson spinning down the lane to make a game-winning shot or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar flicking in a skyhook to defeat the hated Boston Celtics. I played in the summer when the Midwestern humidity would leave the ball slick with sweat and I would play in the winter when the snowplows had pushed mounds of snow underneath the hoop that allowed me to make believe I was James Worthy tomahawking the ball through the rim.

I have since played basketball on the sandy blacktops of a Southern California beach on parquet courts in - of all places - Boston and on baskets hung off of barns hidden off of country roads and in glossy college arenas that almost lived up to my childhood dreams and even on courts as far flung as the Arctic Circle in Sweden. I have gone to the gym to shoot away the tension of an uncertain job prospect. I have banged in the low post after a frustrating day of work. I have cut through a 2-3 Zone to forget, for an hour, the pain of a lost parent. I have played basketball to honor the last day of school. I celebrate my annual reunion with my brother with a particularly spirited one-on-one battle, elbows flying and gums flapping.

Basketball hasn’t always treated me kindly. Games have left me with a variety of floor burns, jammed fingers, sore and strained muscles and occasionally with stitches or twisted ankles. Those physical injuries are easier than dealing with a poorly played or lost game. I can still remember vividly the details of an intramural game I lost nearly ten years ago and that’s to say nothing of games from my high school years that I can remember or, perhaps even worse, games from the past couple of years when I should be wise enough to use my limited gray matter more effectively. “I should quit,” I think occasionally. But it is not a real thought – I can’t quit basketball.

I can’t quit basketball because I love making those quintessential basketball plays – the kind seen on highlight shows and the kind even the most casual observer would recognize as a basketball play. I’ve dunked on people (yes, even on regulation rims) and been dunked on. I’ve hit game-winning jumpers and watched other teams hit those game-winning jump shots. There are other moments, though, that only the most ardent fan and player would recognize much less appreciate: the perfectly executed backpick to free a teammate for an open basket; a pass feathered just past the defenders’ outstretched fingertips; outleaping and outwrestling an opponent for a loose rebound; rotating to cover a cutter on defense; the sustained eyeballs-on- belly-buttons, crouching with feet and arms spread wide to turn away to frustrate a good offensive opponent for an entire game. The kind of uncanny closeness that can only be forged on a basketball court, the kind that allows me to throw a pass without looking and know that my teammate will not only catch the pass, but that he was expecting it. These are the moments that have seared basketball to my heart

And so even though I’ve (mostly) outgrown my youthful fantasies about being an NBA player, stepping onto a basketball court remains a transformative experience. As my responsibilities pile up – work, parenting, being a spouse, keeping the house from falling apart, civic and church duties, and so on – it takes longer and longer for those externalities to completely fade away and basketball’s grip to fully overtake me. But as I step onto the court and dribble the basketball, feeling that ball spin against the palm of my hand, I can feel it spread from the tips of my fingers into my shoulders, releasing the tension held there, and into my feet, gently pushing me onto my toes, ready to compete. Ready to play.

When I was a boy and called home to dinner, I would make that slow transformation back into the ungainly boy with the rubber ball. I still make that transformation today when I leave the courts, piling my gear into my car and driving home. I do it knowing that I will be back in a few days to set another screen, hit a driving layup and tip away a pass. And I know the basketball will spin into my hand and give me another hour or two of devotion.

Avery's First Food

Avery tried her first bites of food tonight.  The other kids were much more excited about the dining experience than Avery was.  She may prove very difficult to wean...

In this one, we really like the blocking maneuver she was throwing at Crystal.  It comes at about the 45 second mark.