Jen has Started Blogging

Over the years I’ve tried a few times to get Jen to start blogging. Maybe if I had ever kept it up for a solid amount of time myself she would have been more inclined to start. Maybe this time I’ve kept with it long enough that she’s giving it a shot.

She’s still working on it but she has it looking good and has a few posts up. She is using it similar to I am as a type of journal to keep track of the things we do. I tend to throw in some other things every once in a while but if you end up following both our blogs you’ll certainly get some overlap. One of the great things about blogging though is that even writing about the same topic each person is different so you’ll get a different perspective.

So without anymore preamble her site is http://dreamofsummer.com take a look, give a follow.

Pumpkin Planting and Picking

Back in the beginning of June we made, what has become our annual trip to Ross Farm Museum to take part in the Pumpkin planting weekend. It’s a great event where you can go and plant your own pumpkin seed in their fields. They put a large number of stakes in the ground in rows and each person gets a number. This year we were in the high 500’s, so it’s a popular event.

We always enjoy visiting this museum anyway and get an annual family pass so we can visit when ever we want. I’ve written before about the Maple Syrup Weekend they do.

This past weekend was when you could come back to “pick” your pumpkins. It is more like pick up your pumpkins because they do a lot of the clean up and make sure that everyone has a pumpkin, because inevitably I’m sure not everyone’s seeds actually grows, and even if they did each plant produces more than one pumpkin. So they detach all the pumpkins and remove all the plants from the field and make sure each post has a pumpkin waiting for you to come get it.

This year they made it even better than before because the provided wagons and wheel barrows that you can use to carry the pumpkins from back in the field out to your vehicle. I still ended up with the task of making three trips to the car carrying the four pumpkins because of the large group of friends that came the wagon we took only held a few of the pumpkins.

Luckily I only carried one the whole way from the field because most of the people took a horse wagon ride to the field and then back closer to the entrance. Then I just had to carry the other three from there out to the parking lot.

Besides picking up the pumpkins the kids also enjoyed stopping by the cottage where they had baked some molasses cookies to sample. The other highlight was something they don’t get to do every visit, but they were able to milk a cow this  time.

Planting the Pumpkins back in June:

Our trip back to get the pumpkins:

Photo Bloopers

The other day I was trying to take a picture of Jen and Noah after his birthday party. It turned into a bit of a hilarious disaster and I just kept taking pictures as it happened. The two of them were falling all over the place and laughing. Caile was trying to jump in and photo bomb them but you can only catch her leg in one.

It ended with a nice picture though so it was worth it.

animated

Week Five Summary

This week it has become obvious to me that I know nothing about how to lose weight. In my week four summary I was still working out pretty solid and eating pretty good as well and I lost no weight. This week however I gave in many more times on my eating and snacking. Then pretty much gave up on my evening workouts. I think I only did one maybe two this week.

I was scared to get on the scale this morning for my weigh in but as it turns out I was still the same weight. This makes three weeks in a row my weight hasn’t moved but I’ve been doing worse with my eating and working out, so it is very strange to me.

Running however has still been going well. I had five runs in this week for an almost 30km total distance. My 10k run this week was under an hour. Not as fast as my last years Valley Harvest run, but it is getting closer.

Results:

Last week: 201lbs
Now: 201lbs
Lost: 0lbs

Starting this week I’m going to start tracking my eating more. I hate counting calories but I think I need to for at least a bit so I can bet back into the swing of things.

running

Noah’s Birthday Party

Today we had Noah’s birthday party with all his friends. We rented the local community centre which has rooms you can have the part itself in and then access to the gym as well.

The party had a Skylanders theme. The plates, treat bags, some presents, and one of the games all related around Skylanders. The game is one that Jen created and it was a big hit.

The kids all sat in a circle in the middle of the gym and played pass the present. The idea is music gets played and you pass the present around the circle, when the music stops if you’re holding the present you’re out. If you were the last one you get to keep the present. This time there was a twist though. If you were out you came up to the big Punch Out Kaos board and punched out a space and inside was a piece of paper with a task to perform. When you perform your task you received a small prize.

Some of the tasks were easy like sing a nursery rhyme, do 10 jumping jacks, and lead a conga line through the gym. Last night I was helping Jen come up with some more tasks so I added ones like score a soccer goal on Sandy, and hit Sandy with a dodge ball. The kids seems to get a big kick out of them all and I got a bit of exercise in the process.

Happy Birthday Noah

Today is the first of three of my kids birthdays that fall in September. Noah, my youngest, turns six today!

He’ll have his actual birthday party with friends this weekend, but there is only a half day of school today so he’ll also have lots of friends here after school to celebrate and have cake today too.

Cutie little Noah
Gets to eat a special birthday breakfast that I had to go buy at 11:00pm last night. Froot Loops
Noah’s First Birthday
New Born Noah

First Halifax WordPress Meetup

Tonight I attended my first ever WordPress meetup. When I found out that Alison and Tara were organizing a meetup in Halifax I was very excited. Seeing co-workers going to meetups and WordCamps talking with others who are either passionate about, or wanting to know more and learn about WordPress had me a bit envious.

It was a really great evening, the first talk was about the differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. This is a complicated topic that has a fair amount of confusion around it and they did a great job at laying things out.

Over the years I’ve helped people in person to use WordPress but it was really neat tonight to get to engineer some happiness in person and I look forward to doing more of it in the future as well. I’m far from an outgoing person, but I found it really easy to talk to everyone tonight and can even see myself doing a talk at some point.

One of the highlights of the evening for me was when I introduced myself and my job title someone said, “that sounds made up.”

Thanks again to the organizers and everyone who came out. I’m looking forward to seeing you all again.

Thoughts on Fatherhood

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about families, and in particular Fathers. Previously I wrote about my own Father, I never really had a role model around except for some old memories and stories about things I specifically would not do as a Father myself.

Having just finished Scott Berkun’s book The Ghost of My Father it has given me even more to think about. Scott is becoming quite an influential author in my life pretty quickly. I had first read his book The Year Without Pants while looking at applying at Automattic. It certainly confirmed many of the things I had read elsewhere and gave me great insight into the company. It helped assure me I was making the right move working at becoming an Automattician. His other books will now be ordered soon.

Reading his latest book, a memoir about his own family and relationship with his Father, it really hit home with me personally. It has me thinking even more about all my relationships with my children and the things I need to really work at to make sure I have the kind of connection with them that I truly want.

Having the career I do gives me the opportunity and flexibility with my work life to really be a part of my kids lives. For the most part I do believe I have a strong bond with my children, but I really do need to be more present and active in their lives. While I do take them t,o and love watching, their extra curricular activities, my wonderful wife is usually the one that does a lot of the day to day things.

It’s not enough to just be present in the home with them I need to make a greater effort to talk with them about things, about their lives. More one on one time where I can show them individually how much they mean to me and how much I value them. This happens sometimes, but it is usually just something that occurs, I need to make more effort to purposely plan these things.

The one relationship that I need to work on the most is that of me and my oldest Alexandria. It seems we’ve struggled for a long time, and while I could make millions of excuses why that might be, they don’t really matter. What matters is I need to work to fix it.

Alexandria is turning 16 this month. When I was only a year older than that I left home and not on great terms. I wasn’t happy with my family and thought living with friends while I still wasn’t done high school, or have a job was a better alternative than living there in my mind. This put a huge strain on my relationship with my family that has taken a long time to overcome. Even still there are wounds there as well. My relationship with my youngest sister is almost non existent as she was so young when I left. This is a pattern I desperately don’t want to repeat with Alexandria and I need to fix it before it’s too late.

We have different personalities and different interests. She struggles with school a great deal which has always been a barrier between us. She will never be the strongest in some subjects in school and I need to learn to accept that, yet be willing to be there and help her without letting the historical battles frame how I approach it.

While reading and writing might not be strengths for her she certainly has the potential to be a great artist. She is taking her first real art class now in school and some of the sketches she has been doing are very impressive. Helping her develop these skills even more while improving in the areas she struggles in is going to be a balancing act I need to help her achieve.

While I don’t think I’m a horrible Father, there are certainly many areas that I can use work. It won’t be easy, especially in the case with Alexandria, there is already a lot of repair that needs to be done. The other night I took the first tiny step, I sat down and had a real conversation with her. Pretty casual, but I let her know that I’m proud of her and the hard work she is already putting in this school year. A small start but I’m going to build from there.

Change of Plans

Today Jen had a rare day off during the week. When we found out about this we decided to take advantage and I made arrangements to be off work today and work another day instead. Our plan was to hike Cape Split for the first time together. Jen has never made the hike before and I did it many years ago probably when I was around 12. I don’t really remember it at all, and I’m not sure I even made it to the top.

This plan had me very excited for a couple reasons. I’ve wanted to do the hike for some time but just never seem to get around to it, but the main reason is because Jen and I never seem to get time alone together besides at night when the kids are in bed. Even that with an almost 16 year old means we aren’t really alone because she stays up almost as late as we do and there have been times I go to bed before her.

We’ve been getting a fair amount of rain the past few days so I knew there was a possibility that today wouldn’t happen. But today itself was supposed to be overcast but no real rain. We ended up getting rain this morning coming down fairly heavy for a bit early so everything was soaked. Anecdotal stories from friends and family suggested that the hike wouldn’t be real enjoyable with a wet, muddy trail. Wet roots and fallen leaves would make things slippery and not the easy hike we were both looking for today. Therefore we decided to put it off until another time.

We were disappointed but really spending time together is what we really looking forward to and we were still able to do that. As I wasn’t going to get the exercise from the hike though I started the day with a run. I intended to just go for a short one at a decent pace but decided to keep pushing and go for 10k at the same pace I’ve been doing 5k runs. To my surprise I was able to do it!

We did have some errands to run but before that we dropped off some books to our local Wee Library and then went for a walk around the marsh where it is located as well. Once the errands were done we decided to go out and have lunch together. Quick calculations while we were there have us guessing that it was about two years since we shared a meal out just the two of us.

It wasn’t the day we initially planned but we made the most of it and had a fun day, even while running errands.

Reading, Setting an Example

Reading is important to me. It’s something we’ve tried to instill in our children from early on. We’ve always read to our kids since they were very little. Before they could even fully comprehend what was happening. Jen still reads all the time to the young kids she cares for.

One thing I’m bad for though is not setting the example. For a long time my kids would never have seen me sitting down to read for myself. Lots of the reading I did was either in my office, on the computer, or when they were in bed. Reading more has been a goal of mine for some time now, but haven’t done a great job at working at it. In the past couple of years though I have read more books than I had in years, but that’s still not a big number.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Fatherhood and Parenting in general but I’ll write more about that soon. Yesterday morning though I had just a small simple experience that helped remind me the effect we can have as parents on our children. Caile and I were home along for a bit of time. We were all ready, chores done and she was playing on her iPod in the living room. After making myself a coffee I came and joined her on the couch with my book I’ve been reading.

We talked a little bit, but for the most part we were each involved with our own task, or so I thought. Not long after I sat down with my book Caile got up and put her iPod away. She went to the kitchen and then came back with her book she’s been reading and we sat and read together until it was time for us to go meet everyone else.

On our drive I took the opportunity to talk about reading in general, it’s importance / benefits, and about the book she was reading. This wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t seen me showing by example that reading was enjoyable and something worth me using my time to do.