Max's Big Day

Today was Max's blessing day. Both Megan's parents and my parents came to Virginia for the express purpose of participating in the blessing this morning. (Ok, so seeing Ali and Kaitlyn too may have had something to do with it as well.) Max was so good during the blessing--he didn't cry at all.

That really isn't much of a surprise. Max has been such a good-natured boy so far. He's not bothered by the usual loud noises such as the vacuum or Kaitlyn's screams, and he doesn't even cry after Ali's occasional accidental full-body squishes ("Sorry...I didn't see Max there"). Max is definitely a male through-and-through; he only cares about being fed and being comfortable. (Soon enough he'll also care about playing the drums, but first things first.)

Since it was Max's big day today, we offer the following collection of photos:

Not To Be Outdone

My favorite Ali story of the week occurred right after our Friday night married institute dinner-and-discussion class. I'll skip the boring specific details about how I accidentally pulled the fire alarm and had to deal with a group of firefighters who showed up in quick time in a fire engine, and cut right to Ali.

She had just finished her third half-donut and was jumping around wildly--flailing her arms and legs in every direction and yelling incoherent babblery. I asked her what she was doing. She responded (as exactly as I can recollect), "Sugar! Sugar! I've had too much sugar today! Aah! Sugar!" Classic Ali. Too clever for her own good.

Over at my school they held a family Christmas party earlier in the week. Alison took that opportunity to tell Santa (who happened to be there) that all she wanted for Christmas was "a book." She's used to being poor. Maybe that's why she also took the opportunity to try her hand at a desk job. She sat behind the receptionist desk at the front of the building and said, "Can I help you? Do you have any questions?"




Kaitlyn has certainly had a great time with her grandparents here. Megan's parents had to leave immediately after the blessing to drive back to Indiana; they couldn't stay for the end of church. As we drove out of the church parking lot, with my parents following in the car behind us, Kaitlyn asked, "Where's the other Grandma and Grandpa?" She knows that "there's two grandmas and two grandpas" (her words) but I guess she's still figuring out how the naming thing works. Before my parents arrived on Friday night, Kaitlyn announced her exitement to see "Grandma Mary Lee and Grandpa Mary Lee."

This afternoon Kaitlyn climbed up on Grandpa's lap only to swipe the glasses off of his face and take off running. I tried desperately to capture a picture of her running around with them on, but this was the best I could do:

Trips, Trains and Tumbling

Megan and I spent Thursday, Friday and Saturday in Chicago at Accenture's "sell" weekend, where they did their best to convince us that accepting their offer was the best choice we could make. To be honest, we were leaning that way to begin with, so it probably wasn't that hard of a sell. We used it more as a "confirmation" weekend, to meet more people at the firm and to meet some of the people that I might be working with.

We took Max with us, but Ali and Kaitlyn spent time with the Hughes, McLaughlins and Sorensens who were incredibily gracious and kind for taking them for a couple of days (and for suffering through various meltdowns from each child).

Megan and I had a good time as well--when we weren't worrying about the girls. I think our highlight was eating at the Signature Room on the 95th and 96th floors of the John Hancock building. The views were incredible. Megan's parents were also very kind as they volunteered to drive up to Chicago from Indiana to watch Max so we could attend the dinner in the John Hancock building, although we ended up hiring a local service and everything worked out great. This picture is from our hotel at night, and doesn't really do justice at all to the kind of clear and amazing view we had.



Through it all, Megan decided she's not much of a big city girl. She didn't enjoy taking taxis everywhere or waiting in traffic. On the other hand, I decided that I'm not a huge fan of bitter cold made worse by blowing wind and airport delays due to impending blizzard conditions. That said, it looks like we're taking the job and will be adding Indianapolis to our list of places we've lived.

Max keeps getting bigger and bigger. Today he weighed in at 15 pounds. To put that in perspective, at 20 pounds (and 1 year), by law you can change the carseat from rear-facing to forward-facing. I'm guessing he'll hit the 20 pounds well before he hits the year mark.

Prior to our Thanksgiving and Chicago trips Max was sleeping about 6 hours straight at night, making both Megan and me (but especially Megan) very happy, and less tired. But, since our trips he's gotten out of the rhythm and has taken a few days to get back into the swing of things. I've been getting less and less sleep with an increasing workload at school (given that I didn't do anything during our trip to Chicago).

Kaitlyn is getting more and more creative. The other day she laid out all of the blocks in a long procession and declared it a train. I like how she grouped like-colors.

Kaitlyn is also getting smarter. We had stake conference yesterday. After following the directions to "get on Route 33 and drive over the mountain" we made it just in time to sit in the cafeteria of the high school where the meeting was held and which was being used as overflow. There were 2 closed circuit TV's which were set up so that we could watch the proceedings going on inside the auditorium. The girls didn't pay much attention, so on the way home we thought we'd see if they retained anything.

We asked Kaitlyn, "What did you learn at church today?" Kaitlyn's response, "The earth." Apparently, we missed that because they talked about Christmas and attitudes to have, and about the newly reorganized stake presidency. I followed up, "Anything else?" Her reply, "Monson." I guess church on TV (regardless of the location) means general conference, and I guess we've quizzed them all a little too much on who the general authorities are.

Alison is enjoying various and sundry adventures. The other day before bed, I walked in to find that she had set up the grocery shopping toy as a hurdle between her bed and Kaitlyn's bed and was leaping over it by springing from one bed to the other. I thought it was pretty funny and ran downstairs to get the camera. (What a bloggable moment!) However, perhaps I shouldn't have been so encouraging. A couple of jumps after taking this picture, she didn't clear the hurdle and ended up with quite a bruise on her little behind (which is still there).

I guess I should have shown her better technique. Use pillows.

Post by Ali and Kaitlyn

In our family, we have a lot of fun play-fighting and wrestling and playing "chase." Today, I said to Ali, "Ali, would you like to come over here for some spankings?"

She replied (and this she is going to type by herself), "Do I get a prize after?!"

Not bad typing. That only took about 7 minutes--that's a speedy 51 words per hour.

Kaitlyn will now type something. Let's try to get her to do her name: kaitlyn

Nice job. 3 minutes per word.

Max will now mash the keyboard: opl

Well...enough stalling. Type to get these kids into bed!

"My Eyeball Is Missing"

Kaitlyn is really becoming her own little person. Her silly little personality is starting to peek out like a toddler up past her bedtime sticking her head around the corner. Today during lunch after church, I looked up only to see Kaitlyn (immediately followed by Ali) saying, "My eyeball is missing!" while holding a grape up to her face.

It's so amazing how food finds it way everywhere except in their mouths!

Kaitlyn also loves to play with the digital camera. It's not so bad, because we can always delete the multitude of pictures that she takes, and our camera is rugged enough to handle an occasional drop. However, I personally can stand her taking pictures of random things for only so long before my patience wears thin and I take the camera away from her. Last week, however, she took off running with the camera before I had the chance to yoink it out of her hand. It took about one full lap around the house until I was in a good position to grab it. Just before I kindly repossessed the camera from Kaitlyn she managed to capture this incriminating photo:

On Friday, I had a field trip to Maryland to interview with another consulting company. Ali, on the other hand, had a field trip to Ash Lawn, home of James Monroe, U.S. President in 1816 and 1820. Here is a transcript of my conversation with Alison about it, 5 minutes ago:

Ali: "We went to 'Ash Lawn' for our field trip."

Me: "What is Ash Lawn?"

Ali: "It's an old place."

Me: "Why did you go to an old place?"

Ali: "...so we could learn about long ago, and today. They wore different clothes...[we learned] that girls wear long dresses and boys wear, like, suits. And...uh...today they wear...um...today girls can wear pants or jeans and shirts...Long ago they made candles by getting bee's honey and they put, like, um, a like piece of string in and they keeped [sic] doing that until it looks like a candle...and I made one...I made two! Really, I did make two. You're writing down everything I say?"

Our conversation got less productive when she was more concerned about reading my transcript than trying to answer my questions.

Moving on.

It's been about 5 or 6 weeks since Max was born, and Megan is really doing well. She's started running and exercising and several non-me people have commented on how skinny she looks, especially in her LBCD (little black church dress). Max, on the other hand, is packing it on, as you can see below.



Megan also volunteered at Ali's school this week and helped the kids trace their hands and then create "turkeys" with them. I sense that Ali feels a great sense of pride that her mom loves and cares about her enough to go help out at her school. I think Megan feels a great sense of successfully spying on her first daughter.

Return to Blogging

First of all, let me apologize for breaking my regular routine of posting every Sunday. It turns out, people actually do read our blog. Allow me to make some excuses: I've been extremely busy with school, and with interviewing--trying to get a job, and with Max as well as Ali and Kaitlyn, and given the current lunar cycle and all...

The most recent, exciting news is that we got another job offer! After interviewing at their office in Atlanta yesterday, we received an offer to join Accenture's Strategy practice later that evening; we're really exciting about the possible opportunities with this offer, but we'll keep you posted on our decision making.

However, it was quite the trip. I woke up at 4:15 a.m. to get ready and catch a 6:00 a.m. flight to Atlanta for a series of 3 interviews starting at 12:15 p.m. Believe me, if there had been a later flight that would have put me there on time, I would have taken it because I wasn't really that excited about sitting in a Starbuck's reading cases for Monday for hours just to pass the time.

The interviews were done by 3:15 p.m. and a group of us from Darden who were there for interviews took a shuttle back to the airport to wait (and again pass the time) for an 8:50 p.m. flight back home. However, by 9:15 p.m. we still hadn't departed due to some sort of "ballast" or weight problem in the plane. Then, there was a problem with the flight being oversold, but a seat being needed for an under-age passenger who needed to get home that night. Once we finally took off, I dozed off for what was supposed to be a short hour and 15-minute flight. As I woke up when we landed, I was informed by my colleagues that we were in Richmond, not Charlottesville, because of some sort of wing-flap mechanical problem. By this time it was about 11:30 p.m. The pilot said he was going to have to call operations to get a mechanic to come check it out, but that in the meantime he was going to power down the plane. After about 5 minutes of waiting in the dark cold, the pilot came back on and explained that he had basically just "rebooted" the plane, and that the wing was working fine now. Unfortunately, a couple of cranky people wanted to get off the plane and stay in Richmond, which delayed our departure for Charlottesville even more. At last, we took off--but not before the flight attendant went through the whole pre-flight instructions one more time--even though only 2 people had exited the plane! I got in bed at about 2:15 a.m.--22 hours after starting my day.

Next story.

A couple of days ago as we were eating dinner I was trying to help the kids feel loved and so I said, "Do you know you guys are the best kids in the whole world?" Ali's immediate response was, "Ab-so-lutely!" I'm glad they know.

We really enjoyed having Mary Lee out here for a week and a half. We had a such a great time together and it was so helpful to have her here. We enjoyed going to the Children's Museum, trick-or-treating on The Lawn, and attending the temple. I think that she had a great time here too--and how couldn't she? Look at how cute they all are together!


As I mentioned, one of our activities was visiting the Charlottesville Children's Museum at the Downtown Mall. I happened to have the Friday off from school, but it was a cold, rainy day. So, we decided that playing inside at the musuem was just what we all needed.

The first area we visited was the grocery area. Kaitlyn collected every single piece of plastic fruit she could find and filled her little grocery cart to the very top. Then, she took the groceries to Alison who was waiting at the pretend check-out station. Ali patiently scanned each individual item and then re-placed each one back in the cart. I love how they imitate what they see and act so grown up. It's amazing to see how they make sense of the world they see.


We, I mean they, also loved playing in the "ambulance." Each of us took turns pretending to be the doctor and looking at the silly x-rays that they had. ("Aah...I think I've found the problem: you have a pair of scissors in your stomach and a nail in your head.")



At The Lawn, hundreds of kids and their parents gathered to trick-or-treat. I've never seen so many little costumes in my entire life. It was really great of the undergraduates who live there to do such a nice service to the community (the dental community) by giving out hundreds of pounds of sugary treats. Ali's bag was so full that she literally couldn't carry it. She was dragging it on the ground from door to door.



Max wanted to be a Zebra (not a skunk) for Halloween, and helped his dad score some excellent treats as well.


Max also had his 1 month check-up and has grown from 8 pounds to almost 13 pounds. At this rate, he will be approximately 690 pounds by his first birthday. Do the math.

Supplemental Photos

For some reason, Blogger wouldn't post these pictures in connection with the last story about Max, his exponential growth, etc.

Let's try this again: