Yes....
Via The Consumerist
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June 30, 2008
Latest Changes
After taking Randy Pausch's advice from his lecture and his book, we decided to let Emily "express herself" by painting her new room. While Emily and Hannah had brilliant ideas and palates, their delivery was not quite what they expected. Thankfully, mom came in and saved the day...
June 20, 2008
The Death Star Cafeteria - Lego Style
Via Gizmodo
June 11, 2008
Not Earning His $0.50 Today....
And before you go off that we are evil, awful, terrible, uncaring parents...the list was HIS idea...
June 8, 2008
31=3+16+12
To call this last 31 hours a time of extreme ups and downs is probably an understatement.
Friday afternoon began with the arrival of Hannah and Grandma Jan back from London. For the first time in six months, all five kids were living and laughing under one roof as seen in the photographic evidence above.
Three hours later, Krystal walked up to the stage with 440 of her closest friends to close out her high school career. She graduated, passing her hardest class by a mere 0.033%. During the ceremony, a tornado tore across the lower half of Huntington County pausing the festivities for about five minutes while they sorted out if we were going to be target practice. Obviously, nothing happened and graduation commenced. At the end of the ceremony, we were greeted with the following double rainbow....
and then, the bottom fell out, 19 hours after that first picture.....
Hard feelings about boyfriends, expectations, and all sorts of fun changed our immediate plans of a nice Saturday afternoon graduation party. Krystal has decided to move back home with her mom, immediately. Now. A mere 16 hours after graduation, Krystal wanted to move home. A call from the police to yours truly (apparently fearing for their safety...whatever that means) and we were greeted with the following. No Party. No real goodbyes. Just hard feelings, hurt kids, and confused parents wondering how to explain this to the world.
I really wish I had something witty or wise to say right now, but it's hard to get the right words together. Of course, DeAnn and I tried our best (and I feel succeeded) with our original plans, to get Krystal to graduate High School and to build some sort of relationship with her. And hopefully those things will live on, just in a different fashion.
In the chaos afterwards, Hannah and Emily have been spending hours (literally) discussing how they will repaint and redecorate Emily's new room. I spent some time reflecting on what I did right and wrong as a dad, re-evaluating my biggest decisions, and then agreeing those were the right decisions back then and even now.
The chaos of time will diminish the pain and joy we felt this weekend. As a parent, we're forced to sometimes make the hard decisions, the examples, and the consequences for behaviors which we think will hurt our kids in the long run. And it is the duty of our children to push those boundaries, and make us as parents decide what is right and wrong for our family.
I don't know what's going to happen tomorrow, or two months from now. Right now, we all need time to get past the emotional crap that today unleashed and start to rebuild a new normal.
Congrats Krystal, we are proud of you finishing High School and we miss you. Good luck with your new life....
June 5, 2008
My Office
After some room tweaking and various things during conference calls, everything is in place (at least for this summer).
The Couch
This is a pic of Tyler on the couch. The couch that is behind my desk. Where people stare at my back while I'm working/screwing around on the computer/etc. The couch that catches everything (including me) when I get paged out at 03:00 (ok, today was 05:30....but still). The couch where the kids sit when they are bored, tired, grumpy, etc and launch whatever at me when I'm trying to work...
I'm really starting to hate that couch...