Tasman is three!

Well, I've already violated my promise to blog weekly since I missed last Sunday. But today I have an especially good reason to blog. It was Tasman's third birthday on Friday! And we have the photos to prove it:

This was the pile of presents. And this didn't even include two boxes from my parents, who weren't able to be there for the Friday celebration. (They came over today, Sunday.) You'd think it was Christmas or something.

Tas got a Backyardigans cake.


Thanks for the balloons, V!


Mommy and Tasman, looking cute.


The infamous birthday hat. We bought this hat at Disneyland long before Tasman was born with the intention of making it a family tradition. So we're likely to see this hat pop up in photos from time to time.


Yummy birthday cake.


This is Tassie's ghetto pressie. Kirsti found this Sesame Street radio-controlled race set for six bucks at a consignment sale. The plastic and tape on the right end were there when she bought it; the lid had obviously been torn off. We were amazed that nearly all the pieces were there. The only thing missing was a little four-wheeler that goes on a little trailer that the car pulls around, but its absence in no way alters the functionality of the rest of the set. (If we had been missing pieces of the track, that would have been problematic, but they were all there.)

Vanessa made this little hat for Tas.

There were lots of other cool presents. We didn't get photos of everything. Tas got some wooden food toys: one was a Bento box with toy sushi, and the other was a cutting board and some food that can be "cut" into pieces. (The pieces are held together with Velcro and when you cut through the slices, the Velcro separates, making a very satisfying cutting sound.) She got a stuffed rabbit, lots of princess dress-up apparel, the movie Sleeping Beauty, a fake CD player that plays Disney songs, a giant Magna Doodle, and several cute outfits. I'm sure I'm forgetting stuff. But that's because there was a lot of stuff. What a spoiled kid!

And thanks to Papa and Meme (David and Roxann, Kirsti's parents) for hosting the party at their home and preparing a lovely dinner.

We're back!

I'm not sure to whom I'm writing. At this point, it's been three months or so since my last blog post, so most of our frequent readers have probably given up and gone away for good. (Unless you kept our RSS feed in your reader, in which case, good for you!) But if you are out there reading this, welcome back.

So what's new? Well, it snowed this morning. Now the sun just came out, so hopefully by this afternoon, most of the snow will have melted away. But we ain't in San Diego anymore, Toto.

We have made the move to Utah and we're settling in. Well, sort of. We still have about fifteen to twenty boxes sitting either in our garage or our basement waiting to be unpacked. We've retrieved all the stuff we need for our day-to-day living, so the rest of our junk has just been sitting there waiting for us. Since a lot of it is in the garage, we haven't been parking our car in there. But now that it's cold and snowy outside, it would be a good idea for us to get to that stuff and at least move it out of the way enough to get our car parked in the garage.

I am loving Westminster College. All my colleagues are genuinely nice people and the whole vibe there is pretty laid back. My classes are going well, for the most part. I'm excited about the spring semester since I'll be teaching an upper-division topology course.

Kirsti is working one day a week at the University of Utah supervising students in their audiology clinic. She is also planning to work from time to time at the VA as a substitute audiologist (presumably when people go on vacation and so forth), especially during the holidays and summers when I have time to be home with Tas.

Speaking of Tasman, we have been potty-training her for the last few weeks. It is going pretty well. We decided to go "cold turkey" on the diapers. So at least while we are home, she wears her "big girl panties", although we have to put her in pull-ups when we go out in public. When she stops having accidents at home, we'll be more likely to let her go out without pull-ups.

So now you're relatively up-to-date. My apologies that this first post back sounds a little "Christmas letter"-ish. My goal is to blog once a week, probably on Sundays since I'll have a bit more free time on Sundays than I do the other days of the week. Hopefully, the posts will get a bit more exciting.

Blog hiatus

As you can see, some time has passed since the last blog post. And it looks like even more time will pass before anything substantial arrives. With my dissertation defense just around the corner (and my typing still not done), and with a big move to Salt Lake in about a month, it doesn't look good for our humble little blog. Hopefully, once we get settled in our new home and new jobs, we can get back to a more regular blogging schedule. In the meantime, if you want to see some of the photos that I was planning to post, go to Devin's blog jelloplanet. There you'll find stuff from our family reunion in Houston, including some cute pics of Tas. (That's the only reason anyone reads this thing anyway. Heck, that's the only reason we write anything here, for that matter.)

A'ight. Peace out.

Some Tasman quotes

I know, I know. It's been almost a month since my last blog post. Well, things are a little crazy right now. Kirsti just finished up her class and she's still working on a prospectus for her capstone project to finish her doctorate. I'm also finishing up my dissertation for my doctorate. I have now started teaching my summer calculus class at Miramar college. We had a family reunion last weekend in Houston and this next week we'll be in Utah looking for a house. So, it's a little chaotic here. At some point, I hope to be able to blog about the fun weekend we had last month with our friends Scott and Vanessa Jackson and Lisa Wood. (We call ourselves the Jackson 5, although with Tas, we're more like the Jackson 5 1/2.) And I want to post some photos from our family reunion. In the meantime, though, I hope to tide you over with some funny Tassie quotes.

• We had planned to wait to potty-train Tasman until we moved to Salt Lake and had a bit more stability in our schedule. But one day, Tas said she wanted to go pee-pee in the potty. So we obliged her and she picked it up pretty easily. She's not at the point where she can decide she needs to go. But if the idea to go to the bathroom occurs to her, she can usually squeeze out a few drops to ensure the awarding of the consequent M&M treat. In fact, I think she started asking to go to the potty just so she could get an M&M. Anyway, the funniest thing was what she said the first night she started going to the potty. She put her hands on her hips and triumphantly declared, "Nothing's gonna stop us now!"
• I fed Tasman some lunch the other day, and she decided she wanted to play a little game. So she told me to "say, 'Hey, Tasman.'" So I said, "Hey, Tasman." And then she responded, "What?", leaving me with no response. Very funny, Tas.
  
• We have been watching Monsters, Inc. a lot. Of all the possible quotes from the movie that she might have memorized, she decided on "I'm watching you Wazowski. Don't let it happen again." Now she says it to us all the time.
  

Popular photo

We've received several comments about the small photo we've used in the right panel called "Tasman's Blue Period". So by popular demand, here is a more full version of the photo. (I maxed out the saturation to get a nice contrast between the blues and the whites.)