Unpacked!

Posted on by Jordan

Well, it took roughly six weeks, but we have unpacked *ALL* of the boxes from the move.

I have to give most of the credit for that to Heather, I was ready to just kind of ignore the last 10% of the boxes, but she somehow found the energy to keep pushing until everything was unpacked.

That isn’t to say there isn’t some post-move related work still to do… organizing and whatnot, but hey, it’s more progress than I was hoping for at this point.

On a related note, having a house is more work than the condo was. The whole yard thing, while very nice for a toddler adds a substantial amount to the total time per week required to maintain a household. I won’t say I have fully adjusted to that change yet.

It does provide opportunities for things like this though:

 

It’s hard to complain about that! 🙂

 

-Jordan

Another First

Posted on by Jordan

We got our first Amazon order that came with its own shipping pallet

 

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Side note, you can see that our garage isn’t really organized yet… not even close

 

Back on topic, we now have a treadmill! It ended up being the heaviest thing I have had to lift in the entire moving process, but last night Heather and I managed to get it down into the basement and setup.

It would be difficult to overstate how happy Heather was to have a treadmill… walking is a big part of her stress management process, and being able to do that while staying close to Hannah is a big deal.

-Jordan

Notes From The Move

Posted on by Jordan

We are in KC!

It’s funny how often I think “this could probably be worked up into a blog post” but excess time and energy have been hard to find over the past week or seven.

That being said, I decided to sit down and share a few observations:

We discovered a new game, it’s called “What box did the bottles wind up in?” it is not a fun game. Just to paint the picture, it’s Saturday night, we have spent the entire day trying to unpack enough stuff to live in the house that night, and somewhere along the way we lost the one bottle we had held back from the packing process. (side note, hold back more than one bottle). Hannah only does one bottle at this point, but it’s a big part of her bedtime routine, and getting her settled is pretty important to us getting any sleep. About an hour before bedtime we realized we didn’t have a bottle and shifted our priorities to unpacking “kitchen” boxes, knowing that one of them would contain the treasure. An hour and a half later I and I have abandon trying to put anything away and am just tearing the top open on each kitchen box and trying to unload just enough to see what’s in there (not bottles). At this point there is only one box left in the kitchen, so better late than never right? I open that one and find a single infant bottle. I walked into the next room to share the um… news with Heather and was confronted with an entire wall of boxes marked “kitchen” yay! Hannah got to eat a NASCAR style bedtime bottle where the pit crew frantically reloaded a tiny bottle before she got knocked out of her grove.

When we started gearing up to put our house on the market, we followed the standard advice and packed up lots of clothes and other closet items to de-clutter the house. Given that the weather was something like 14 below zero then, packing all my shorts into a box seemed like a good idea. A month or two, and one move later, it’s getting kind of warm (or was) and *all* my shorts are somewhere in a box marked “garage.” This was perhaps a mistake.

Having a 15 month old is not a force multiplier. Hannah can somehow keep both of us tied up if she is properly motivated. She is really starting to feel at home in the new hose, and that helps a lot, but the first few days were really interesting.

The movers helpfully wrote “MBR” on lots of boxes. I may have been a little out of it anyway, but it did take me a minute to realize I wasn’t looking at a box of master boot records.

Speaking of boxes… I have a couple more to take care of before bed, so I guess I will call this post done. 🙂

 

-Jordan

 

 

Changes On The way

Posted on by Jordan

So that essay plan? Yeah I have one about half written, but it turns out I can’t just sit down and bang out something thoughtful so… I may have to plan my time more carefully for that to work out.

But what else could be imposing on my time?

Well…

We are moving to Kansas City!

Heather’s employer provided the option of moving there with her job. Given that we were looking to move somewhere, and there aren’t a lot of places in the Midwest that are viable for both my job and hers it was an opportunity we couldn’t say no to.

We have known for a while now, but didn’t want to say too much until we had a few things locked in / communicated, but at this point I think we have most of the details figured out. In just a few weeks we will be moving into a house in Parkville MO.

What does this mean for us?

  • I have to learn how to spell missury messuri muzury Missouri
  • Hannah will have an entire yard full of grass to contend with
  • Going to the garage won’t involve three flights of stairs and crossing a street
  • Heather and I will both be giving up our sub-20 minute commutes

And, probably other things we haven’t even thought of.

It has been exciting and kept us really busy, but I think we are nearly ready for the move. I suppose this does open up all sorts of opportunities to come up with blog posts, so that will be good too!

 

-Jordan

Change In Programming

Posted on by Jordan

Well, not a drastic change, but still.

My goal for the year was to keep posting to this blog, and to avoid every post being a recap of the somewhat predictable saga of raising a toddler might be.

It occurred to me as I wrote the above line that one of my favorite blogs The Bleat, happens to be largely recaps of the mundane, but I won’t kid myself about his writing talents and my own. I don’t think I will venture down that path.

No, what I had in mind was giving fair warning that I may be doing some more reflective posts rather than just recording the day to day events in our lives. This is in part due to my fear that it would be really boring, and because I don’t feel comfortable talking in any detail about my job or Heather’s here, so that basically leaves the adventure found in mopping applesauce off Hannah. Some days there is adventure there…. but I don’t know if I can really do it justice.

So, reflective posts it is! I will aspire to avoid controversy and or politics, because frankly there are plenty of other places to revel in exploration of ether (or both) and I doubt I can provide anything new to the conversation there.

-Jordan

Cup Stacking

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So you know the cup stacking thing? You know, this one?

Well, we have been playing a variation  of that around our house, except it takes two players.

Heather or I frantically stack Hannah’s stacking cups, and she flails her her little arms and laughs manically. Well, maybe not manically, but it makes better word picture that way right? 🙂 Whatever the case it’s actually a lot of fun, I just haven’t fully adjusted to the fact that games don’t end on my time anymore.

Hannah has been quite the hand full over the past month. I think she has cut two or three teeth and gone into a weird drama phase over the past week. We don’t really know what the story is there, but as Heather always says “kids are a mystery”

It’s possible she is picking up on how stressed Heather and I are… it’s been a crazy, crazy month (more on that in a future post!) but I didn’t think we were that obvious about it. I suppose a meaningful percentage of her intuition is tuned to perceiving everything she can about mom and dad right now, so I might be selling her short.

Oh, and we took a trip out to Colorado for a few days, dropping her off in Nebraska with my parents. It was a great trip, and she apparently had lots of fun with Grandma and Grandpa, but I suppose a few days away from home plus 14 total hours in the car could, perhaps have contributed to her unrest 🙂

Speaking of that car ride, I don’t know how you are suppose to handle hour six of seven, but Hannah and I used an apple and a hat:

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It seems to have worked ok… she looked better in the hat than I did.

-Jordan

Document Security

Posted on by Jordan

I shredded some documents tonight, as one should when the contain personal and or financial information.

It did occur to me however, that I could probably get sufficiently good security simply by placing the documents in a bag with a few cups of water and placing them in the dumpster tonight. The combination of -10 temperature and a 20 mile and hour would, I am certain, work to both transform the documents into a form that could not be readily used, and to deter snoopers prior to their being covered in other garbage.

So, I guess what I am saying is that I should really be using this latest cold front to my advantage! Think of all the wear and tear I could save on the shredder!

 

-Jordan

Tubes

Posted on by Jordan

2014 is apparently the year of the ear infection.

Hannah is on her 20th day taking oral antibiotics, and in today’s doctors appointment they said “oh, this looks worse than a week ago!”

We already had the procedure to get tubes for Hannah on the calendar, and I guess there is no question but that it is necessary at this point. We feel so bad for her. She frequently acts like she doesn’t feel good, and I think we can understand why! Everyone tells us the tubes will make a world of difference, so hopefully they are correct.

Hopefully we can get our little explorer back full-time soon!

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-Jordan

Still Winter

Posted on by Jordan

It’s amazing how hard this time of year seems to hit… every year. There isn’t much to look forward to in the days after Christmas and winter has only begun to bare its icy fangs.

So, twice in the past seven days we have gotten a flash snow storm bad enough to choke traffic going to work in the morning. Both times I managed to see an accident on my ONE MILE drive to work. Also, it was several degrees below zero on the way to work… again.

Sorry, I don’t mean to complain, I mean everybody knows it’s going to be cold in the winter. and this isn’t the first nasty winter we have seen in Iowa. That being said, it still surprises me how quickly it gets us down.

Driving home today, I did see one approach to dealing with winter:

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Mind you it was a balmy 5 degrees out by this time. I don’t know if this was an attempt to feel warm by dressing for summer or what.

-Jordan

Workouts 2014 Edition, Or Perhaps A Retrospective

Posted on by Jordan

It has been roughly a year now that I have been doing the “You Are Your Own Gym” workouts, as mentioned in a prior post. I can’t say that I have really been doing the workouts as much as borrowing the lift ideas and doing parts of the workouts. His full program is intense! I find that I cannot push myself that hard and keep doing the workout, sadly.

On the bright side, doing a somewhat relaxed version has allowed me to consistently get three to four workouts in a week. This has been enough to at least let me maintain my weight, and stay in something that resembles “in shape.” I sometimes worried about my joints using this approach, but excepting some muscle soreness, it has been surprisingly easy on my body over the past year.

We had one of those random mid-winter nice days a week or so back, and I thought it would be a great idea to go for a run. It turns out my knees still don’t really like that. I guess it was almost two years ago that I was running regularly, and I wasn’t having too much in the way of knee pain most of the time then. Maybe I would need to work back up to that, because just doing an out of the blue run caused several days worth of pain.

All of that is to say that I am really glad to have found something that is: low impact, practical within the confines of parenting a one-year-old, and something I can keep doing day in and day out.

A year in, and I don’t even slightly resemble the guy on the cover though, so perhaps there is still room for improvement 🙂

 

-Jordan