LarrabeeFamily.com

Well 2011 is officially here, so I am taking a moment to reflect on what 2010 brought us. We had a pretty interesting year overall I would say. I was just reviewing the posts I have made in 2010, and it is amazing to see how much the kids have grown in just that one year.

Oliver had some interesting milestones for 2010.  He started Kindergarten this year.  He lost his first (and second) tooth this year.  He had his first Halloween Parade, as well as many other school activities this year.

Summer continues to grow everyday, and is really starting to get her own personality, with a dash of little miss boss attitude.  She is still going to dance class and seems to enjoy it quite a bit.  She had her first dance reticle this year.  She  is very much interested in coloring and other artistic things – and she does rather well in my opinion.

Both kids have been enjoying more outdoors activities lately, they like going fishing from time to time, and going on nature hikes at on trails at the local park.

Kim continues to work at the same company – but at the end of 2010 transitioned to a new position which should keep 2011 interesting for her.  She also ran her first Half Marathon in 2010.  She also suffered an injury that put her training back a bit in 2010, but managed to run almost just under 450 miles over 10 months, and is making a recovery and has big plans for 2011.

I made an effort to get back into shape, and even start running myself in 2010.  I was able to shed about 35 pounds over the course of about 6 months.  Mostly accomplished by eating better – but I also logged a little over 332 miles of running myself.  I ran a few 5K’s and also ran the 2010 Run for the Diamonds.

We had a few nice outings as a family.  We had a couple trips to Annapolis / Baltimore - where the kids sparked an interest in baseball and the Orioles.  We also checked out the science musuem an Maryland zoo.  We took advantage of our Philly Zoo membership as always, and Kim and I took a refreshing trip to to Turks & Caicos Islands.  We also had plenty of fun around the house, and other activities in the area.  So looks like overall we had a pretty good year

In other family news,Grandma Larrabee became Grandma Smith (though the kids still call her Grandma Larrabee).  Uncle Tommy got his own apartment in the NYC area, and is engaged to be married, and Uncle Leo ironically also moved to a new apartment and also is engaged.

Here is hoping for a great 2011!

Well I just realized that I haven’t posted anything here on the site since last year – I didn’t think it had been THAT long.  I guess thats what happens when your current job is the search of a new occupation, but since I don’t think I have mentioned it here yet I might be getting a bit ahead of myself.  As many know I am on a partial lay off at work, about 50% actually, so most of my days are a whirlwind of trying to find a more secure position in this current economy and/or picking up extra contract work if and when I can find it.  Add that onto the normal everyday life and it seems the family blog gets pushed down the priority list.

I am usually the negative one, and Kim the positive one, but I am going to try and play the role of Kim here and look for the silver lining.  Yesterday was a good example of how the lay off can at times be good, or at least not bad.  It is finally starting to get warm out, and Oliver fought his fears of bugs and decided the tackle the art of riding a two wheeler (with training wheels of course).  After just a few runs he was flying down the sidewalk, he did however fall a few times – the first time hurt the most as he yelled for  help, but after that he just picked himself up like it was no big deal on future dives.  I snapped a quick pick on my phone and sent it to Mommy – we were both so proud.

I did upload some photos this year, but forgot to post about them, so here they are.

Click to see the January photos

Well things have been crazy as always around the Larrabee home.  Oliver recently was out of school a few days because of bronchitus, Kim is still battling asthma, allergies, or whatever is causing her to have breathing problems.  Just when we thought it was finally starting to get better, it got worse.  Summer is crawling around, and climbing everything, perhaps more climbing than Oliver ever did – and we though he was going to be the troublesome one.  We haven’t made it to the Bloomsburg fair yet this year, originally we had planned on the previous Saturday but Oliver got sick and changed those plans. 

Last night Kim and I took a few hours off to have a night together alone for a change, I won tickets to go see So You Think You Can Dance - which Kim likes to watch.  It was alot of the same routines that they did on the tv show – with a few that were new.

October is coming – we will probably end up taking a trip to the pumpkin farm again this year, to let the kids pick out our pumpkins to carve and ride the hay ride.

Friday after work we went to the 2007 Plymouth Kielbasa Festival (no joke).  Oliver had an ice cream for dinner, summer a perogi, and Kim and I each had a kielbasa.  We browsed around the stands, which was mostly just food – and then we entered a few tickets into a silent auction which benefits homeless pregnant women.

 Saturday we went to Knoebles again – this time for my annual company picnic.  It was a bit too hot honestly, but we had fun – got to see kids of the various people from work and got to ride a few rides.  This trip marks the first trip to Knoebles that Oliver actually enjoyed the rides and didn’t scream on every one we took him on – in fact he was screaming that he had to wait in line before he could get on the ride again.

Today is the start of a busy week, Oliver starts pre-school this week, and later this week I have to take my car to get an estimate on repairs.  A 16 year old kid rear ended me on Thursday.  Additionally I have to start the work required to get our dishwasher installed – and if there is any time left we still have all of the work scheduled for bathroom.

Well as you may or may not know, we have our second child on the way. So we are preparing the house for the arrival of this baby with various home improvement projects that we have been wanting to do since we moved “back to the valley”. The first of these is we are going to move Oliver’s room to what we used to consider our spare room, and his room will serve as the new baby’s nursery, thus providing us easier access to her room, and hopefully without disturbing his sleep….

So far the progress has been slow but I am going to try and keep pictures of the progress in another album Here
Step one is to take up the carpet, get rid of the wallpaper border, and strip the paint. Normally we would have just painted over the paint, but it was textured and there was at least 5 layers of about 3 different colors. Also I have gotten some of the primer done in the room as well.

We took a bunch of pictures on the company trip to NYC Check them out here

Well yesterday my computer decided it would be a good idea to reboot at random times. During this process it was also able to wipe my partion tables on my drive. Needless to say I lost most everything, because I am lazy and barely ever back up my data. Luckily for this site, all (or at least most) of all of our pictures are safe.Â

I have still yet to find what the problem is, after putting in a different drive the computer continues to reboot, all fans seem to be working properly, I have taken out any extra hardware except a single hard drive, dvd rom, and video card. Everything else is on board.Â

The next target on my troubleshooting adventure is the power switch or power supply. The motherboard has a LED that is lit when it gets power, which is still on, even when the machine reboots – so I am swaying towards the power/reset switch. Now I just have to want to work on it again.

The worst part of loosing this information is once I get it up and running again I get to begin the fun process of rewriting 30 hours worth of code.

Hi there anyone that actually reads these things. It has been over a month since the last post to the site, I am sure you are all very troubled by that. Things have been busy here lately. Nothing really that interesting just busy. I started a new job a little over a week ago, while still working for the old job as a consultant in my spare time, and if there is any time left I got an Xbox 360 a couple weeks back.

I did add some January pictures a while back, just never posted about them – and I just added some more. The folders are adding up in Olivers pictures, if i get around to it I might group up all the 2005 pictures into a single folder to make it easier to find the new 2006 folders. Not sure how that will affect pre-existing links, which is part of the reason I haven’t done it yet.

Now get back to whatever it is that you do – I doubt reading this is top of the list.

January 2006 Pics

Since we all love acronyms, ‘the operation’ has been given an acronym (Operation GTFOH) . Many of the recent interviews I have went on have ended up not panning out, but I currently have two in the works that are looking promising. One is staying with the current company and one is a pretty drastic change, but in a good way. More on this if it things go well, otherwise I will simply ignore it and act as though it never happened, to save myself from shame and dissapointment.