Go Skins!

It's that time of year again.....

The Admiral gave me this forest face for my birthday.  Fun, eh?

Aw yeah.....it's time for some FOOTBALL!  NFL opening weekend, to be precise.  Gotta love it.  And there's no better way to start than for my boys to play the Dallas Cowboys.  At home.  Tonight.  This year should be good.  I'm not too pleased that we picked up McNabb from the Eagles, but we've actually  put together an Offensive Line over the off-season.  Say what you want about Jason Campbell, but if he'd had an Offensive Line (not to mention a stable offensive scheme) to play behind over the last few years, he would have been a LOT better than he was.  The 'Skins managed to take a guy with a LOT of potential and make him mediocre with their crappy personnel decisions and hyper-active micromanagement of the coaching staff.  Hopefully the new regime under Shanahan, with Bruce Allen in the front office, will be different.  We'll see!

In the meantime, Go Skins!  Beat Dallas!

:)

So the last couple weeks have been busy, and fun.  Going in reverse chronological order.....

Yesterday, our first event was apple picking.  The Admiral's Mommy Club decided to meet at the Bowman Farm, a short way south of our house.  Naturally, the kids and I went along.  It took a couple minutes for the kids to get the message on what they were supposed to do, but once they figured it out, they were totally into it!  We only stayed for 45 minutes or so, but we left with just over 13 pounds of apples!  That should last us for....oh about.....a week.  

Sibylla picking up a storm!

Vasili got in on the act also.  Well done, lad!

After apple picking, we drove down to Albany, to the Apple Store.  The Admiral's Macbook Pro is acting up: the LCD screen is starting to die.  I guess we shouldn't complain about it, considering the thing is 3 1/2 ears old and has been dropped, spilled on, and danced on (Sibylla!) multiple times, but still functions.  We were dreading replacing her computer, though.  The plan was to replace mine first, since it's going on 6 years old now and WICKED slow.  It works though, so with her screen dying we began to contemplate options for buying a new laptop for her.  Fortunately, it looks like it'll only cost $400 or so to fix her screen.  That's a lot, but not nearly as much as a new laptop altogether.  So next month, we'll git 'r done.

Next on the agenda was a pig roast.  My cousin, Christine, whom I hadn't seen for 15 years before a few weeks ago, lives about a 1/2 hour south of Albany.  I had no idea, until my Aunt Nadya visited her then realized she was wicked close to us, so brought her up to say hi to us last month.  Christine invited us to this pig roast party they were throwing yesterday, and we were glad to go.  We drove straight from the Apple Store to her place, and stayed for a few hours.  Alas, we didn't get to partake in the pig itself because the kids pooped out before they finished roasting it.  But we had a great time with her, her husband, and their friends.  It was good to hang with them for a bit.

The Admiral and Christine

Rewind a week and a half.  Wednesday, 1 September, saw us in Boston at Boston Children's Hospital, for a Vasili's follow-up with his Cardiologist.  You may recall that Vasili has an Atrial Septal Defect.  We knew he was going to need surgery, but the Doc wanted to check on him this fall, before we schedule it.  Well, he's looking great.  He's in the 50th percentile in height and weight, has lots of energy, and is not asthmatic or pneumonic at all.  The Doc (who looks and sounds JUST like Donald Sutherland) was very pleased with how he's doing, but pointed out that he is starting to show some signs of enlargement in the right side of his heart.  There was no rush to get the surgery done, but we wanted to do it with plenty of time for him to recover before we have to move again, and with plenty of time after kid #3 comes to let him grow a little so we'll feel better leaving him with the grandparents for a week or so while Vasili gets cut.  So we decided to schedule the surgery for next May.  So it was a productive visit.  The Admiral teared up a bit, naturally.  It's a scary thing to think about your cracking open your kid's chest.  But this procedure is about as routine as any open-heart surgery gets.  They go in and sew some kevlar into the whole between his atria.  Within 6 months, the tissue grows over the kevlar and you'll never know the whole existed to begin with.  It's got something like a 97% success/survival rate, and Boston Children's Hospital is the #1 Pediatric Cardiology hospital in the country.  So there's little to worry about.....but still, it's not the most fun thing to contemplate.

While waiting for the Doctor, Sibylla treated Vasili to a spin, literally, in the Doctor's chair.

As soon as Vasili's appointment was finished, we piled in the car and headed south to Dewey Beach Delaware, where my Mom has a beach house.  We'd committed to spending Labor Day weekend there a few months ago, and despite the Admiral's parents' complete panic about Hurricane Earl, we were determined to follow through (especially after we saw the cone that showed Earl going well off the Delaware coast, with at best a Tropical Storm happening where we were going to be).  So we felt great about the trip.  We had to endure calls every other half-hour from her parents though, corresponding, no doubt, to each update on Earl in their local news in Maine.  From my perspective it wasn't all that much of a change, since they tend to call the Admiral six times a day anyway.  But she got really annoyed with the calls too this time.  After all, she's 35 years old.  Can't she figure out for herself what risks are prudent to take and which aren't?  I tend to think so, and so does she.

So naturally, we were both feeling more than a bit superior when Earl did precisely jack squat to the Delaware coast.  :)

In the week leading up to the trip, I did some car searches in the Delaware area for used mini vans.  We've been contemplating a mini van for a while, especially since the Admiral became pregnant with #3.  We realized the the Tribecca, though an awesome vehicle, wouldn't cut it for three kids in car seats.  Back in May, we came this close to buying a Toyota Sienna, but withdrew from the deal when the dealer began screwing around with us (not accepting a loan draft from Navy Federal Credit Union, for instance).  Walking away from that deal, we decided to finish paying off the Tribecca and set aside money each month to pay cash for a mini van around the end of the year.  But Delaware has no sales tax.  So I figured I'd look and see if anything was available, and found a fully-loaded 2007 Kia Sedona for just $16k.  Like many, I suppose, I had a leery view of Kia's, but after doing some research I was quite impressed with the model.  I sent the listing to the Admiral, who also was interested.  The Sedona was in a dealer just 4 miles from my Mom's place, so on Thursday, we went to see it, as well as 3 other mini vans of similar age they had listed.  Interestingly enough, the only one of the four that wasn't sold was the Kia.  We test-drove it and decided we liked it a lot, so we closed the deal that afternoon.  It has everything we wanted: power doors and tailgate, DVD player, folding rear seats, the works.  We had to get a (small) loan to cover that which the trade-in and our saved down payment wouldn't, but we'll have it paid off by Christmas or so, if all goes as planned.  So that worked out well!

Here's a shot of our new mini-van.  All kinds of room compared to the Tribecca!  That's my sister in the back with the kiddies.

The rest of the weekend was fun.  My grandmother, who hadn't seen Vasili in a long time, flew in from Indiana, and my Sister came up from Florida.  So we had a little family reunion of sorts.  We spent Friday at the house, because Earl brought in clouds and (very little) rain.  But by Saturday it was all sun, so we hit the beach.  After getting enough sun for my pale hide, we got Nic-o-boli's for lunch at Nicola's Pizza in Rehobeth Beach.  Nicola's is sort of a family tradition when we're there, and it's famous in the area, so we couldn't miss it.  We all left Sunday morning, the better to avoid Labor Day traffic, and give ourselves Labor Day to recover at home before work on Tuesday.

We had to get lunch at Nicola's Pizza in Rehobeth.  Silly Vasili slept through most of it, though.

Retreat back another week, and you'll find the Admiral and I at the Creed Concert at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC), in Saratoga Springs, about 5 miles north of our little town of Ballston Spa.  Everyone knows that Creed rocks, but we were both very impressed with Skillet, their opening band, also.  The SPAC is a great venue, too, though the beer prices are a bit high.

The Pavilion at the SPAC

That's a big beer (24 oz), but it cost $13!  Oy....

So that's about it for the last couple weeks.  It's been fun!