Test photo

Just testing the capabilities of this phone taking pictures, voice texting this post, and uploading it to my blog.

Changes a coming

I got a new phone today. Early Christmas present. It’s the newest phone from Google – the Nexus Prime. A super phone. The capabilities of this thing are amazing. Technology is awesome.

But I’m not posting this to brag. I’m hopeful this device will enable me to post things more often. In shorter posts. In fact I’m writing this post on my phone now. I hope to get more pictures and videos shot with this and quickly posted. I’m looking forward to really getting used to this machine and to use it quickly. Should be fun!

Weekendness

I know I post a lot of Alex playing drums, but that’s mostly because it’s all he does. But at the same time, all this practice is helping. He’s very creative in creating different sounds now.

What else are you to do on a 90 degree day but go sliding and swimming?

Alex has heard the classic Blues Brothers song maybe twice, so it shocked me the first time he said this. But to be fair, this phrase does get repeated a lot during the song.

Flip Camera

Sara won a FlipUltraHD camera at a trade show convention earlier this month. It arrived on Tuesday and is a pretty sweet little camera. I had considered getting one, but now we don’t have to. It shoots better quality than our point-n-shoot and it has a great simple interface for editing and uploading. This little gadget will come in handy.

This was the first video I shot. It took Alex a couple seconds to realize it was a camera.

The Flip software has some basic editing tools and some cheesy soundtrack music, which enables me to quickly put together the following video. The music here was added in the editing. He was showing off these new dance moves to us to the music playing in his head. Which actually makes this edit even more remarkable. The music timed up really well – on accident. I kid you not.

Leaves

Playing in a pile of leaves is a lot of fun.

Silly Walking through the pile (he's a Python fan)

Throwing leaves is fun too

But it's only fair to get leaves thrown back at you

3 Years Old

Happy Birthday Alex.

Wow how time flies.  We had a parent/teacher conference at his school on Tuesday to discuss his report card.  Yep, he’s being graded already.  Ok, so it was on stuff like how well he knows his shapes and colors (he says Pink instead of Purple … but don’t look to me to help correct that one).  The teacher asked us again if I or anyone we knew played drums since he does that so often during the day.  We did learn that the school does piano lessons and so we’ll probably start that next year when he’s closer to 4.

This January he’ll be transitioning to the 3-6 year old room.  But he has to be potty trained before that.  The teacher assured us that they’ve never had a child not be potty trained before making the move.  In fact, we were told that his best friend Nick is already on his way to learning that, so it won’t take Alex long after that.  He did go a few hours in regular underwear on Monday before he had an accident.  All part of the training and thank you for the school.

So we can say with great confidence that when we go to Disney World in January, he’ll be potty-trained.

We also learned that Alex is part of a clique.  Him and Nick always sit at the same lunch table as Olive and Anna.  And if one of them gets up, they are always sure to “save their spots.”  Olive and Anna are transitioning to the other room next week, so that should help with the desire to learn how to use the potty so that he can move downstairs and hang out with them.

All this week Sara’s parents have been in town to celebrate Alex’s birthday and play with him.  They watched him all day Tuesday and Wednesday.  They’re worn out.  Today, being his birthday, we brought him back to school so that he could celebrate with his friends and share cupcakes and little goodie bags.  He’s real excited about the cupcakes.

He did get 1 more.