Executive Summary:
Big house remodel, had twins, launched a new on-line grocery service for Amazon called AmazonFresh and Tracy’s sister is pregnant.
Details:
2007 has been a very exciting year for Tracy and me. It started with us loosing about 25% of our roof in the ‘big wind storm of 2007’. It was actually quit scary, the winds hit about 80 mph, having never through a hurricane or a tornado it was amazingly noisy, at somepoint during the evening,Tracy and I ended huddle in the corner in the basement.
As a result of this storm we lost power for six days. It is amazing how adversity can bring people closer together, Matt and Anna and then Mark and Melissa were kind enough to host us for a couple of evenings, so we did not freeze in our 45 F house. Matt was kind enough to spend the better part of two days helping me patch the roof, towards the end Mark showed up to ‘help’, his first act of kindness was to throw the good shingles off the roof. At this point we gave Mark a hammer and sat him in the corner.
Soon after this Tracy and I decided that we should move forward with remodeling our house. The roof and gutters were trashed and it seemed pointless to replace these on a house that we knew we wanted to remodel. So after three years of me playing around with different designs for the house, we were finally going to be able to realize my true vision for a home. I thought this was going to be so much fun…
Soon after we made that decision we got the most exciting news of the year, Tracy was pregnant and then soon after we found out that news we found out she was pregnant with twins!!! This was clearly going to put my project management skills to the test. We had a truly ‘hard deadline’ with my limited knowledge the only thing I was sure of was that the gestational period was fixed on the long end and could be significantly shorter – gulp. With all of this and trying to launch Amazon’s foray into the home grocery business we took the plunge.
There is no reason to regale everyone with home remodel stories, anyone who has been through one knows how they go and everyone knows someone who has been through them, let me just say that the house was not done by the time the babies arrived and we are still trying to get things finalized. I am truly amazed that an industry can operate with the level of incompetence that seems to be pervasive, but I digress.
I have to say a big thanks to Anna’s mom and dad (Mr. and Mrs. Phillips). They were kind enough to let us stay in their apartment while the house was getting finalized. The only rule was no giving birth in the apartment, which was a rule to which we were able to adhere.
Clearly, the biggest news for us this year was the arrival of Owen and Ava (check them out at http://owenandava.blogspot.com/). I was (and am) very excited to have twins, it is interesting to note that all of my father’s brother’s (he is one of three brothers) first children have all had twins. Owen and Ava are now 11 weeks old and starting to smile, coo and generally interact with the world. They are very cute, but a tremendous amount of work (I totally under estimated how much work). Our families have been out to meet them and my mother has been out for almost six weeks since they have been born she has been a tremendous amount of help, she claims it is a labor of love, which is great!!!
I don’t think that our lives will ever be the same again, I have been told that we will in fact sleep and that it does get easier. We have a made a new group of friends that we fondly call ‘the people we meet at the University of Washington multiples classes’, which we have shortened to the ‘dub club’. If you are interesting in more of musing about being a parent check out their blog.
As if all of this excitement was not enough Tracy’s sister is due in May. After having waited to become grandparent Tray’s parents will be grandparents three times over in less then a year. So not only did we become a Mom and Dad we will also soon become an aunt and uncle.
There you have it, a whirl wind update of our lives. Many of you we see on a regular basis and many of you we don’t; we love you all and wish you all a very happy holiday season.
The Clarkson’s (Ian, Tracy, Owen and Ava)
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Sleeping
I never knew how important this was until I could not do it. With this in mind we have decided to give our children the 'gift' of learning how to put themselves to sleep. This is 'parent speak' for we are going to let them self shooth, which is 'parent speak' for crying.
On a related note, but somewhat tangental, I was thinking about the following facts - a baby sleeps between 16 - 18 hours a day and every parent I know is tired, it just does not seem mathmatically possible, but working through the math, I guess it is. To make the math easy lets assume that a baby sleeps 2/3rds of a day and an adult sleeps 1/3rd of a day the probability of both adult and baby being a sleep is 66% * 33% = 21.78% when this is multipled by the number of hours in the day means that there is roughly 5 hours that both parent and baby should be sleeping at the sametime. Clearly the above is assuming that the chance of sleeping is evenly distributed, given that there are two care givers it seems to be that parents should be able to get more sleep, but clearly this not the case (just look at that picture of me below). I think that this has to do that the probability of an infant is actually evenly distributed throughout the day, but this is not true for adults... Glad I got the chance to think through that.
The summary version is that Owen does not seem to care about this and Ava seems to be very opinionated about it and her opinion is that this sucks!!!! The first time we tried this (this was about two weeks ago) Ava worked her self up into such a tizzy that she vomited, which would have been really sad, but OK, if she did not immediately inhail the vomit and start to choke, which is really not good. Needless to say (or maybe not) after this we took a break from trying to give them this 'gift'.
About a week later we decided that we needed to try this again. Given the disaster of the first attempted were appraoched this with a little more caution then we did with the first attempt. We were in fact so nervious that we had a rule that one of us had to be in the room to watch them cry, which is really really not fun - I think that for Tracy this is the equavant to a form of torture. The frist night of 'gift' v2 was really hard. I think that Ava cried on and off for about 2 hours and finally cryed herself to sleep, fourtunately she seemed to have forgotten about this when she woke up for her next feeding and was all smiles when we showed up (I am sure that this will come back to haunt us at some point).
Fast forward two weeks and this actually seems to be working. Both the kids have gotten a lot better
On a related note, but somewhat tangental, I was thinking about the following facts - a baby sleeps between 16 - 18 hours a day and every parent I know is tired, it just does not seem mathmatically possible, but working through the math, I guess it is. To make the math easy lets assume that a baby sleeps 2/3rds of a day and an adult sleeps 1/3rd of a day the probability of both adult and baby being a sleep is 66% * 33% = 21.78% when this is multipled by the number of hours in the day means that there is roughly 5 hours that both parent and baby should be sleeping at the sametime. Clearly the above is assuming that the chance of sleeping is evenly distributed, given that there are two care givers it seems to be that parents should be able to get more sleep, but clearly this not the case (just look at that picture of me below). I think that this has to do that the probability of an infant is actually evenly distributed throughout the day, but this is not true for adults... Glad I got the chance to think through that.
The summary version is that Owen does not seem to care about this and Ava seems to be very opinionated about it and her opinion is that this sucks!!!! The first time we tried this (this was about two weeks ago) Ava worked her self up into such a tizzy that she vomited, which would have been really sad, but OK, if she did not immediately inhail the vomit and start to choke, which is really not good. Needless to say (or maybe not) after this we took a break from trying to give them this 'gift'.
About a week later we decided that we needed to try this again. Given the disaster of the first attempted were appraoched this with a little more caution then we did with the first attempt. We were in fact so nervious that we had a rule that one of us had to be in the room to watch them cry, which is really really not fun - I think that for Tracy this is the equavant to a form of torture. The frist night of 'gift' v2 was really hard. I think that Ava cried on and off for about 2 hours and finally cryed herself to sleep, fourtunately she seemed to have forgotten about this when she woke up for her next feeding and was all smiles when we showed up (I am sure that this will come back to haunt us at some point).
Fast forward two weeks and this actually seems to be working. Both the kids have gotten a lot better
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Videos?
This week has been a tough week. This is somewhat ironic as the kids are actually doing pretty well. Owen seems to have gotten over the acid reflux problem or the medicine is working, which is great. And Ava seems to have gotten over her night time fussiness. This really only lasted about 5 days, but she would cry and cry and cry for about 3 hours, which was really not that much fun for Tracy and I and I am guessing not all that much fun for her. (Her in this case means Ava, which I guess is pretty obvious as I already mentioned Tracy, but I think leaving the her at the end of the sentence is an unmodified something or other)
So what is wrong? They are not sleeping all that well, neither one of them wants to go down at night (this used to be Owen's strong suit) and they don't want to stay down. So that combined with the fact that we have not had any help this week means that Tracy and I are both extremely tired.
Fortunately for us my mom is coming back Saturday, so that is really really good.
On a completely unrelated noted, it snowed in Seatte last weekend and I was able to convince Tracy that it was a good idea to take the kids out in their first snow storm, sooooooooooooooo Tracy, Jill (Tracy's sister was here and visiting), Owen, Ava and I all went down to the park and meet up with Kristen and her two kids to 'go for a walk' in the park. There was a ton of parking available, which was unusual for a Saturday :-). It was fun, but honestly maybe not the best idea. I had a good time chasing Kristen's kids around. Everyone got outside for a bit and it felt nice to be back in the house when we were done.
Not sure how these will do on the web, but here are a couple of low quality video's of the kids playing, plus some other pictures. I have been told that there can be no good blog posting without pictures.
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