2/26/2011 2nd Grade YMCA Basketball Sonics vs Wolfpack

One of the parents on Caleb's basketball team made this video of their team. They are the green
team and call themselves the Sonics (which I personally think is like putting some salt in the wound). They're a great team. There is a little footage of Caleb in the video. He's number 4. Around the 3:00 mark, Caleb takes the rebound coast to coast for a shot.
It's been a blast watching him play again this year. It's a different league than in years past and has been really good for him to play for a good coach and with other players of his level.

Abby's Highlights Video (Age 0-6)

There was no way I was going to get away not making a video for princess Abby!
Here are some of the highlights of our videos and pictures of Abby.

Monica tries boogie boarding

And the video editing continues. This is from our cruise this last fall in the eastern Caribbean. Monica had wanted to go on a cruise for a long time but the idea of sitting around poolside and stuffing myself with food never sounded appealing. But Mon kept the pressure on and found a way to save money by teaching scrap booking classes on-board and also found a cruise ship that had a wave ( flow rider) on it. She knew saving money and surfing are two ways to change my heart.

We had fantastic time. I was blown away by how much fun I had. From dancing, sailing, eating, meeting a ton of cool people, and riding the flow rider, we had great time.

Monica spent most her mornings resting poolside or doing scrap booking stuff while I hung out with the teenagers at the flow rider. Surfing the wave proved to be pretty tough and I'm certainly not going to be joining any pro-tours soon. But the boogie boarding was surprisingly fun. After several days, I finally talked Mon into giving it a try.

****Again, I'm realizing when I post videos on the blog from Youtube, the widescreen video doesn't fit very well in the window provided and also the advertisements are placed directly over my witty comments. To avoid both these problems I suggest clicking on the Youtube button on the bottom right and watching the video from YouTube's site. From there you can click on the 'x' on the ads and they'll go away.

Caleb's Highlights Video Ages 0-8

Here's my new creation. It makes me very proud to see all the things that Caleb likes to do. I'm very blessed to have two perfect children.

They YouTube advertisements cover up some of my fancy editing, so it's better to watch on Youtube's site and then close out the ads as they pop up.

Video Time

Santa came early and brought me a new laptop with new video editing.

Here's my first video.

I finally captured one of Caleb's goals on video. He scores a lot, but I never had the video recorder ready. The video starts as the opposing team was throwing the ball from the side line, but they had two illegal throw-ins, (the first one, Caleb tried to head butt the ball). Then the ref gave the ball to Caleb's team and Caleb quickly ran to the open space, got the pass and scored the goal. That a Boy!!!

Or you can watch it in HD here

Caleb Wakeboarding

Though it's been a fairly cool summer, we've still managed to spend a good amount of time at our favorite summer place, Loon Lake. Monica's parents have a place out there on the water that provides us with ample opportunity for all kinds of water sports. We had many days at the lake this summer, but the highlight has to be watching Caleb, 8, learn to wakeboard. He showed some interest in wakeboarding after watching some of my wakeboarding DVD's this last winter and as the weather got warmer, he kept talking about it. So for my birthday, I bought Caleb and Abby a wakeboard. Abby decided to stick mostly to kneeboarding, but Caleb was excited to learn how to wakeboard. He tried many times over several days, only tolerating a few crashes at a time before getting back in the boat. But he never got discouraged and was eager to try again the next time out on the boat. He eventually started to pick it up and before we knew it, he was wakeboarding for a few minutes at a time.

It's always emotional for me to see my kids accomplish something new. I feel like a sap of a parent as I cheer them on from the outside, but bursting with tears on the inside. And watching Caleb wakeboard was no different. Caleb especially loves to wakeboard when we have guests on the boat. He's becoming quite the ham (He must get that from his Mom). Though he tries to maintain a serious look on his face and it takes all the energy he has to not let show his big cheesy grin. It's quite the site and once again makes me feel very thankful for he and Abby in my life.

Abby's Power

Recently, Abby came up to Monica and me and told us how the deer come up to her when she plays her toy recorder. She then showed us the wind instrument and even danced around the kitchen like some sort of snake trainer. Mon and I looked her and then each other, and laughed at our perfect little princess. Abby does have quite the imagination and expresses random thoughts nearly every day about her being a princess, librarian, or a rock star.

She is our self-entertainer and can be found in her room playing hours on end with dolls, singing to herself, or teaching her stuffed animals how to read. So when she told us of her new talent of being some sort of deer whisperer, it was easy to down-play as a make-believe story. And then something extraordinary happened a few weeks ago. Abby quietly yelled for Monica and me to come to the front door to see the deer she had called over. When we got to the front door and looked out the screen door, we both could barely believe our eyes. Abby had played her small recorder-like instrument at the front door and apparently a small fawn walked right up to the front porch, never loosing eye-contact with Abby. It was amazing. Mon told me to take a picture with my phone to prove that it really did happen. I always knew that Abby was an angel sent from the heavens, and this may be the proof.

A Great Big Hole

Keeping our yard green through the summer takes a good amount of effort. We have no sprinkler system and with a couple acres of grass it means a lot of moving around hoses and sprinklers. I've come to love our little traveling sprinklers that I can turn on at night and they water a large portion of lawn while we sleep. We probably have 400 feet of hoses that feed different areas of our yard, including Wallace park (our flat yard in front that's approximatly 1.5 acres of grass). The vast majority of the water comes from one outside faucet, a frost free yard hydrant to be exact.
A few days ago as I was heading out of town for a boys camping trip, I went to turn on the water and noticed no water was coming out of the yard hydrant. I literally had the car packed and running when I discovered that something was wrong. I knew that not watering the lawn for 5-6 days could potentially cause a lot of damage, but my plans of camping sounded a lot better than fixing the problem. And I was right, camping was a lot more fun than fixing the problem.
When I got home I started investigating what could be the problem and hoped that it was just bad valve in the hydrant. The only problem was that hydrants are buried deep in the ground to avoid freezing and I had no idea how deep. My trusty Kubota back hoe would be the perfect tool in digging up the hydrant, but it is inches away from our well and main water line, which meant that after scratching the surface with the tractor, it was down to me and the shovel.
I gave myself a little head start on digging with the tractor, but then I had to start digging by hand...and digging...and digging...and digging. I followed the hydrant down 3-4 feet and started to wonder if I had some different type of faucet or hydrant. I made some calls to some different home-improvement stores and found that one of them carried an 8-foot hydrant, 2 feet above ground and 6-feet below ground. What are the chances that I owned the house with the elusive 8-foot hydrant? Why would I be writing this blog post if it weren't the case?
I ended up have to dig 6 1/2 feet down. At around the 5 foot mark, it was too hard to throw the dirt out of the hole, so I just put the dirt to the side inside the hole and essentially dug a smaller shovel-sized hole at the bottom of my big hole where I could get on my knees and bend over with my shoulder on the ground to reach the bottom of the hydrant. Once the hole was dug, it was an easy fix of just unscrewing the old unit and replacing it with the new one.
I spent the good portion of an entire day on that hole, and the problem seems to be fixed. It's days like this that owning a condo sound really nice.

Caleb's iPod

For Caleb's birthday we bought him an ipod itouch. While your picking your jaw up off the ground wondering why I would spend more than $15 on my kids birthday gift, let me attempt to justify the purchase. We don't have a game console like a Wii or an Xbox and the $200 iPod and the hundreds of free or $1 games is much cheaper in the long run. Caleb has been playing with my iPhone for a long time it had become quite annoying that he always had my phone. It's been amazing how fast he's learned to navigate around my phone. I'm not sure if that means that Apple makes very user-friendly products or that Caleb is a genius? The clincher on buying the iTouch was that he was able to send texts while in wifi range. I knew that he'd love to communicate with me, Monica, and his extended family via text and since he's had it, he's struck up funny conversations with his Grandpa Wallace and other family members. On this first night with his text capabilities, he chatted with me a few times while I was at work and then ended the texting chat with "I'm going to sleep now. P.S. don't text me back." How cool is that?

He's learned all about his new toy since he had it and has even stated teaching me things. Compared to the other toys that's he's gotten that only keep his attention for a few days, he's always wanting to play with his iPod. Which brings me to the last reason that we bought him an ipod touch, leverage. With even a simple threat of taking away is iPod, we're seeing an great amount of behavior improvements. He's even doing his chores more! It may sound mean to some (probably people without kids), but leverage works great with kids. Just ask Santa Claus.

Mt. Hood with the Wallaces

We spent a week with my parents, brother, sister and their families at Mt. Hood, OR in July. My parents rented a house in Government Camp, OR where we all slept, yes, all of us. That's nine kids under the age of eight, for those at home counting.

We spent a day playing at local ski resort, Ski Bowl, that they've set up with all kinds of rides and games for the summer season. The highlight of the day was the alpine slide that we played on most of the morning. Describing the slide is similar to that of a mile long water slide, but without the water. We rode up to the top on the ski lift and then down the slide on plastic sleds. Since most of us adults had little kids with us, we were given different sleds to accommodate two people, and we soon learned that these two-man sleds were much faster than the other ones. Todd, Josh and I were soon racing as fast as we could down the mountain, but unlike most testosterone-raged races, we had small children with us for padding in the event of a crash. Even the kids had had blast. The five older kids Caleb, 8, Jaxon, 7, Michelle, 7, Abby, 6, Chase, 6, (our niece, Michelle, was also with us) rode up the lift and down the slide non-stop.

We did have one incident that day when Chase crashed his sled. We're still not sure exactly what happened, but somehow he ended upside-down on the slide. Caleb claims that Chase was going so fast that he ran into the back of Caleb's sled and crashed. Which begs the question, why was Caleb going so slow? But an adult who was on the lift above the crash said that Chase wasn't near anyone when he crashed. Since I know Chase's and Caleb's dads well and I'm very familiar with the trouble they caused as kids, I tend to believe that we're not getting the whole story. We may never know.

We also spent a day at OMSI in Portland. A great place that every kid in the Northwest should see. The kids got to see all kinds exhibits from dinosaurs to a tour of an actual submarine. My personal highlight was in a certain area of the museum where there were a bunch of types of puzzles and mind-teasers, and we all tried to solve them. Unfortunately for me, it was another one of those days that I have realized that I was adopted. To see my parents, brothers, sisters, and wife struggle so mightily with simple illusions was quite painful. I helped them as much as possible, but there was only so much I could do with their feeble minds.

(* Quick side-note before I see my wife and am banished to to basement couch, I may have gone to the information desk a few times at OMSI and looked up the answers to the questions. Some may call this cheating, by I call it using all my resources).

The other major activity of the trip was a day spent at the Portland Zoo. The kids had a great time seeing and learning about all the different animals. We even saw the elephants poo and pee again. I'm starting to believe there is a genetic trait in elephants that causes them to relieve themselves around my children.

The trip was a complete success. The days spent as a family are always filled with our own special mixture of laughter, cynicism, and political rants. The kids adored the time spent with their cousins. The food is always excellent and I'm fairly certain I gained 10 lbs.

A huge thanks goes to my Mom and Dad for all their generosity. We all had a fantastic time.

Please click on the link below to see the pictures from the vacation.

http://picasaweb.google.com/clintrn/WallaceFamilyReunionSummer10?feat=directlink