Happy Easter!

So today is Easter. What better time than now to finally update the blog?

But before I get into Easter stuff, I wanted to brag a bit. We had our first parent teacher conference at Hyrum's school this past week. He is doing well, although he still has a ways to go. We met with 3 different teachers since he has a regular teacher, a speech pathologist, and an occupational therapist that work with him in class. They all commented on how much he loves to sing. That's my boy! Wonder where he gets it from? Currently, his favorite song is "A Child's Prayer," which he insists on singing at least 40 times a day.

They also all mentioned how quiet and obedient he is in class. They say that compared to the other kids, he's much quieter and behaved. In fact, his speech pathologist was thrilled to tell us that he actually shoved a kid off of him for getting in his personal space and being obnoxious. While she said that she would prefer him to communicate it another way, she was cheering him on for finally standing up for himself. The other two teachers agreed that they were amazed and encouraged by the act.

Talking with them also answered quite a few mysteries. One day, he came home from school and started pointing out all the things on the ceiling. He'd point to the doorbell, the fire alarms, the lights, anything that was up high that he hadn't noticed before. He was particularly intrigued by the doorbell. When we went to the conference, he started chanting "doorbell" as we neared the school, and we couldn't figure out why. As we entered the front door, he immediately pointed to the fire alarm next to the door. We decided that he must have thought it was the same thing as the box that houses the door chime at our home. Then the teacher told us a story of how they had a fire drill and Hyrum flipped out. She was afraid she was going to have to have him go home early or sit in the nurse's office until school was over because he wouldn't calm down. Now every time he goes to school, he has to check for the fire alarm. Even when we go to stores, he has to check it out and know where all the alarms are. It's a sort of paranoia for him now.

Emily is doing well. She's trying more and more to walk. She loves to stand, but when it comes to moving around, she'll drop back down to her knees and crawl. Oh well. I'm sure it'll come in time. She's also jabbering a lot, and loves to sing with Hyrum. She's getting more teeth, and her hair is starting to get longer and curlier. She sure is a cutie!

Mom came to visit yesterday. Hyrum was thrilled to see her! It took Emily a little while to warm up to her, but a little food helped Mom to make friends with her. We went out to Julie's house. She made us a nice lunch. Afterwards, on the way home, we decided to stop for ice cream. We had seen a shop on the way in that advertised ice cream, so we went back to find it. It turned out to be the shop where Julie works as a chocolate dipper. I think Julie would be happy to know we got to see her workplace. She loves her job there!

After sacrament meeting today, Mike had gone ahead to set up for our primary class. He had left Emily's diaper bag in the coat room, and we needed some toys from it to keep her happy while we taught. So I headed up to the coat room and nearly ran right into a woman coming out. A quick double take, and I realized it was a high school friend of mine and Jacob's! I knew that she was living in Nampa, but hadn't actually been to see her, although we had exchanged a few emails. She has been fighting a rare form of breast cancer, but things are going very well now. Last I had heard, she had a clean bill of health. She was always a very positive, upbeat person. That was something I had always admired about her when we were in school. It seems that hasn't changed one bit. What an inspiration! She's just as cute and cheerful as always! I was sure thrilled to see her!

So, on to Easter stuff! The Easter Bunny crashed last night and didn't wake up again until the kids were awake. So he came to visit after church during nap time. Emily got a stuffed bunny, a bunny bath mitt, bunny shaped soap, socks, and shoes.



Hyrum got a duck bath mitt, duck shaped soap, a duck shaped bath fizzy, a Buzz Lightyear kite, and a bike.



The soaps are entirely too adorable to actually use. Hyrum loved the bath mitt, and played with it like a puppet, making it quack. Nearly all was forgotten at the realization that the bike was his, although candy still reigned supreme. once he finished off his candy bracelet, we couldn't get him off the bike. He drove it in the living room, the kitchen, the bedroom, the hallway.. that's not really saying much though since our apartment is roughly the size of a shoebox. It took some convincing to get him to put it away in the garage. But when we told him he could "park" it next to the car, he thought that was super neat. Sure we may have splurged a little on the bike. But it actually wasn't very expensive at all, and I'm sure he'll get a lot of enjoyment from it. Since Hyrum has this week off for spring break, I think I'll take him to the park to ride his bike and fly his kite. The weather has been so nice lately!





Hyrum also enjoyed hunting eggs again this year. I think he remembered doing it last year, because it only took a little prodding to get him to put down the candy and search for them. Maybe next year Emily will be able to help.





Sadly, Emily wouldn't cooperate for pictures today. I'll try to post some of her later. Sundays are always hard with Emily. It really messes up her schedule. She likes her new shoes a lot, so we'll have to see if she'll let me take pictures of her wearing them.

That's all the news from around here. Yep... exciting, I know. But I DID give you pictures this week, so no complaining!

Oh, and Hyrum just pulled his bike from the garage, insisting he sleep with it in his room tonight...

Ooo, it sparkles and it's so beautiful.

Well, our last entry brought up the topic of Robotech, one of our favorite anime series of all time. I grew up watching the series with Dan and Dave and yes, we probably all had crushes on Lisa, except for Dave who I knew only to have a crush on himself. The cartoon played in the middle 80's and was the highlight of our early morning cartoon experience. It wasn't until over a decade later that I really understood why I was attracted to this series as a child and even more so as an adult today.

After introducing the series to Jay, she also understood that it, indeed, was a great series. We became very active in the Robotech community for some time and eventually depicted ourselves as characters in the series. Here are those dipictions:


This picture worked perfectly! The original picture was that of my heart-throb Lisa Hayes, so this picture is extremely close to my heart. I have it framed on my office desk.


We tried to make this one an animated gif, but at the time, the tools we used made it extremely complicated.

Btw, I don't have the picture of "Jaylisa" on my office desk. I'm not that much of a geek...

How to blog without punching your computer.

I know I'm not alone when I say that I get extremely annoyed when Blogger won't format my posts the way I want them to. It also never inserts my pictures where I want them to but rather posts them at the top. It seems that I have to go edit the blogger code after every post to have it post the way I want it to be. Luckily I have some coding background; although not much, but enough to do some decent damage (ask anyone at ils.cefutenmai.com).

I have this thing inside me that all my call center experiences has plagued me with: it's called "being efficient." Although I'm typically the last guy to be efficient, I've still been brainwashed enough to have it constantly bouncing around in my head.

Anyway, enough prefacing.. here's my tips on how you can live a long, sane life of blogging on blogger.com.

1- Spellcheck. Get a real-time spellchecker!! I'm putting this first because it requires work outside of your blog. I use ie7 despite all the security holes. I know Mozilla Firefox is more secure, but it bugs me for some reason. If you use ie7 as well, please download ie7pro. It's simple, it's lightweight, the find feature is very non-intrusive and the spellcheck will check as you type (p.s. "spellcheck" is not a word, apparently.. doesn't matter because I just added it to my dictionary!!). You really can skip this step, but I haven't been able to get blogger.com's spellcheck feature working in months... I dunno why.

2- Beginning. Before you write your blog, clear your mind of how you want it to look. Forget font style, size, color, line-spacing, pictures... everything. Now that that's done, start writting your blog using the Edit Html tab. Ignore the Compose button.. this will hurt you in so many emotional ways. It's so very much easier to finish your blog content, then go back and make everything look fine and fancy and -- most important of all -- consistent!!

So, now we're typing in Edit Html mode .. well, I am, actually. You're just reading at the moment... should I have told you to envision these steps or follow along at the beginning of this entry?

So, now I'm typing in Edit Html mode, you're envisioning or following along in another window, or just reading because you don't care to do that. You do have a few options to use for on the fly formatting: bold, italics, links, quotes, pics and videos. You should obviously use these as you create you entry so you don't have to go back and find where you wanted to bold or add a link. You can even add pictures as you go, but don't worry about positioning yet (they'll be at the top again.. more on adding pictures later).

3- Apparently, later is now: Pictures. Blogger hates putting pictures where you want them. Instead, it will always post them at the beginning of your blog while also making it difficult for you to place them where they need positioned. While I can't confirm this, I also believe it is the leading cause of changing your line spacing from nice, evenly spaced lines to having them run right on top of each other... "Not, very, pretty." (What Disney movie was that from?)

I've found the easiest way to place pictures where you want them to be is to type placeholder text where you want the picture to be placed. ie. I usually type something like PIC_armedbox or some cryptic word where I can search for it later. If I have only one picture to post, I upload it right away, however if I have several, I just leave the uploading for when I'm finished with my text. When I do this, I can just ctrl+F (find) and search for "PIC_" if I need to remember what pictures I had planned to upload and place.

Now, you have your pictures uploaded, scroll to the top of your blog. You'll find code such as this:

{a href="http:blahblahblah"}{img style="blah" src="http:blah" /}{/a} with carets instead of brackets.

Highlight all of the code from the beginning "<" to the ending "/a>", cut (ctrl-x), search for your placeholder text (ie. "PIC_"), then paste (ctrl+v)!

Vundubar Results!

4- Finish. Ok, so you've finished your picture placement as well as typing your blog. NOW you get you use the Compose tab and make everything look pretty (well, mine will look pretty, yours will look the way you want it to look). In Compose view, make sure your cursor is flashing in the body of your text, perform a Select All (ctrl+A), and use the formatting toolbar to choose your font type, size, alignment... go add pretty bullets if you want to.

Viola! Pretty blog, less headaches. I may have described the process more complex than it really is, but once you have a good foundation of starting as simple as possible, you can finish without the hour or two editing your blog to look the way you want it to.

Edit: Also, the quote feature will ruin your spacing as well.. don't use it if you can.