A few weeks ago I mentioned my son had his first birthday. Because of everyone's schedule's, we weren't able to have a party right away.

We finally had that party this last weekend and it was a lot of fun!

All the kids pile in for presents!

Nathan got to open a lot of cool presents and I got to fire up the grill and cook for all the guests. There were quite a few adults, a bunch of kids, and much merry making!

In other news, Project eVo also launched this weekend and the official name is uVme ("you versus me", get it?). The new sites are up and running, and it's still a bit rough around the edges. But there is a huge potential here.

More on My Son's First Birthday Party

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. You can also get updates by email using the "Get Your Update" form. Thanks for visiting!

We've done it! We've all survived our first year together.

Today is our son's first birthday and it's been quite a year. This may sound like a cliche, but it really is amazing how much a little person develops over the course of a year. When we look back at his birth photos we can hardly believe that it's the same kid as we have now. He hasn't been out of our sight much, so we're pretty sure it's still him.

Nathan and Dawn at Red Robin - Nathan is One!

This last month especially has seen a lot of progress. He started crawling at about 10 months, but started taking a few steps on his own at just over 11 months. About two weeks ago he was walking from one piece of furniture to another, and now he walks around to wherever he wants to go.

We can tell that he understands many of the things we're saying to him, as well as the "baby sign" we use, but he's not quite to the point of repeating things back. He claps when we ask him to clap, and he comes to us when we ask him to, he understands "no", etc. Just a matter of time before he catches on to the other things, I guess.

For his "birthday lunch" we took him to Red Robin, which is a Pacific Northwest family burger restaurant that has a great reputation as a fun place. I've been going there since college and it's always a good time. My wife's parents were with us and they seem to be very happy grandparents. They are very into him.

We should have a new bike trailer to put in him in tomorrow, so finally after a year we will all get back into an exercise routine and get to spend more time outdoors. I guess this is really when the fun starts, eh?

This weekend was my first Father's Day!

Our son will turn one year old this month. It's been quite a year. This is our first child so everything is new and there are a lot of challenges that we've learned to handle. Nothing Earth shattering, really, just the "normal" stuff that new parents learn.

Before he came along some people told us, "you will not be able to remember what you used to do with all of the time you had". That's not true. I know *exactly* what I used to get done with the time I used to have.

More on Happy Father's Day!

Over Memorial Day weekend we decided to take a few days and head out of town to visit relatives. This was our first trip involving more than a couple hours of travel since we had our son eleven months ago. The whole trip went pretty well!

We first went from Bellingham to Preston, WA which was a couple of hours. We stayed there overnight with friends. We've taken road trips that have last a couple of hours before and so we figure there would be no problems with this first leg.

The second leg going from Preston to Walla Walla, which we estimated at about 4.5 hours was going to be the unknown and any potential challenges were going to come up there. Nathan doesn't really sleep well on the road, so we needed to be prepared to keep him entertained. Fortunately, between Dawn feeding him and watching videos with him in the back seat and his little bit of sleep, we actually got though that leg with minimal emotional trauma.

However, it's not something I would want to endure frequently or without several days between the initial and return trips. We stayed in Walla Walla for several days with Dawn's family and really enjoyed ourselves. They are excellent hosts and it was good to relax for a few days.

On the way back we stopped in Burien, which is just south of Seattle, to again break up the return trip and spend the night with friends. We made the last leg yesterday and now we're back into our home routine.

But as far as routines go, we're changing things up a bit to make sure we get in some daily exercise. I'm going to start getting on the bike in the evenings and work on getting my aerobic capacity back. I have put exactly zero miles on the road this year so this could be a painful transition.

This weekend I made the nine hour round-trip drive from Bellingham to Port Angeles for a surprise birthday party for my uncle. It was good to see family again since I haven't been able to make this trip since our son was born. Of course they all wanted to see him, but that's just too long of a trip for an 11 month old kid to make. Heck, it's almost too long for me to make!

My uncle is actually looking pretty good, especially considering that he's still recovering from a knee replacement over the winter. Now both knees are artificial, but he's getting around really well. In fact he wants to do some commercial fishing on one of the weekends this summer. These days he just fishes for enough to put into jars and to smoke.

More on Uncle Turns 70

A couple of days ago I wrote about some of the challenges of balancing home life and working at home when the responsibilities of home life can jump in at any time. I mentioned how our dog Timber had been not eating and throwing up on the carpet, which was not all that unusual for him as this might happen once or twice a year.

Timber Scoping Out the Area from the Trees

This time was different. He was not going back to eating normally as he usually did and was getting skinnier all the time. When we took him to the vet, she mentioned that she might have felt something in his abdomen so we had x-rays done.

When the x-rays came back they mostly showed fragments from the rib bones we gave him the previous night just to get him to eat something. The radiologist also mentioned that the intestines looked like they were larger than normal. The vet suggested some different food and to see if he would get better.

More on Goodbye Timber - We Miss You

When you work at a home office you have to learn a certain amount of discipline so that you can get any kind of work accomplished during the day. That is especially true if you are the primary caregiver to a small child. I imagine that's true if you are primary caregiver of any sort, but I haven't got there yet.

There are some days when even focus and personal discipline are not enough to carry you through to getting work done during the day. This was one of those days. Combine a teething 10 month old with a sick dog and that spells a recipe for busy day, just not a productive one.

This is mainly a story about our dog. Timber is about 9 years old and is generally a very good dog. However he seems to have always had "eating issues".

More on The Daily Adventure: Work and Family

Normally installing a baby gate would not be a big deal. Certainly not something that should take all weekend. Those who know me understand that this is not something out of the ordinary.

This is not because I'm unskilled or generally don't know what I'm doing, I just have a knack for finding some, shall we say, "convoluted" ways of getting things done?

Checking out Dad's Handywork

 I defend my track record by pointing out that it takes me a little longer to get things done sometimes just because I want things "just so". Sure, I could have gone out and bought the cheapest gate available, propped in the space, and been done with it. But I'm not about "cheap" and I care about function and aesthetics.

More on Baby Gate Weekend

Yesterday we had a chance to walk with some friends through a local park.

Like us they are new parents "a little later in life" - that being early 30's. We all have careers in progress, under us or behind us. As we walked and talked it got me to thinking about what each of us can do to give as much advantage as possible to these new people in our lives.

Of course, there's the good home life - that's definitely a priority. It's one of the big reasons that I've left the engineering career behind and my wife and I chose for me to work as a stay-at-home dad. Not everyone has this option and making these kinds of choices just makes life a little more interesting. One of the things that our friends are going to do is that dad is going to take his son into work with him while he is still an infant. It is so important to them that they raise their son themselves that they are going to make it work.

More on Planning for a Child's Future

My wife and I are in the process of teaching our son (who is almost 10 months old now) "baby sign". This is a modified version of American Sign Language (ASL) and the concept is that a baby actually has things to communicate at a very young age.

These can be things as mundane as "eat", but can get to the point where a child under a year old can tell you he wants medicine because his mouth huts (teething). Even though we have been teaching him some of the signs (like "eat", "more", "milk") I had not yet gotten around to reading the booklet that came with the "Baby Sign" program.

More on Learning Communication from a Baby