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.

The number of people playing games online is on an upward trend. The number of people using social networking sites (MySpace, Friendster, YouTube) and tools (MS Messenger, Yahoo! IM, AIM) is also increasing. The approach this company has taken taps into these trends for a business opportunity that I'm glad to be in front of.

The next week or so will likely be spent getting the bugs out of the business promotion system. Over the next couple of months we will be able to use the promotional tools to introduce the business and the product to even more people before the official launch. That is likely to happen in September.

So if you still want to get in early, follow this link and get signed up for your free web site. We have a great support team and we're going to be having some serious fun in the next few weeks and months.

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?

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.

But all around it's a good thing. I know people who would (and have) gone to extraordinary lengths to have children. We have spent the last year with a healthy, happy child and I guess that's the best you can hope for when you're just starting out. It's been pretty amazing to watch him develop physically, emotionally and in his personality.

He's a fun kid to be around and is very inquisitive. He's getting the whole "walking" thing down and likes just cruising around and investigating the world.

I'm looking forward to a lot more Father's Days when we'll be able to go out and share outdoor activities like camping, biking, hiking or some extreme sport he happens to join.

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.

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.

I'm in a bit of disbelief that he still has the drive to do that kind of work. I first when commercial fishing with him when I was 12 years old, back in 1982. It was when sockeye was more plentiful through the Strait of Juan de Fuca and we would be up all night working the net, keeping an eye on freighters and all of the dirty, hard work that goes into working a small (about 30') gillnetter.

These days I don't want to go near a fishing net. But for my uncle, I think it's in his blood. It has to be. At 70 he's still looking at boats to buy and fish.

I would like to see him around for another 70 years, so hopefully those body part replacements keep up!

Happy Birthday!

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.

He was still not eating much after a couple of days and would puke up most of what he did eat. On Monday he went in for a different type of x-ray procedure that would show more detail. They found that there was a blockage right at the bottom of the stomach at that the intestines were four times larger in diameter than normal. The vet sent him back home to us with some decisions to make about what to do next, as the blockage could be benign and possilby removed through surgery or it could be a cancerous tumor which would likely mean a very poor outlook.

Yesterday he went to the vet again to have surgery to take of the problem if they could. What they found seemed to surprise everyone. They found a tumor that measure three inches by four inches half way down the small intestines. Yes, that was inches – not centimeters.

We were all surprised not only that it was there, but it was so large. Other than what seemed to just be finicky eating he didn't show signs that we or different vets over the years had picked up on. He had never whined, cried or seemed to be in major discomfort other than what appeared to be a sensitive stomach.

Since the cancer was so large and so far along we had to make the only decision we really could make. He never woke up from the operating table.

Timber would have been nine years old August of this year. We definitely had some good times with him over the years and we like to think that he had a better life with us than what would have been his fate if we had not rescued him. We found him in Kansas City cold, wet and shivering behind a garbage can. He might not have lasted much longer then, as he was just a few weeks old, had a severe case of worms, and had chewed away part of his tail.

With us he got to experience camping trips, birthday parties, mountain bike rides, hikes through the woods and different parts of the country.

Now we hope that he can somehow remember us as fondly as we think of him. He will always live in our hearts and minds.

Goodbye Timber, we miss you.

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".

From the beginning we fed him the most natural and whole foods we could find. You would think he would appreciate that, but every few weeks to a month or so he would just decide that he didn't like that food anymore and wouldn't eat it. Then he would go on a binge of eating his own poo. Or maybe just puke on the carpet at a random moment.

This would motivate us to try a different flavor or conisistency of food for a while. Over the years we've done dry, water with dry, adding soup to dry, canned food, canned and dry together, raw food, and all manner of table foods. The table foods are the only ones that seemed to work best consistently for him, but we didn't want to get to the point where we were setting another place at the table for the dog. And you don't always want the dog to have what your having anyway. Pizza or Mexican night would likely not be so good on his digestive system, and even less welcome on the carpet.

So recently when he decided to stop eating again, and then puking whatever we did get him to eat we figured it was just another episode of the dog's picky eating habits and sensitive stomach. After a week or so of trying to get him to keep something down he was starting to get pretty thin.

The vet checked him out, but didn't find anything obviously wrong with him other than he had gotten pretty skinny. So now we've had x-rays and barium studies done. Apparently there is something blocking the entry from his stomach to the rest of his digestive system.

At least this time there is a physical reason for the problem.

Now we start down the road of finding out what it is and what can be done about it. We found him as a stray when he was only a few weeks old, so we've kind of saved him one already from an uncertain future.

Hopefully we can save him again.

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.

I wanted a gate that was designed for a "top of stairs" location, was a "swing gate" style, that looked nice when it was installed, and would span a 54" opening. I managed to find one that met the first three criteria, but not the fourth. I figured that we would get the gate and I would have some carpentry work ahead of me.

It's the amount of carpentry work that took me the duration of the weekend. And several trips to "Bellingham Millwork" for lumber and parts.

Basically, the gate was designed for a 52" space (max) and I needed to span a 54" space. Plus, the bottom of the gate could be no higher than 3" above the floor. This means that I need to build out from the wall, then extend a piece of support below since the floor moulding is 4" tall. Also, the wall on the side of the stairs opposite the exterior wall did not extend far enough to meet up squarely with where the gate need to be installed on the exterior wall. So this required extending that piece of the wall.

So, on the exterior wall I screwed a 2×4 to a 1×4, painted it to match the wall color, and then used eight medium duty drywall screws to attach that to the wall. Eight is likely overkill, but I don't want a structural failure in my construction.

On the other side I made a similar assembly of 2×4 attached to a 1×4 to extend the wall length. To close the gap I used a 2×2 cedar post. With all this in place I was able to follow the directions that came with the gate to made a sturdy, yet attractive, barrier to my son going down the stairs.

This gate actually works very nicely and can be easily removed from the hinge when it's not needed.

The multiple trips to the hardware store came about because I had originally intended to make the supports from oak and stain it to match the gate. When I got those pieces home, I realized it was going to be much simpler just to do this with regular lumber and paint it to match the walls. I also needed to make a couple of trips to get right kind of screws. I underestimated how this the board combination *plus* the drywall thickness was going to be.

Ah well, it's up now, looks good and will hold up for the next couple of years.

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.

There are other things to think about long term. "Being there" as parents is a big factor in how well our children will develop, but I also think about the long term financial challenges that will come. As our own son gets older he is going to have more expensive needs and tastes. And there is always the costs of advanced schooling hanging in the horizon.

It turns out that being an at-home dad has a unique set of challenges, but technical challenges are generally not one of them (unless it involves figuring out how to get the diaper genie to work properly). I'm glad that I discovered marketing on the internet and using this tool in network marketing. There is as much technical depth here as you want to get into, plus it gives me the chance to earn an income greater than what I would earn as a full time engineer.

I tend to have expensive tastes. Paradoxically, I think it comes from growing up poor and being denied so much at every turn. When I began to have my own money I would save up to buy the best I could find, not just what was cheapest. But I also took very good care of these possesions. It's not uncommon for me to be using something that is over a decade old – but was the best of it's kind when I purchased it.

Even the combined salary of an engineer and a doctor would not support those expensive tastes in addition to providing the very best for our son. There are caps to the potential income in both of those professions and you generally have to work within those caps. With marketing on the internet I have seen theoritical caps completely blown away and people earning as much as their imagination can generate.

That's the kind of income that I will generate for my family so that there are no opportunities in life missed because of financial constraints.

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.

So this morning Nathan happened to sleep in later than usual so I figured I would take that time and catch up on the reading that I should have been doing several months ago. As I began reading I couldn't help but draw parallels between the idea of a baby having something important to say to the parents and how the internet is developing to allow more communication between teachers or coaches and students.

As parents we learn to pick up on the cues of our kids and by knowing thier patterns and the time of day you can pretty quickly figure out that he is hungry, needs to be changed, is teething, etc. But sometimes he will get upset and you have no idea what is going on. That is when it is great for him to be able to give some feedback in the form of baby sign to tell you exactly what is going on.

The same thing can be said of coaches and students in today's two way communications on the internet (some call it "Web 2.0"). In network marketing it has traditionally been the case that the coach has spoken from on high and just delivered the information to students and new distributors without a lot of feedback. Typically people have been too timid to say "hey, this isn't working for me" and so the coach has not had reason to change what is taught. They just figure people drop out but don't really know why.

Now with all of the communication tools being put to use by the modern network marketer, the coach can get feedback from all of the students and make adjustments where necesary so that everyone gets what they need and the coach doesn't need to guess what those needs are.

In the spirit of this concept any comments, questions and suggestions are encouraged and I'll try to address questions in future posts.