Today is my first day home being Mr. Mom.  Yeah, that is right, Val is back to work I am home with Evelyn for the next 6 weeks.  So far so good, 9:40 and the baby is still alive.  I do have a some help the next two weeks, my Mom is out from Pittsburgh, so there is little chance I will even get to hold my daughter. 

Well I have been holding off creating this post since I was not sure how I wanted to approach this topic on my blog.  But as many of you already know, Val and I are expecting another child.  Not that Hayden was not good enough for us, but we thought it would be good to try for kid 2.0.  

Hayden is actually very excited, he has always wanted to be a "big sister".   In our many conversations with him on this topic he is very convinced that the new baby will be a little girl, and that he is going to be a big sister.  I know he is just a little confused, but since we don't actually know if it will be a little boy or a little girl yet, the conversation has yet to make progress.  Needless to say he is very excited, although I am not sure how excited he will be to have a little brother (if that is the case) since he seems very stuck on have a little sister. 

Since Hayden blessed us by coming 2 months early we are considered high risk on this one, so that means we will be getting plenty of ultrasounds between now and when the baby arrives, hopefully somewhere around end of June (~+36 weeks). 

Val had a great idea to take a couple day off an go explore a part of Washington state that neither one of us has ever visited, before summer was over.  So we decided to take last Friday off and drive over to Sequim

on the north Olympic Peninsula.  We took the ferry, which Hayden loved, not only does he love boats, but to drive our car onto the boat, well he thought that was great. 

It was a pretty chill weekend, we got to hang out as a family, get some hiking in and I got to work on my photography.  There was some beautiful scenery with some great landscapes.  I think my photographs are getting better, but I still have a ton to learn.  

We first visited the Spit out on the Dungeness Bay, which basically is this natural sand peninsula.  It is 5 miles long, with a lighthouse on the end, and more huge pieces of driftwood then I have ever seen.  The waves were a little too much for Hayden, just too loud for him, but he did like the calmer side. 

On Saturday we explored part of the Olympic National Park, a very small part, it is a huge national park.  We drove up to Hurricane Ridge  it was a whopping mile high, I know that is not much for my Denver readers, but it is a big deal around here.   Then we went for a  hike up to Marymere Falls, which gave me some great photo opportunities.  

I was a great weekend, and we got to explore a small part of Washington State that we definitely will be visiting again.  Although I think we will try camping next time, that is if I get  around to fixing the brakes on my Rover. 

[By the way Windows Live Writer is pretty cool.  I was using W.Bloggar, but I think I have not found my new blog writing tool.]

Well I have been way behind on my blogging lately. During lunch today several of my teammates were discussing our blogging activities, and made me realize I need to get more active again.

I have been having a blast driving my new Mini Cooper S. I keep forgetting to take some pictures, I guess I have been having too much fun driving it. One thing is for sure it gets way better mileage then my Rover, not that that was difficult, right now I am getting 27 mpg vs. 13 mpg on my Rover. I have not been able to really open the car up, since it is still in its break in period (340 miles to go), but the car still moves, even keeping it under 4000 rpms.

I also just got a new Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphone, the T-Mobile SDA. I had a Windows Mobile 2003 smartphone, but this phone really take it to a new level. I think the coolest feature is integrated 802.11b. Now it's actually possible to surf the web on my phone. I really like the ability to check my mail and calendar from my phone, keeps me from having to boot my laptop just to check out information on my upcoming meetings.

I hope everyone had a great Christmas. It was a pretty nice Christmas here in the Groves' household. We have Val's family over for Christmas Eve dinner last night, it was the first time the whole family had been together for Christmas in over 6 years.

Hayden, seemed to like Christmas, I don't think he really gets it yet, but he definitely liked opening his presents. I'm sure next year he will get it, and be asking us for stuff months ahead of time.

The only sad part was that I was not able to be with my family this year, hopefully my parents will be out to visit soon.

OK, I know I have been very, very behind on blogging. It is shameful, actually I have had several ideas of things I wanted to talk about, but have just not spent the time to sit down and write it down. I am also way behind on posting (and taking) pictures of Hayden. Things have been pretty busy, we moved into our new house a couple weeks ago, so pretty much each weekend has been full with unpacking. Getting closer, the house is really starting to feel like ours.

Hayden has been doing great, he started in at daycare a few weeks ago, when Val started work at T-Mobile (Cheap phone plans, Yea!) Hayden loves daycare, Val can barely get a kiss in the morning before he runs off to start playing. It makes it much easier knowing he really has fun all day.

As far as techie stuff, I started using w.bloggar again, since now Spaces supports the MetaWeblog API. I have also been using Windows Live Messenger 8.0 beta, one of the benefits of working for the borg, early access to cool betas. Hopefully more to come on some of the cool stuff coming out from live.com

A recent piece on CBS' "60 Minutes" explained how the video game "Grand Theft Auto" supposedly inspired an Alabama teen to murder three police officers. Interesting hypothesis, but how about this alternative: Sometimes stupidity is the best explanation. Instead of blaming the tragedy on the video game publisher, the CBS producer might have done well to examine whether this kid was simply a sociopath in the making.

Maybe it's coincidence, but religion figured prominently in recent national news stories about shooting incidents. Terry Ratzmann, the Wisconsin gunman who last month went on a shooting rampage, regularly attended services at the Living Church of God in Brookfield, Wis. "We believe that the motive has something to do with the church and the church services more so than any other possible motive," the Associated Press quoted a Brookfield police captain as saying.