Hysterical Henry

Hysterical 1 on Vimeo
(Jenn) I can't help but post this clip of Henry laughing. I'm not sure what got into him -- he just started cracking up about something (driving his car in the dishwasher?), and then kept it up for at least five minutes. If you don't get your fill with this clip, you'd better check out Hysterical 2 and Hysterical 3 on our Vimeo site.

Google Reader

(Ben) I just wanted to inform those of you who may be interested that Jenn and I stumbled across a handy little tool that Google has produced that can keep track of updates on sites that you visit often. It's called Google Reader, and you can check it out here. Basically, you can add any blogger webpage (like ours, or most of the rest of our blogging friends) to it, or any news or sports that you like to keep up on (e.g. CNN or ESPN), and a little button your Google Toolbar will turn green if there has been something new posted. This way we don't have to click through all of our links to see if there is anything new, we can just look at it through Google Reader. It's pretty cool. For those of you who already know about RSS feeds and are experts on this, well, you'll just have to forgive me for not being quite so up on all this technology! :)

President's Day

(Jenn) What better way to celebrate President's Day than taking a voyage to a dead U.S. president's home? And it wasn't just any dead U.S. president's home -- it was Thomas Jefferson's! Ben has a very limited number of days off (at least compared to the student's life of luxury we were used to), so we're really trying to take advantage of whatever we get. We left Sunday right after church and drove down to Richmond, VA to stay with my cousin Paige and her family. Her husband, Bubba, is finishing dental school this spring, and we wanted to visit them before they moved back to Utah. After six hours in the car, we arrived to a glorious Sunday dinner with family -- something we had taken for granted for 24 years. It was really fun to just spend a Sunday evening with family, even if it took six hours to get there! We had a great time with their three kids, and Henry was in Heaven with automatic friends.

On Monday we drove another hour to Monticello, which is the home of Thomas Jefferson. We toured the home, which is beautiful and very interesting. Unfortunately, the grounds are not as gorgeous in February as they are supposed to be during the spring and fall, but we could imagine what it would look like. After the house tour, we zipped back home to get to bed before another week of work started. It was a quick trip (probably a little too quick -- we spent 13 hours of the trip in the car and 19 hours out of the car), but it was fun!

Wow Songs

(Jenn) For my sister Kati's birthday, I compiled a CD of Wow Songs. A Wow Song may not be an artist's most popular or even their best song, but it is the one that, after you listen to it, you think "Wow." If you are cool, you know what I mean. Sometimes the wowness might not happen on your first listening either . . . it's like one day it just amazes you. My list started with 30 songs and was cut down to 18; I tried to reduce it to the very meatiest. Here is the playlist. I highly encourage you to download the entire list from iTunes and take the Wow Challenge! If you don't want to, leave a comment with your address and I'll burn you a disc. Also, feel free to comment on any of the songs, artists, or albums on the list, or suggest candidates for Wow Songs II.

Clucking Practice

(Ben) Henry has recently made several breakthroughs in his communication skills. Jenn now posts Henry's "Word of the Day" on our chalkboard because he is literally learning at least one new word per day. He may not remember the new words the next day, but overall he has caught on to the concept of using language to communicate over the past couple of weeks. These new words are making our lives so much easier. For example, when Henry is full he now says "done" instead of throwing the rest of his food on the floor. Or, a couple of days ago I asked him to throw a wrapper he found in the garbage. He promptly walked over to the garbage and threw it right in! I couldn't believe it! Of course, he then proceeded to dig through the trash to find something else fun to play with. . .but at least he understood me, right?

Along with all of these words, I decided that it was time for Henry to learn some new animal sounds. Yesterday we started with clucking. Check out the video below. I'd say he's coming along pretty well. :)




Henry and Dad practice clucking on Vimeo