Death by Platypus

We have a future athlete in our family. The Holiday weekend started with Tyler running the first full mile (and then some) of the Turkey Trot with me (and then walking the remaining four miles as well). On Sunday afternoon, just one day after we put the pedals on his big-boy bike, Tyler is now riding a bicycle all by himself.

This is amazing to us – Tyler is four years and three weeks old. He received his Trek Float as an early birthday present on November 9th. He has been out learning his balance (the Float allows the pedals and crank arms to be easily removed – the point is that kids learn to ride faster by focusing on balance first without learning to depend on training wheels) for the last three weeks, probably no more than 3-4 times a week. This weekend, he asked to try his pedals, so we put them on and took him out Friday. He and I spent about 10 minutes tops. He did OK – going almost an entire house-length at one point – but was very unsteady and didn’t seem terribly into it. On Sunday, he wanted to try again. This time, within about another 10 minutes of practice, he was consistently going 3-4 house-lengths each time before needing to put his feet down.

Amazing – with basically 20 minutes practice with the pedals, he finished the day zipping up and down the street and around our block. He even learned how to use the end of driveways to give him enough momentum to get his feet on his pedals and moving. Now we just have to figure out how to keep him on the sidewalks and near the house

Here’s the proof: (click the image, may take a while to download):

From an Easter celebration at Town Lake Park. Everyone brought plastic eggs with treats inside. We hid them around the park and sent the kids on the hunt. Quinn did much better than last year, where each time she found an egg and put it in her basket, she took out the previous egg and left it behind.

Tyler Cool.

Taken during a May 3rd Daddy-Tyler-Quinnie trip to the Austin Nature Center. Quinn has the most expressive face. She uses her entire face when she talks, and has a number of different smiles. This is her “Daddy is asking me to smile so he can take a picture of me” face.

For our second annual trip to the Zilker Kite Festival, we went out and bought a great new kite for the kids to fly. Tyler had a great time with it, and we had to make several subsequent trips to Pillow Elementary for more flying after the festival.

In addition to these shots, I posted some others over in Alpha Dog Photography as well.

Back in September, I took my first trip to Las Vegas to go to the Shop.org 2008 convention. While Las Vegas is definitely not my idea of the perfect vacation spot, I did enjoy the two quick escapes out to see some of the casinos and neon of the Vegas Strip. The Mandalay Bay hotel is where we stayed at.

Taken in March at Town Lake Park. Our kids had their first knock down fight last week, with both hitting each other intently. But for all the sibling fire, they both love each other and get along very well. Quinn will be very lucky to have a big brother to look out for her when she goes to school.

Taken during a March 1st trip to Zilker Botanical Gardens. Tyler had just finished eating (or more to the point, attempting to eat) a snack, and looked quite guilty about the mess he had made of himself. I say “looked” guilty, because in reality, he often looks like this and doesn’t seem to be the least bothered by it.

7 months of not posting.

For a lot of reasons, chief amongst them work, wife taking a job requiring her to work on the computer, and for some reason a growing lack of desire to get on the computer in the evenings. But, as our lives have progressed over the last half year, I have missed the little chronicling of events I do online, particularly the opportunity it provides to post the fun shots of the kids that wouldn’t fit on AlphaDogPhotography.

So, here we go again. I’m going to try to simplify things in an effort to rebuild the blogging habit. Instead of tackling the backlog of photos in masse, I am going to try to do one small post with one photo every day for the next 31 days – right up till Christmas Eve. We’ll see where it goes from there. We’ll see how much I can actually recollect about the photos at this point While I haven’t been blogging, I have done a tiny bit with the photo site. I recently posted photos for:

• Las Vegas
• Hamilton Pool
• Additional Town Lake Park
• More Zilker Botanical Gardens
• New Kid shots

Additionally, my site now boasts a refined navigation menu (including fancy drop-down menus for Featured Galleries and Browse By Year), user-selectable frames, photo search, and a tag cloud for quickly finding photos associated with a particular keyword. My taxonomy has changed over time, and many older photos still lack keywords, so I’ll need to do some heavy-duty data clean up before things are really working well. But it’s a start.