Category Archives: Uncategorized

Breakfast Time

Our kids have been getting good at waking up, making breakfast, and entertaining themselves while we get up and get ready to take them to school… As they learn to make breakfast, they are also “exploring” other things in the kitchen…

Today after dropping them off at daycare/school… I found they hadn’t used their little milk as intended for cereal. Instead, they used it to mix with food coloring to drink purple milk for breakfast… Amazingly didn’t make a mess. After school, I told them I was impressed that they remembered where to get the food coloring and were careful not to make a mess. Hilariously, they admitted they had made a mess and worked together to clean it all up before we came downstairs.

I am counting that as a win.

Our kids with her thumb up eating mushrooms she helped cook.

Sasha Anne Mayer

Erin and I are so happy to announce that Sasha Anne Mayer made a slightly early arrival earth-side. She was plucked a bit early due to mom’s gestational hypertension (and an attempt to avoid a repeat of the severe preeclampsia from last time). She was born at a bit over 38 weeks and weighed 5lbs, 6oz and measured 18 inches.

So far the experience has gone much more smoothly than the last time. Everyone is doing well happy and healthy.

We are currently working on the name for Sasha’s chicken-shaped nursing pillow, Theo’s eventually was called “buck buck”. And yes, we had to get a second $50 nursing pillow because as soon as his mom suggested that his new sister would need his, Theo started sleeping with his pillow every night… Names currently in the running:

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  • Cuckoo
  • ChaChaCha
  • Clucky
  • Kikiriki (The Spanish word for a chickens sound)
  • Spark Plug

 

Moving Off Facebook

Hey folks, after the multiple data breaches and seemingly blatant disregard for privacy. I taking steps to remove FB from my life. I am following some of the lifehacker advice on reducing FB usage. Folks might have noticed that I haven’t been active for a good while, but I plan to hardly ever use it in the future and will use this blog to share photos and such.

Anyways, thanks for all the good times and helping folks to connect but there are other ways… Feel free to follow here and from time to time I will post a link on FB to stuff I share here.

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Anyways, a new year and a new plan… Here are some photos of 2018!

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Basically a Theo photo show…

These little piggies went to the beach

Just a view of the beach from Cape Coast Ghana, at castle restaurant. A nice moment to lighten the mood. After our very depressing tour of Cape Coast castle one of the largest exporters of slaves. A place made even more famous, when Obama visited a few years ago. I will say both tourists and locals come to the tours and seem to leave believing in a better future than our past.

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Vietnam Night Market

I bought Erin some flowers, but hadn’t really thought through the vase. No worries nothing one of our many 5 liter bottles of water couldn’t handle.

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The women who sold us the flowers were all so excited that I couldn’t just buy from one so we bought a little bouquet from all 3 flower shops and had them combine it. They had us all take a picture together.

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Our Favorite 412 Wedding Pictures and a Video!

In celebration of our first anniversary, we sat down and attempted to select our favorite wedding pictures. We ended up with a collection of 412 pictures from our wedding weekend, including a few from the slideshow we were showing at the wedding and a few from our honeymoon for good measure. Thanks to everyone who shared their pictures with us.

Reflecting on our wedding one year later, we recognize it as the best day of our lives (cliche, we know) and we cannot thank all of you enough for being a part of it. Looking through the pictures, we remembered all of the amazing things that everyone did to ensure that the day went off without a hitch, from flying across the country, slicing fruit for sangria, making and hanging signs, welcoming guests, performing the ceremony, and corralling people for pictures, to taste-testing the margaritas, bringing the glow sticks down for the party, grabbing an air mic and your man bits to ensure that the dancing didn’t slow when the music took an unexpected turn, and arranging our get-away transportation. We are very grateful that we were able to share the day with all of you.

And now for the pictures, drumroll please….

Our Wedding Anniversary Photo Collection

Erin and Dan 274

And the video! Fair warning — though Dan has acknowledged that this is the craftiest thing I have ever done, he cannot believe that I made a twenty-minute wedding video and has assured me that only our immediate family members will ever watch it. For anyone else, here is a cheat sheet so that you can fast forward to your favorite parts:

  • Slideshow (mostly old family pictures): 00:00 — 02:00
  • Pre-wedding activities, rehearsal, etc.: 02:00 — 03:00
  • Pre-ceremony, getting ready, first-look, family and party shots, arrivals: 03:00 — 07:40
  • Ceremony: 09:15 — 12:05
  • Post-ceremony, more family shots, cocktail hour, dinner, toasts: 12:05 — 14:20
  • First dances, family dances: 14:20 — 15:10
  • The real party, dancing, and photo-booth shots: 15:10 — 18:55
  • Honeymoon and footloose shots: 18:55 — 19:55

Dan and Erin Get Hitched — The Video.


Dan and Erin Get Hitched
Dan and Erin Get Hitched

If you want your very own copy of the video, you can download it by using “right click, save as,” on this link.

love,
Erin & Dan

We are Back and We are Married!

We have the certificate and everything. We had so much fun at the wedding. We were honored to have so many of our family and friends make it out for the big day and we are particularly grateful to everyone who traveled partway across the country to be there. We cannot possibly say thank you enough.

Yes, it was amazing, and yes we had a blast, and yes, it passed in the blink of an eye. We spent days during our wonderful, relaxing honeymoon in Aruba just trying to remember all of the greatest moments, which brings us to the topic of this post — we want your pictures!!

We don’t yet have all the official wedding photos (though you can bet that we will post a link to them as soon as we have them), but we would love to get any photos from the event that you might have. If you brought a camera and got a bunch of pictures, we would love to see them. Even if you just snapped one or two on your Iphone, Android, (or even your Blackberry) during the night — we would love to see those as well.

Here is how to share your photos from the wedding with us:

  • (Preferred method, easiest and best quality images) Google’s Picasa. If you have Picasa on your computer just collect all the wedding photo’s into a album and click: Tools -> Upload -> Upload to Picasa Web Albums –OR– Sync to Web. Choose the highest quality or original picture quality if you can. Then just share the album to us or email us the URL of the album. Note: Now when you try to share images in Picasa, it now sends people the Google+ web album — this is fine. If we have the album ID on Google+ we can use the download to Picasa feature to pull your images down to our collection.
  • (Second best method, still great quality images) Flickr. Use whatever your preferred method is to upload images to flickr and pull all the wedding related photo’s in a flickr set. Send us a link to your flickr profile or the photo set URL. I can then use a tool to download all of your wedding photos to our collection.
  • Facebook. Upload all your images to a facebook album. The image quality of facebook albums is pretty poor, so if you can use another method, that would be awesome. After uploading the album to facebook, just send us a link to the album or let us know and we can use a tool to download the whole album to our collection.

Hate all of those options? The social web makes you sad? Go traditional.

  • Email the photos to Erin or Dan, all you need to do is send a email and attach the images. Note that most email systems only let you send 10MB or so per email, which is likely only 3-5 high quality photos these days. (This might be the easiest method for people who just have a few photos on their phone.)
  • Use our web uploader. Visit our uploader and send the files our way. Just select a file using ‘Choose File’ then upload it by clicking ‘Upload File’.
  • You can use it to upload single image files one at a time, or to upload a zip file. (Instructions for making a zip file in Windows are here, for a Mac, just right click on the folder containing the pictures you want to send and select “Compress to File.”)

As we receive all the awesome images from you all, we will add them to our wedding photo album, which we will be sharing online. If, for some reason, you don’t want your picture to appear on a gallery on this site, just let us know when you send us the picture and we won’t share it online.

Since we are still waiting for our wedding photos, feel free to check out some of the other galleries:

You can view the photos from the slideshow that was running in the electronic frames at our wedding by clicking on the picture below.

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And our photo booth pictures are also online!