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10,000 Visitors… and counting…

May 7, 2008 in Birthday, ORQA, babies, twins | No comments

Wow, I have been waiting for the day when this blog reached the 10,000 visitor mark for a few weeks now.  I thought the counter would actually hit 10,000 by the time Tanner & Tucker turned 1 year old, but at the rate it was going and based on the daily visit counts leading up to their birthday it was going to be a couple of weeks after.  I even thought it would be after I returned home from Las Vegas (today) but a couple of big days for the blog (today and the last day of April) pushed it over the 10,000 mark while I wasn’t watching.  (Actually, since this blog started out for several months over on blogger.com we probably passed the 10,000 mark a while back, but officially I only have the stats since moving to WordPress.)

Anyway, I’ve been in Las Vegas since Saturday and missing Julie and the boys very much.  It was surprisingly (actually not that surprising really) hard to leave them for a short business trip to Vegas.  I’m typing this in McCarren Airport in Las Vegas and I am really excited to get home.  I think the trip was a success for our fledgling business, ORQA, LLC.  We made quite a few demo presentations and got some good solid leads that we will be pursuing vigorously over the next few weeks.  This is all good, but I’m Vegas’d out.  This town is pretty wild.  Home and family sound even better than always right now.

Well, wow, 10,000 visitors from all over the world; dozens of countries and from every continent.  Thank you everyone for reading!  I hope you have enjoyed the blog as much as I have enjoyed writing it.

Next up:  Birthday pictures (finally!) and some video perhaps.  The world needs to see the boys digging in to their birthday cakes!

Roland

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Santa Claus is coming to town…

November 30, 2007 in Christmas, Grandparents, ORQA, Packers, RSNA, Santa, photos, twins | 1 comment

Santa and the boys (Mommy too!)
Santa Claus!

Well, it’s almost that time of year again, the Christmas tree is already up (actually we have two this year!), the lights are going up on the house, and the boys had their first sit on Santa’s lap.  (I wonder what they asked Santa for this year?  Hmmmmm…)   Regardless of what they ask for, one thing they will be getting is a spot on the incredibly long and ridiculous waiting list for Packer season tickets.  The letters adding them to the list (they will be something like 75,000th on the list!) will go out in the mail today.  Here is a link to a great article about the list from the October 15th, 2007 Sport Illustrated. So if they’re lucky, their kid’s kids might get the tickets, but who knows, and its cool to be on the list anyway!

We took the boys to get 6 month portraits taken recently too.  I know, if you’re keeping track, they’re 7 months old now, but these were taken when they were just over 6 months old.  At least the photos are here before their 1st birthday(s), right!?

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We had a wonderful Thanksgiving with Julie’s parents and sister Diane.  We have a lot to be thankful for, always, but we feel especially blessed this year with our boys, each other, and our whole family.  There was turkey of course, and lots of it, along with all the other essential Turkey Day accoutrements, including an excellent (tape delayed of course) Packers Lions game.  GO PACK!  A side note here:  I’m slightly depressed that the Packers lost last night to the Cowboys, and about Brett Favre’s injuries, but more upset at the NFL because I couldn’t even see the game delayed since it wasn’t available on TV here…  Mr. Goodell needs to get his head out of his…

…anywhoo, we have done a lot of landscaping around the house and I managed to get a big chunk of our “new” fence painted with a new Wagner Power sprayer (why I didn’t spend the $70 on that a long, long time ago, I will never know!)  Now the fence looks great from the street with some pine garland and red bows Julie and Diane put up while I was away.  But, I think it will be spring before the rest of the fence is completed (sorry Honey.)  I just returned from a week in Chicago at RSNA (that’s the Radiology Society of North America’s annual convention/show) where my business partner and I had a great deal of success promoting our business, ORQA, LLC.  In fact, it was more successful than either of us imagined and we have garnered a lot of support from vendors and a lot of interest with customers.  That’s great and it means we have a lot to do, as if we didn’t already.  Being away from home for a week was really tough on me though.  I’m glad Julie’s parents stayed for the week to help take care of them.  I think Tanner and Tucker grew a whole bunch while I was gone, and they started putting their feet in their mouths while I was gone too.  They seem to have a great appreciation for their big toes!

Well, this is just a quick post to get some pictures up here for everybody and a quick update too.  We are going to be getting some actual family Christmas pictures taken soon too (never too early right?  Ha!)

Oh yeah, I just got this via email and in case you never saw it, the following video is absolutley hilarious!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/q4T5sGmmlRU&rel=1]

NO, I am not in the video!

The adventure continues soon,

Roland

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5 Months! Where'd it go!?

September 18, 2007 in ORQA, RSNA, babies, football, photos, twins | 2 comments

Where the heck have we been???  Tanner and Tucker are almost 5 months old (on September 24th) and we have no idea at all where the time has gone.  Seriously, despite round-the-clock feedings (early on anyway), Julie going back to work, and an exceptionally hot summer, these five months have flown by.  So, here’s an update of what we are doing… finally.

The boys have settled in really nicely.  They are sleeping through the night and have been for about a month now.  And that’s about how long it’s taken me to catch up on the lack of sleep from the first 4 months.   Sleeping through the night is great!  They eat cereal about 7:45pm and at least 8 ounces of formula before going to bed between 8:30 and 9pm, then they actually sleep until well after Julie goes to work at about 5:30am.  We are so blessed.  They eat “breakfast” (let’s not kid ourselves here, breakfast is the same as dinner is the same as lunch is the same as… there is not much variety here yet) at 8am.  They’re also very organized babies having been on a schedule since very early on.

8:00am    - eat
8:30am    – play
10:00am  - sleep
12:00pm  – eat
12:30pm  – play
2:00pm    - sleep
4:00pm    - eat
4:30pm    – play
6:00pm    - sleep
7:00pm    - play
8:00pm    - eat
8:45pm    - sleep!

(What a life, huh?)

Did I mention this has been FANTASTIC!  I’m so proud… already!  This leaves lots of time for Mommy and Daddy.  It even gets the boys rested up for football season.  (I was dying for a segue to football and this was the best I good muster, give me a break).   As you can see, they’ve been ready for the Packers for quite some time.  These pictures were taken back in July, the anticipation was starting to get to them, and they’ve grown soooo much even since then.

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Tanner: “Football season???”
Tucker:  “REALLY???”

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Tucker:  “Bring it on!”
Tanner:  “We’re sooo ready!”

My little Packer Fans!  ;-)

Speaking of growing, at their last well-baby visit with the doc on August 23rd, (almost a month ago now!) Tanner was 14lbs 11oz. and 25 1/2 inches long.  Tucker was 15lbs 4oz ad just shy of 26 inches long!  Needless to say, they are big boys for their age.  And, if you add in the fact they were born a month early, they are absolutely ginormous.  Ok, not really, they are tracking just right, about 75th percentile and are taking after Daddy (and Mommy too, we’re not small people you know).  These boys have got to be over 17 lbs now, but we won’t get official measurements until 6 months.

Tucker is rolling over from front to back.  Tanner is almost there too, but I think he may decide to roll from back to front first instead.  They’re both “talking” like crazy, cooing and laughing and squealing and just being really happy babies!  They love to play and go for evening walks with us.  They’re even enjoying time in their car seats more now.  Which is a good thing since we’ll be taking a road trip to Wisconsin in October which will be a lot of fun.  I think the boys will do fine in the van for the 8-10 hour drive (over two days I think) and we are really looking forward to introducing them to lots of family and friends.

Julie is back to work and is enjoying it.  She’s doing everything right too because she is now the new OIC (that’s Officer In Charge) of the Primary Care Clinic at Fort Leavenworth, the US Disciplinary Barracks Health Clinic (that’s the prison at Fort Leavenworth!) and the Richards Gebauer Air Force Clinic in Belton, MO.  This is great for her Army career and brings a lot of responsibility and respect.  I’m so proud of her!  (in case you weren’t sure, I think she’s great!  :-)

I’m actually sort of back to work too.  My friend Mike and I have gone into business together.  Check it out: www.orqa.org.  In fact, I’ll be heading out to Illinois for a few days this month and about a week in November for the big RSNA show in Chicago to help get things with the business rolling.   We just got the website up and we’re still somewhat in the planning stages, but we’re excited about our opportunities and we see a lot of potential out there.

So, I’m sure it won’t be that long again until I do another post here.  But ya never know, I find time with my boys to be a lot more fun than this (more fun than just about anything, just look at our lawn!) even though this if fun too.  Here’s a link (click the photo) to a photo gallery of a bunch of recent pics of the boys.  Enjoy:

Recent to Sep. 15

Take care everyone!
With love,

Roland

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