Pop Goes the Monkey

Here are some more of my favorite family pictures we took this fall. My friend Amy took them again and I think she does a great job.

So, Adam has done all of the posting so far, mostly because I just can’t figure out how to do it. I remember when I was a kid and we used to laugh because our mom had a hard time playing Nintendo with us. I now find myself rapidly turning into my mom. I have no idea how to plug our TVs into the wall and hook them up to the cable, TiVo, and DVD player and now that Adam has an i-phone I can’t figure out how to turn it on much less make an actual phone call with it. But, that being said, since it is Adam’s birthday I can’t really expect him to do this post so here I am attempting it.

Adam is such a great husband and dad. He has a million times more patience with our children than I do (then again my patience is usually almost nonexistent) but his patience is probably the thing at this point in our lives that I appreciate the most. He works hard to provide for our family and we love him to death. Happy birthday!!!

As we previously mentioned, we recently stayed with Sandy’s family in Appleton, Wisconsin. We packed the kids up, headed to the airport, flew to Chicago, and then headed north for a three hour drive. Traveling with two little monsters can be exhausting, but for the most part, the kids did pretty good (I’m going to overlook the 30 minutes Cassie spent screaming at the top of her lungs in the airplane).

Our time in Wisconsin was pretty quite, which is nice. We did get out and do a few things. We took the kids to see Aunt Ellen’s story time at the library. We went to the Appleton’s Children Museum. We went out to dinner with Ben, Michelle, and Ellen. I was able to take Sandy to see the new Bond movie and grab a bite to eat. We also stopped by Simon’s and spent a bunch of money on cheese.

All told, we had a really good time and are grateful for Sandy’s parents for putting up with us for a week. It was really nice to visit since most of Sandy’s family has never seen Peter and some hadn’t seen Cassie for two years. Hopefully we get the chance to visit again soon. But maybe we’ll go when it’s a tad bit warmer.

Hey everyone! We’re out in Appleton, Wisconsin enjoying the frigid weather, visiting with family, and the cheese. Yesterday we took the kids to the Appleton Children’s Museum and I must admit, it’s a pretty cool place. There was TONs of stuff to do. I’ll let the pictures below do most of the talking, but on the whole, it was an enjoyable experience. We went fairly early in the day, so for the most part, we could do all the activities without a hundred little monsters trying to push their way ahead or us.

Anyhow, the pictures are below. They were taken on my iphone so the quality isn’t all that great. We have some other pictures from our trips, but they are all across our three digital cameras so I’ll probably get them all together once we get home.

Halloween was pretty hectic this year. At 4:00 the family came up to my work for some Trick-or-Treating there. Sandy has never been inside my new office, so that’s nice. Cassie was so funny cause she wouldn’t get within five feet of anyone passing out candy. And no matter how much we prodded, she wouldn’t say “thank you” much less “Trick-or-Treat”.

After my work, we had to be a Trunk-or-Treat at our church building at 5:30. Funny story, on the way back from my office, Cassie asked Sandy for a sucker. Sandy said, she could have one and handed Cassie her candy bucket. A few minutes later Sandy heard Cassie giggling and looked back at her, only to find that Cassie had shoved as many suckers in her mouth as she could. Little white sticks were going in every direction.

After the Trunk-or-Treat, we headed home so that we could give candy out to the same little monsters we saw at the Trunk-or-Treat. I took Cassie around the block so she could gain some valuable Halloweening experience that is sure to come in handy later in life. We started out going at the same time as Cassie’s friend Winston. But Cassie was a little bit slower so she kept losing sight of him. Then a few minutes later we’d see him again and she’d get so excited and demand we followed him until we lost him again.

After the last of the tikes came knocking on our door, my mom, Sophie, Michael and Emily came over so they could see Cassie and Peter all dressed up. Cassie had a bit of a sugar buzz, as I’m sure the vast majority of American children did. She was bouncing all over the place and somehow kept showing up with more candy she had hoarded somewhere.

On the whole, it was pretty fun. More pictures are provided below for your viewing pleasures.

So I finally got around to plugging in our old family PC. He’s been gathering dust for the past six months or so and since we have four other computers, I haven’t been pressed to get him operational. But I finally plugged him in and was able to copy all our family photos off of it and onto our media PC.

Anyways, with Halloween approaching in a few short days, I thought it might be fun to break open the archives and show off Cassie’s first two Halloweens.

2006

In 2006, Cassie was 3 and a half months olds and about as interesting as those flour babies they make you carry around in middle school. So here she is, dressed in a glorified potato sack:

2007

The next year, Cassie was a walking, babbling star. She also was (and still is) quite opinionated, and there is one thing we know for certain: she hated her Halloween costume. For the most part, she screamed and screamed until we took the costume off. Then she happy again.

Tune back in this weekend for Cassie’s and Peter’s latest Halloween adventures!

Sandy came and brought the kids up to my work tonight so that we could drive over to Thanksgiving Point. They’ve got a lot of fun stuff going on right now. We decided to do their Barnyard Boo since Cassie’s still pretty young and we had to lug Peter around.

We did the the Barnyard Boo last year as well with Sam and Jessie for Cadence’s birthday. It’s pretty fun for the little ones. There’s a lot of random activities and lots of animals to look at. It’s fun because Cassie knows how to say the names of all the farm animals, but this is the first time she’s seen them all in person while knowing what they are.

She’s pretty bashful around them, though and she never really wanted to get too close. She also didn’t want to try the pony rides again this year. She just likes to keep her distance and name the animals from afar. She does pretty good with the names and sounds, but for some reason she thinks pigs are really pirate piggies. Weird?!

After eight years, I’m turning in my final day as a CirclePix employee today. I just wanted to shout out to all my coworkers and say, “Thank you.” It has truly been a joy to be on this adventure with all of you.

I started my CirclePix career in 2000, as a processor. At that time we had around 10 processors to do 200 tours a month. Rob gave me an opportunity to write some scripts that made it possible to do many more tours with just a single processor. I went back to school for a semester, and when I came back to CirclePix, it was to a drastically different company.

Before I left, the company wasn’t huge by any means, but we had dropped from 20 employees all the way down to six. But that small group had me and Greg and Rob and Faleni and Tyler. We all worked extremely hard and we started to see great results. The rest is history.

I’ve had a blast watching this company grow from 100 tours to a thousand tours to 10,000 tours and beyond. We’ve had a lot of great ideas succeed and had a lot of great ideas not work as well, but rain or shine, it was always a great place to come to work. That is a testament to Rob and the family atmosphere he built.

I’ve made countless number of friends over the years. These friends are the most honorable, hard-working, fun loving group of people I’ve ever come across and I can honestly say that I have learned from each of them. They have made me a better worker, a better leader, a better friend, and an overall better person.

I wish all of you at CirclePix the best on your future journeys. The leadership of the company has a really good plan for the next few years, and I’m excited to see that vision executed. Good luck every one and stay in touch.

My wife and I have a large library of family pictures sitting on our computer. As I go through these pictures and arrange them, I’ll post some of the more significant ones here. The first of my “Looking Back” series is actually only goes back a month to the birth of our son Peter.

Peter was born on July 22nd, 2008. He weighed 7 pounds and 1 ounce, and he measured 18 and a half inches long.

The hospital story was pretty unexciting. Sandy had a doctor’s appointment late in the afternoon on the 22nd. I was at work and received a call as I was about to leave for the day informing me that we were going to have the baby that night. I came home, helped Sandy carefully pack her bag, and drove over to the hospital. This led to that and around 8:30, Sandy went in to surgery and at 9:22 Peter entered the world.

For the most part, there were little complications. Peter was having a small problem breathing, so they sent him up to the NICU for about 3 hours. After that though, he was completely fine. They say that sort of thing is common with babies who are premature (Peter was three weeks early).

The next day I brought Cassie to the hospital to meet her baby brother. Cassie was very excited and even got a chance to hold him (with some strict supervision). For the most part, she has been very accepting of Peter, even though it must have been a huge adjustment for her.

Well, that’s the story behind Peter’s birth. He has been such a blessing in our lives and I’m definitely excited to see his story unfold. Below I included a few photos from Peter’s stay in the hospital. Enjoy!

Hello and welcome to the Thomson blog. Sandy and I both have existing blogs, but we wanted to combine our efforts and get everything in one place. Over the next few months, we will probably be updating some of our old blog materials and other items from our family photo collection.

Here is a picture from Cassie’s first birthday in July, 2007. We went up to my parent’s cabin and had a birthday dinner up there.