Computer is getting packed Posted Wednesday, June 23, 2010, 2:20 PM, CDT by Hank ...wow haven't posted in a WHILE!... Keep up with us on Facebook. See ya later in the UK! Love, ~Hank, Dawn, and family

We Are visiting! Posted Wednesday, March 10, 2010, 10:42 PM, CST by Hank If you don't know already, we are visiting Washington and Oregon and Jordan's coming down from military school too! E-mail us at illibrium@yahoo.com or calls us for details.

Jordan Spotted Again Posted Wednesday, February 17, 2010, 12:45 PM, CST by Hank He's in the Photo Album in formation. The picture is very small, but he's in front just to the right of the training instructor. (I think his eyes are closed in that photo too.

Picture of Jordan Posted Posted Thursday, February 11, 2010, 4:45 PM, CST by Hank He's in that sea of bald heads near the center of the photo in the Photo Album.

Happy Holidays Posted Friday, December 18, 2009, 8:08 AM, CST by Dawn Merry Christmas everyone. We are having a nice holiday season. UE and UF visited us early in the month and we all had a good time. It is always nice to see our family. We were treated to several dinners and an IMAX movie. We didn’t do all of the stuff we wanted to, due to the cold front that came through that week. We did find out we got an assignment to England. It was fun to share the news with UF and UE and talk about travel possibilities. We celebrated Jordan’s 16th birthday while they were here also. It was wonderful to get to know UF better. We hope to see them again soon. As I mentioned earlier we have been assigned to the UK. We will be moving in the summer. The kids are excited. Jordan was less than enthusiastic at first but has warmed up to the idea. London is the Free Running capital. We will possibly visiting home on our way to England. We will find out dates and such later when Hank actually gets his orders. Well Ashlyn lost her first tooth. It had been loose for many weeks. Nathan is getting his first teeth. He is also rolling over both ways. He is really a happy sweet baby. Doesn’t care for baby food much. Amiyah was the same way. Alyssa went to the eye doctor at the beginning of the week. She has 20/20 vision with her glasses on. We are very happy about that. Hank is working Christmas morning this year. He always has it off, so this year he decided to sit in so everyone else can have it off. We are going to do our stockings and the gifts the kids bought each other on Christmas Eve. We will do everything else in the late morning or early afternoon when Hank gets home on Christmas day. I have let the kids know so they are all OK with it now. We have had a nice season, several Christmas parties. Today the kids have their last day of school before vacation. We do not know if Jordan got accepted into military school yet. We should find out in the next few weeks. They are really pushing it to the last minute. They had to reschedule the last orientation due to the cold front in early Dec. Jordan’s application is completed. All we do now is wait. Well I am off to start my day. Nathan is getting fussy. Thanks for the toaster UF and UE. We make toast all of the time now and have gone through several boxes of waffles.

Paula came to visit. Posted Friday, October 23, 2009, 10:27 AM, CDT by Dawn We have had a busy month. Paula was here for a week at the beginning of the month. It was nice to have her. She was very helpful. It was great to have another woman around to pick up the slack. She did a lot of laundry. She helped me finish up decorating all 3 of the girls rooms. She made Halloween decorations with the girls. They put them up in all the downstairs windows. She spent a lot of quality time with her grandchildren. I never had to worry about keeping her busy. If she saw something that needed to be done, she would get in there and do it, with a smile. We went to a couple of community get togethers while she was here. We also went to Sea World. We stayed from the time it opened until just about closing, 11 hours. We saw just about every show. Everyone had fun. The park decorated for Halloween so it was really cool. The weather was also cooler than when we went last year. It was nice not to sweat all day. The kids all have there Halloween costumes. Ashlyn is being a cheerleader, Alyssa a spider witch, Amiyah a fairy, and Nate a tiger. I didn’t do a theme this year, it was easier not to. Nate is 3.5 months now. He is so much fun. I am relieved to be moving past the newborn faze. He can entertain himself for short periods of time now. His sleep pattern during the day is a little more predictable. He smiles a LOT. I am going to have to work on him going to nap and bed without being rocked or in his swing. I usually do this at around 3 to 4 months, we’ll see. One of the odd things about Nathan is he only poops less than once a week. I guess in strictly breast fed infants it is normal. I don’t remember any of my other kids going that long between poops. His poop is normal when he does go. He always has a big blow out though. He will have a couple specs in his diaper once in a while but that is it until he does the big one. I guess he has to be different. His umbilical hernia is almost gone. It is healing up on its own. We attempted potty training with Amiyah. She doesn’t quite get the concept yet. All of our other kids were around 3. I think we will keep it light hearted for now and try a more serious attempt this winter. She is so ready though. When your child tells you she’s peeing and then gets the clean diaper, gets into changing position and takes off the dirty diaper, she is ready to be potty trained. I think it is mostly stubbornness holding us back at this point. Ashlyn was the same way. We have a nice weekend planned. There is a fall festival at the Youth Center tomorrow. There will be free food and lots of crafts and games. We love free as you all know. The weather is supposed to be in the 70’s so that will be perfect since it is outside. Alyssa has joined 4-h and the Torch Club. They are both leadership clubs that do community service. The youth center combined both clubs into one. Alyssa loves it. She went to a Spurs game last weekend. I think it makes her feel more grown up to get out and do things without her parents. They are holding a Renaissance Fair next month that she is really excited about. She was talking about what to use as a costume. She is also in the Lego Mechanics club. I guess they build robotic type stuff. Ashlyn is doing great in school. She still has her diva attitude. I don’t suppose that will go away anytime soon. She has the cleanest room out of all of the kids. She is still grumpy in the morning. She gets plenty of sleep but I guess she is not a morning person. Jordan is really into Free Running. It is a type of stunt running. He does flips and jumps to get around obstacles. Anyway he is pretty good at it and he has a group of friends that are also doing it. We are happy to see him into something. He is very athletic, but not into team sports. Hank and Jordan have been to 2 concerts in the last month. They saw Creed in late Sep and Alice n Chains last night. They both had a great time. Jordan’s grades are poor. We are possibly sending him to a military school for 6 months. He is on board with the program. It is for teens who are doing poorly in high school or who have dropped out. He will do credit recovery and maybe even get ahead. There is a detailed application process that we are in the middle of. The school is in Sheffield TX, several hours north of here. It has been a somewhat easy decision for us as parents. We feel that this could give him the opportunity to graduate on time or maybe even a little early. We want him to have the tools to be successful in life and a high school diploma is one of them. Well I have to go, one of Hanks co-workers is bringing over a whole bunch of toys and clothes for the kids. She is really sweet. I love hand me downs, they’re FREE. Love you all.

Worst Puke EVER! Posted Friday, September 18, 2009, 12:38 PM, CDT by Hank In all my years, I've never heard a throw-up story as big as this one. Alyssa threw up last night. I knew because Dawn woke me up at about 3:30a.m. and told me "I think someone puked." Being the dutiful husband, I climbed out of bed and began to investigate. I knew I'd found the place when I walked through the threshold of Alyssa's room and felt a large amount of cold wetness under my feet on her carpet. I asked Alyssa "Did you puke?" "Yes." It was rather odd that my feet were wet, so I flipped on the lights. Horror. I was dumbfounded. Over the next few minutes I would slowly realize the devastation in layers of awareness. The most prominent thing I noticed was that the ladder to her loft bed was covered in last night's dinner. Every rung had a layer of chunks dripping down to the next rung and there was a pretty hefty pile on the carpet below. I noticed the side of her bed leading to the ladder was coated in a beef-and-potatoes film as well. Looking down at the carpet, I began to realize why my feet were wet. There were little brown and reddish chunks all radiating from that central spot all over her carpet. Now she has a pretty huge room. Her doorway is at least 15 feet from the top of her ladder. The puke spray from losing her cookies down those rungs had propelled her stomach contents in a fan-like shape over the entire room. There was no safe place to walk. There was puke literally EVERYWHERE. Still in disbelief of what I was seeing, I heard Dawn tell me to get Alyssa into the shower. I told Alyssa to get up on the far side of her bed and get to the bathroom. Even though she skirted the outside of the room to get out, she was still walking in it with every step. A concerned Alyssa then offered up, "I got some on my bed". "Really?!" I thought. The irony of her statement was pretty humorous considering the bed got the least of the impact. OK, kid out of the room, how to tackle this? I decided to get the floor first. Luckily we have a steam cleaner. I got it all set up and hauled it upstairs. I had to move various spattered toys out of the way and got to work. I went over the whole floor of course, but in the process, I began to see just how far-reaching the collateral damage was. The walls...all four...had puke spattered on them. Take the journey with me: All four walls. ALL FOUR! The urge of needing to be sick hit her before she could react and got her just as she was trying to get out of bed. When the resulting gravity-assisted downward stomach flood hit her ladder rungs leading down to the floor from her loft bed, it literally went 360 degrees round the room from this elevated position. The doors to the open closet next to her bed were heavily spattered from my shoulder height on down to the floor The inside back of the closet was hit as well as a basket of clean laundry in there, a storage bag of winter clothes, and even some of the clean clothes hanging on hangars! On the next wall where her dresser was, there was spatter about 5 foot on down and the front of her dresser was speckled with goodies. The next wall only had a few speckles, but probably the worst wall was the one UNDER her bed. Under her loft bed there is a large open area of where a basket of toys and a few other things are kept. The basket of toys was covered in a nasty sheet of chunks and the wall behind it was covered as well. Wow. After the steam cleaning, I worked on the ladder. I decided I'd have to take it outside and hose it off--It was that bad. I had to wipe the drips and larger pieces away and put the lower half in a large black trash bag to get it out of the house without getting the mess anywhere on the way down the stairs and out of the house. I hosed it off outside. Now it was time to clean up the bed. Bleck! I'm so surprised I hadn't gone over the edge myself at this point. I haven't mentioned it yet, but the smell was--well just as you'd expect it. The whole upstairs had the malodorous tang of vomit. I used some cleaner and paper towels and got the edge of the bed cleaned up...very gross, cold, and chunky. Amazingly, Alyssa's blanket and sheet were largely unscathed. I did have to take her sheet off, but it didn't really get much on it. Now on to walls. By this point, time had passed and the splatters on the walls had dried pretty good. I spend the next 30 minutes scrubbing all four walls, a dresser, and her bed getting the remaining groceries off all the vertical surfaces in her room. About 2 hours after it had began, I was done. It still smells kinda funky in there, and I'm probably going to have to go over the carpet again, but it's pretty contained. We kept Alyssa home today. We're still not sure if it was a bug or food poisoning. She's a little puny still, but hasn't had any atomic relapses. (thank goodness!) This was the worst puke incident I've ever heard of. Can you top it? I'd be surprised.