Nine Lessons Learned

Since all these house posts are getting to be a bore for some of you (especially grandparents), here is a more personal post. :) Lets look at some of the lessons learned by Calista recently.
1. You can get a lot of free canned vegetables (and more) by rolling catalina coupon deals at Acme.

2. You can get around the swimming pool just fine without swimming by hitchhiking on all your cousins.


3. Sisters are great for snuggling!

4. Mascara, and other things in "Deluxe Beauty" kits make you look "gorgeous" and make mom and dad "crazy".

5. Driving cars is fun, but tractors are even better.

6. Good friends will always be good friends. Thanks for visiting, Lukas! (Doesn't the second pic look like a bad engagement photo or something?)

7. If at first you don't take a nap, just find somewhere comfortable to stand up and zzzzzzzzz..............

8. Snow in NJ is cold... and fun to throw at Daddy.

9. Christmas is really fun, but best of all is remembering the birth of the baby Jesus.

Reveal #3: the Dining Room

 

BEFORE: The dining room was just white, no wallpaper (hallelujah!) but plenty of holes to patch. Ms. Purcell liked to adorn her walls well.

 

This was what it looked like when we closed on the house.

 

and Now: Nicely painted in a color called "Ivory". It does look yellowish in some light though. We actually tossed (freecycled) the brass candelabra light fixture the first week we were in the house and traded it for a less formal but more functional ceiling fan.

 

There's not much else to say about the space except that we love it.

Reveal #2- Eden's Room

 

BEFORE: Eden's room was pretty much like Calista's room when we bought our house- schlepped from top to bottom with wallpaper. Only her room's was pink, not flowery. Just right for a baby girl, right? No, thank you. (Furnishings did not come with the house, but the loverly drapes did.)
"I can't believe it looked like that!" says Eden.

 

We're still wondering what was previously ignited in our heat vents to leave the nasty black smoke marks up the walls. They were in every room I think.

 

TADA! The color of the room is called "Funky Yellow" and it is indeed funky. Its green by artificial light and yellow by natural light. I think it goes nicely with girly pink things.

 

Eden still enjoys sleeping in mommy & daddy's room at night, but we think she'll love this space like Calista loves her room as she gets older.
Once again, we credit is due to the many hands to helped us finish painting this room before Eden was born: Elders, Matt, Dad, Mom, and Amy G. Thanks!

The rocker/glider was a FreeCycle score. Jerry picked it up the day Eden was born. :) I wish it were white... but that's a project for later.


"MUCH better, mommy & daddy!"

Reveal #1- Calista's Room

We've been in our home now for almost three months. Its about time we showed off some of the progress we've made it making it our own, inhabitable, clean(ish) space. We're not HGTV, but all our sweat has brought something to be proud of.

 

BEFORE: This is the bedroom we selected for Calista's. It was coated with loverly flowery wallpaper from floor to ceiling- including the ceiling. Oh, and when the removal had begun, we found layer #2 underneath. It just had to go.
Lots of scraping and 2 layers of primer and 2 layers of paint later, it's a cheery terracotta/ salmony orange. Calista loves it.

 

The bed is also the fruits of our labors. Pottery barn? Nooooo. I found it at a thrift store in Maryland (I miss you, Value Village!) as we anticipated Calista moving into a big girl bed. It was dark brown but had a great classic style I knew would be cute in a little girl's room, once painted white. Voila. After she fell out of the bed twice the first night, we put up the rail and told her to keep her head on the pillow. Now she's good as gold.

 

It's really nice for her to have her own space for her toys and books now.

 

The closet is her dresser for now. We're on the hunt for her dresser still.
And the painting continues...

hiphipBOOray

 

Happy Halloween everyone! A big sloppy boo kiss from Eden to you.
This being her first halloween, and our first in NJ, let me just tell you a couple things we've learned so far today.
1) Its OK to go trick or treating at 2:00pm. Or 3pm. Hey, why not start at noon??
2) Its OK to go trick or treating when you are 12 years old, especially if you go out at 2pm. Cause its going to rain later, ya know.
3) If you see something in the bowl that you like, just reach in and grab it.
4) If you see something in the bowl that you like, but are too shy to just grab it, then ask the homeowner if you can have the "yellow one".
5) Nevermind saying thank you!

Seriously, the kids we've had so far are not following any of the "rules" I know for the sport. Hope you get the team players in your neighborhood!

Eden's First Week

Calista has had a busy week while Danae and Eden take it easy, thanks to Grandma's help. We enjoyed a visit from Karl & Jolene's family Friday evening, and celebrated Grandma's birthday on Saturday. We can hardly believe Eden's a week old already, let alone that Calista is two and a half, and man does she seem heavy now. Eden's a peaceful delight- she cries only when she really means it and is excelling at age-appropriate activities like sleeping and eating. Mom & Dad get some sleep too. Not like the 8 hours a night from 8 days ago, but we're not quite zombies yet. Maybe for Halloween.

Bringing Eden Home

After what felt like forever at the hospital, we were reunited back at home. Thanks to a quick call to Utah on the way to the hospital, fortuitous planning and flexibility of Southwest Rapid Rewards tickets, Grandma Peggy hopped on the airplane just before Danae gave birth to Eden Adrienne Fails (her name, its official!). Calista played at Hazel's house (the kindest person ever in our ward!) until that evening when she came to meet her sister, whom she adores, then Grandma arrived. Grandma's been her pal every since!

Baby Girl #2 Has Arrived!

Last night as we came home from a quick trip to the store (that was prolonged because the car wouldn't start and we had to get a jump from a neighbor), Calista said, "Baby will come out tomorrow" (which she had never said before). Danae and I looked at each other and said, "Well, maybe". Obviously Calista had a pretty good source for her information, because after going to bed, Mommy was awakened at 1 am. She forced herself back to sleep and was reawakened at 2:30. She didn't awaken Daddy for almost an hour at which time we formally started timing contractions. They were between 3 and 7 minutes and we talked, did a little prep, and started calling the doctors. Finally we awakened Calista at 5 am on our way out of the door to drop her off at Sister Hazel's house (a kind member of our ward) and then went to the hospital. By 6 am we were checked in and Danae was getting ready. A lot of effort later - and fortunately not too long as "labor" time goes - Baby Girl Fails #2 was out and in Mom's lap. Danae and baby are doing well.

Baby's info at birth were:
Born at 7:58 am at Mountainside Hospital in Montclair, NJ.
She is 7 lbs. 10 oz. and is 20" long.

She is a beautiful baby girl (for whom we are still searching for a name). Thanks for all of your prayers and well-wishes. We love you!

One last story, we called Calista to tell her, her sister has come out and she was VERY excited. The person who is/was watching her said she was too excited to go back to sleep, but when her own children awakened, she told them Calista's mommy was having a baby. The children said that was cool. Calista said, "Yeah, that is very cool!" She is so happy to be a big sister.

Working on the House

We knew the house needed a lot of help. We started even before the move to fix things up. We are VERY grateful to Dad Cann for flying out the week before we moved to help work on the house; and to Matt North for coming from PA to come and work tirelessly on our house. Oh, did I mention that two days after we moved in our AC went out, so all of their help was in the hottest week of the year with no AC! And, yes, we also "celebrated" our sixth anniversary by working on our new house and going out to eat.

We're also grateful to members of our new ward - especially the Relief Society sisters and the missionaries who pitched in right away to help with some cleaning and painting!

We are making progress on the house - we'll post transformation pictures soon!

Moving from MD to NJ

It was exhausting even though we had "full-service" movers. We made it though. Our full apartment was packed, loaded, cleaned, our belongings moved to NJ, and unloaded (filling the house!) all in one VERY LONG day.

Our First House!

We did it! We bought a house. It was kind of anti-climactic with all that was going on, and the process seemed so less formal and ceremonious than we somehow thought it might be, but in the end we walked away with the keys!

Saying Goodbyes

We wish we could have spent more time with so many of our beloved friends in MD! We miss you already. Thanks for being our friends and teaching us so much. You will always be in our hearts, thoughts, and prayers.

T's Birthday

We got to go to Timothy's birthday and see our friends the Keislings and others in the ward before they moved to Iowa and we moved to NJ. We will miss the Keislings. Calista spent so much time with T and Margaret!

Last Time at the Fountain

Calista had one last "hurrah" at the fountain in "downtown" Hyattsville. We also had a nice meal with our friend Jon Rodeback.

Grandma Fails Visits

After Jerry defended, Mom Fails came in to town to visit. We had an enjoyable time while Jerry busily made his revisions and we prepped to go to NJ for Jerry to be "oriented" at his new job at Montclair State University.

Jerry PASSED! :)

Well, I'll update this with more information later maybe, but the news is Jerry PASSED his defense, he has some revisions but will be busily making those over the next week.

Jerry and his committee

 

Celebration lunch at Chevy's (sorry, I cut off the main man!)

Our house- in the middle of NJ

The last house update I put on here was good news- our offer on Mill St was accepted! Then we waited... and waited... it was a "short" sale, you know. Then came the bad news. We found out about 3 weeks ago that the owner of Mill was not going to loose his house after all, his family was helping him to stay in it, so he canceled our contract. We were SOOOO close to the bank's approval and then this news came from out of nowhere.
Meanwhile, Jerry is slaving away on his dissertation. The day after he turned it in to his committee, we whisked ourselves away to NJ to see just a few more houses. It just wouldn't be right to buy a house without seeing at least 100 you don't want to buy, right? We had about 4 that we were considering, but we narrowed it down and offered on Byrd Ave in Bloomfield.
After waiting for the seller's attorney to coordinate with the seller and the seller's Realtor and all get together in the nursing home (where the owner is living) at the same time, we got good news again. We've done the inspection, our mortgage is coming along, and we will be calling it home in about a month.
We are looking forward to having space for guests- so if you want to see NYC sometime, let us know! We'd love to have you! Just give us a few months to get the guest room/ bathroom into a decent state. :S
Enjoy the pics! Its very... 1958. Just think of the fun we'll have with the "before" and the "after" pics (to come over the next 5 years).

In his defense...

It's officially coming right up:

THE DISSERTATION DEFENSE FOR THE DEGREE OF Ph.D. IN COMPUTER SCIENCE FOR

Jerry Alan Fails

Will be held:

DATE: Wednesday, July 29, 2009 at 10:30 am

LOCATION: Room 2105, Hornbake Building, South Wing


TITLE: Mobile Collaboration for Young Children



ABSTRACT:

Within the last decade, mobile devices have become an integral part of the activities of adults and children, at home or work, in industrialized and developing countries. For children, these devices have primarily been geared towards communication, information consumption, or individual creative purposes. Prior research indicates social interaction and collaboration are essential to the social and cognitive development of young children. This dissertation research focuses on mobile users — specifically children ages 6 to 10 — to support shared reading and story creation. I developed Mobile Stories, a novel software system for the Windows Mobile platform using C#. Mobile Stories supports collaborative story experiences, with special attention to two collocated collaboration experiences: content splitting and space sharing. Content splitting is where interface parts (e.g. words, pictures) are split between two or more devices. Space sharing is where the same content (e.g. a document) is spread or shared across devices. These collocated collaborative configurations help address mobile devices’ primary limitation: a small screen.

The three research questions addressed are: how do mobile technologies affect children’s collaboration and mobility, what are appropriate interfaces for collocated mobile collaboration with children, and when are the developed interfaces preferred and why. Mobile Stories was designed and develop using the Cooperative Inquiry design method. Formative studies furthered the design process, and gave insight as to how these collaborative interfaces might be used. A formal, mixed method study was conducted to investigate the relative advantages for each of the collocated collaborative interfaces, as well as to explore mobility and collaboration.

The results of the formal study show children were more mobile while creating stories than when reading and sharing them. As for task effectiveness, children read more pages when they were closer, and created more pages when they were further apart and more mobile. Children were closer together when they read using the content split configuration. While creating their stories, children rarely used the collocated collaborative configurations and used verbal collaboration instead. Several indicators pointed to relative advantages of the split content configuration over the share space configuration however the advantages of each are discussed.



Examining Committee:

COMMITTEE CHAIR: Dr. Allison Druin

Committee Members: Dr. Ashok Agrawala

Dr. Ben Bederson

Dr. Yan Qu

Dean’s Representative: Dr. Jenny Preece


EVERYONE IS INVITED TO ATTEND THE PRESENTATION PORTION OF THIS DEFENSE

The Phone Call

We waited with anticipation for a phone call regarding our offer on the house in Bloomfield on Thursday. We expected to hear if the seller accepted our offer on Wednesday evening, which became Thursday morning, which became Thursday evening. The call came, and went like this:

- Hi, its Nancy (not in her normal cheery voice)
- Hey Nancy.
- I just called to let you know that we didn't get the house.
- Really? awww.
- Yeah, I guess when you're up against that many offers...
- How many were there?
- There were a total of six.

and so on...

I decided not to call Jerry right away and tell him, since I was just getting in the car to pick him up. My head was spinning with what we would do next. I guess we'd go up there again once we saw a few more interesting new listings... or try a low offer on one of our runner up (but more expensive) homes.

Sitting at the stoplight at Rt 1 & 410, my phone rings again.

- Hi! Its Nancy. (This time, her usual, cheery voice)
- Hey nancy. (perplexed)
- OK- First you're going to laugh, then you're going to say, huh? then you're going to laugh again.
- (me, laughing) OK?
- We got the house!!
- Huh??
- Patrick (the seller's realtor) just called me again.

... the first phone call was meant for the other Nancy at the same real estate office, but Patrick didn't catch that. He called our Nancy twice- once to say sorry, no go, then again to say, congrats, you got it!

We're just glad we didn't get the phone calls in the opposite order. And that our Nancy is the winning Nancy. :) Hurray!

So what now? We wait for the bank. Its a short sale, aka, take all the time in the world sale. We're optimistic and we're putting on our patient pants for the next several weeks. Its just hard to wear the same pants for that long, you know?

Long Car Rides

So to really answer Jenete's question to me today about how Calista does with the long car rides to/from New Jersey, I give you this movie clip. This is what its like riding with a bored 2 year old in the backseat.

House Hunters: New Jersey Edition

It's not front page news anymore, but some of you may not know that Jerry has accepted a job at Montclair State University in New Jersey. We'll be leaving Maryland with mixed feelings this August, probably.
And so we begin the hunt to find a place to live in the very expensive New York City suburbs (of New Jersey). We've made three trips now... and who knows how many more will be needed. I don't know how folks pick a house in a weekend! We did make our first offer on a house (a short sale), and you can check it out here: http://tinyurl.com/pn98gj

Wee looked at the house a couple time, for pictures you can see:
Round 1 Pictures
Round 2 Pictures

Calista's going to have a little ...

SISTER


Yes, it's official - well as official as it can be at this point. Calista is going to have a little sister! She takes good care of Mommy. (No, still no pictures of Calista "buttering" [putting lotion on] Mommy's belly.) Here are just a few sonogram pictures. As always, they only mean much to the trained eye, but enjoy nonetheless! As I'm sure you all can see, baby is already a beautiful, happy, intelligent, hard-working, obedient, and talented little girl! :)

Mother's Day and Jake's Baptism

We had a lot of fun at Karl and Jolene's. Mother's Day was special; we got to be with my Mom and sisters. Calista and I are sure so grateful for her Mommy! We love her SOOO much!!! We also had the pleasure of witnessing Jake's baptism. Calista also REALLY liked Aunt Jen's rental car.

Partytime

We went up to Karl and Jolene's to celebrate Jake's and Amber's birthdays. Before we left, Calista saw the fire trucks that were in our front yard getting ready for the Hyattsville city parade. As always we had a lot of fun with family!

She's two, too

Just a glimpse of Calista's first two years on Earth. We're so glad she joined our family first and we're going to keep her for good!

Easter

We packed up and went to Round Hill, Virginia to celebrate Easter with the Goeckeritz Family. Karl, Jolene and family were already there. Together we had a very enjoyable time, celebrating this sacred time of year! As always it was nice to be with those we love so much. Calista really had a fun time with her cousins. Jerry had a fun time using Rebecca's digital SLR camera because we forgot ours. So enjoy the quality pics!

Baltimore Aquarium

Amidst the craziness of figuring out what our next step is (e.g. what job Jerry's going to take), we had a fun night out in Baltimore. We had enjoyed the Baltimore Aquarium a few years ago, but hadn't taken Calista yet. So, the last day of "prices taking a dive after five" during the winter season (it used to be $5 after 5 pm on Fridays, now its $8), we went as a family. And, as we suspected, she loved it!

Lady Terps vs. Utes (NCAA Tournament)

Maryland hosted some second round Women's Basketball NCAA Tournament games - including the game between the Lady Terps and Utes. We went and cheered the Terps on to victory. Calista LOVED watching the game, and had fun clapping, cheering, and yelling "Go Maryland" and "Defense" — which she picked up just from listening to others yelling!

Playing Around

Here are some fun pictures of Calista playing around. Some of her favorite activities right now are going outside and running. She loves chasing birds (especially "robins") and squirrels. And for some reason they "fly away" when she runs after them. She also loves to help around the house, transporting things between Mommy and Daddy, putting things away, getting things for Mommy and Daddy, helping with cooking, and cleaning up messes ("me mess!") with a "rag".

Also, included are just a couple pictures of Calista's, au natural harp recital. After getting out of the tub, and doing her nightly "boo" to Mommy, she shed her towel and went to play the harp. She plucks the strings quite well. Daddy just couldn't resist taking these pictures to display thirty years from now when she starts dating! :)

Calista is a BIG ...

SISTER


Yes, it's official - Calista is 12 weeks on her way to formally being a big sister! She is VERY excited. She loves to hug and kiss baby, to sing to baby, and to rub mommy's belly with "butter" (lotion). We are very excited to welcome a new baby into our home, even though we're not really sure where that will be by the time baby comes along.

Jamestown

After getting ready, we all went together to Jamestown. We actually went to the Jamestown Settlement which is right next to Historic Jamestown. It features some more hands on activities and displays for the children. We had a great time while we were there.

Playing at Powhatan Plantations

One of the reasons for our early Spring Break was to meet Emily (Danae's cousin) and Brad Heaton and their kids (Tyler, Braden, and Anna). We got a great deal on a nice 3-bedroom condo (for only $90/night) which we shared. We were able to enjoy a few of the many nice features of the place including their playground and pool. Most importantly, we were able to reconnect and play with the Heatons!

Williamsburg

We got a late start because Jerry got sick Tuesday night, but we made it to Williamsburg and were able to take advantage of the annual passes we purchased last year. We enjoyed a great meal, walking around Williamsburg, and a great tour of the Governor's Palace. Calista's favorite part of the palace were the gardens. She also had fun making a new friend and running around.

Our Big, Little Girl

A set of pictures showing how our big, little girl is growing up.

Snow Day

March 2nd, we had a snow day where schools were canceled including the University of Maryland. We got 5" of snow. We enjoyed the day by applying for yet another job for Jerry, and playing in the snow with our neighbors. We had a great time.

Valentine's Month

We enjoyed celebrating our Valentine's day all month long. Here are just a couple highlights.

January - on vacation

Great times in Utah - thanks fam!

January - on the homefront

Most of our excitement this month was spent visiting our family & friends in Utah- see our "January - on vacation" post. Otherwise our month was punctuated with a couple parties, the first "real" snow of the year (and all the chaos that ensues around here), and a brief visit from my Mom, who is one step closer to being a certified Music for Healing and Transition practitioner.

Christmas Day

You are probably all over Christmas by now, but we're just wrapping it up. Christmas day was pleasantly quiet at our house. We loved chatting on the phone with our loved ones, and sharing dinner with friends. Calista has been officially spoiled. :)