Howefitz Blog

This doll will help Calli learn to potty ... right?

OK, I’m pretty sure around the time that Calli was born I read somewhere that girls generally start potty training at 18 months. ‘Woo-hoo!’ My inexperienced father’s brain cried. Only a year and a half of foul-smelling, foul-colored, unidentifiable, unexplainable messes in diapers? I can handle that!

Nearly three years later, I’m still changing diapers. I’ve failed. You can see pictures of the wife and I in the parenting Hall of Shame. There’s a failed potty-trainers wing, and we’re the star attractions.

Then again, maybe not!

Calli can help you conquer the world!

Yesterday I was stressed at work. The day before that, I was stressed at work. Last week: yeah, more stress. I don’t want to get up in the morning. I don’t blog but once a week (FatherHood Friday, as seen at dad-blogs.com! Be sure to check out all the cool moms and dads who selflessly share the lives of their families for your entertainment and delight!) I can hardly take making a decision anymore, because somehow it’ll be wrong to someone.

Whew! Happy FatherHood Friday! This week was a crazy one, and I’m pretty sure I missed a day somewhere. The store I work in is going through a remodel, and they hit my departments this week. I put in a couple 15 hour days, but man it’s looking good! Also, my weekly column at dad-blogs debuted on Tuesday! Make sure you check that and the other great articles and discussions there! I think I saw my family this week as well…

Without too much more drivel from me, I thought I’d share another of Kat’s paintings…

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I continue my intention of posting things my kids do here in this blog, and measuring how much I can puff up my chest. The previous Talent In The Family post on this blog featured two colored pencil drawings of dragons by Kat (the 15 year old) that she was submitting for a mascot for Red Canyon High School.

This time around, I thought I’d present you with one of my all time pieces of hers:

Calli achieving warp velocity within an inflatable castle...

We had another adventure at the rec center today. We decided to wake Calli up at the wee hour of 10am (we’ve gotta do something about her sleeping pattern…) and took her to Tumble Tots!

Tumble Tots is a time when toddlers can have free play in the gymnastics area! We had a blast! Calli got to jump into a hole in the floor filled with foam blocks, into which her daddy promptly got stuck, much to the embarassment of her mommy. She bounced on trampolines, swung from rings, and achieved at least Warp 3 running around an inflatable castle.

The other day I was reading a blog post over at johnchow.com entitled, ‘You Are Already Rich‘. It got me to counting my blessings and really thinking about the good in my life.

In posts such as last Friday’s ‘Fatherhood Friday‘ post that I called ‘…And They All Lived Happily Ever After…‘, I’ve talked of my family and all the blessings that they bring to my life.

Then I thought of other blessings:

Calli and I at her first war protest in 2007. This was in Columbia, MO. We lived not too far away in Jamestown, MO at the time. We were mentioned in an article about the rally in the Columbia Missourian. Calli was only 7 months old.

I woke up this morning to blog, and for the life of me, I didn’t know what I’d blog about. So, I turned, as I often do, to one of my favorite blogs, dadomatic.com. The front page entry hit me square between the eyes. In a post called ‘Don’t be afraid of Change’, Jeff Turner talks about his ‘adventure days’, where he packs the family into his truck and just drives! He starts by telling of car-pooling the other day with a handful of kids:

If you follow me on twitter or Facebook, you’ve heard me hint at starting a webcomic. Between that, my blog here, and my day job, that squeezes a lot of time from the family. Sitting at the computer is a fairly lonely hobby.

So I’ve made moves to balance this new found lust for a digital life with my real one.

First and foremost, I wake up early. I’m not saying this is for everybody, but it works for me. (Kind of ironic, really. I used to be a ‘nightowl’, and now I do my best work in the early morning!) In my blog entry, ‘Balancing Life, Family, and Technology: How Some Authors Do It‘, Dayton Ward addressed how much sleep he got by saying:  

Don't look for zebras, they can run away with you...

My wife woke up yesterday in a panic. Something could be wrong with the baby.

Last week she went through several tests. Saturday they drew blood to look for HCG hormones. These hormones are found in a woman’s body when she is pregnant, and should double every 48 hours during the first trimester. So Saturday they drew the first sample, and the HCG count was 14000. Monday, the count was 24000, not quite double but we were told it was nothing to worry about. Wednesday they drew more blood, but we didn’t hear from them.

As we look to a bright new year, many of us are looking back at the year we just had. Then we look forward to the year ahead. I am doing the latter with a vengeance. This does not come without the required retrospective, however.

The past year has been very busy for me. I moved twice, continued to try to sell my home in Missouri, worked overnight and days, considered a second job, started several blogs, discovered Facebook and Twitter while growing increasingly impatient with MySpace, and somewhere in there tried to figure out how to get family and ‘me’ time.