Snowy Adventures to Walla Walla

Lest we forget to record our favorite memories of 2010 for all eternity, we here briefly reminisce about a fun adventure to Walla Walla. A huge winter storm for the ages struck the Northwest a couple of days before Thanksgiving, threatening our long-planned trip with Jude and Greyson to Walla Walla. We never seriously entertained the idea of staying home though. There was too much family to see, too many people to introduce Greyson to, and too much food to eat to stay in Tacoma. Instead Rob ensured he could install snow chains (if needed) and we packed up and departed across the treacherous Cascades. With Chris, Jeanne and Daylon in tow, our two cars conquered the passes with minimal slippage. A few long hour later we arrived at our half-way point at Glory and Blake's house in Yakima. The next morning we finished our journey on uncleared icy highways between the tri-cities and Walla^2.

The rest of the time at the huge concrete mansion was spent playing games, eating, watching movies, and taking care of our two sick boys (yes I neglected to speak about that extra burdensome variable).

Overall a fantastic trip, Greyson's first road trip, and a great and memorable Thanksgiving adventure in (and to/from) Walla Walla.

Can Rob actually install snow chains properly? Check!

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A Very Proctor (Tacoma) Halloween

This little community we live in just seems to get cooler and cooler. Early on Halloween Day, Jude's nap and Greyson's incessant need for milk kept us from going to the local Tacoma zoo for family-friendly trick-or-treating. As the afternoon drew on our options grew more limited to the point that we said, "let's just walk to Starbucks." On a total hunch we also discovered that Tacoma’s Proctor District shuts down and all the stores hand out candy to kids. We quickly dressed up Jude into his lion costume (roar!), and Greyson into his Pea In The Pod costume and strolled our Bob Duallie up the street to the Proctor Starbucks.

We were so impressed by our little community. Families and kids were everywhere in Proctor. If we can’t manage to sell our house for another year we won’t be too disappointed.

The afternoon was a crisp and clear fall day. Leaves falling, blue skies, it was gorgeous. Greyson did such a great job of sleeping the whole time! After a just a few stores, Jude figured out to put his bag out in front of him so that people could drop candy inside. On the way home Jude practiced roaring like a lion. Later in the evening Jude helped hand out candy to trick-or-treaters as mom and dad enjoyed a warm mug of Romanian style “vin fiert” (spiced / mulled red wine).

Jude helped dad carve three pumpkins. He helped by pulling out the innards and throwing them into the trash.


Our adorable little Pea in the Pod: Greyson at 1 month and 2 days old.

Dad and Jude walking through the Proctor District old town shopping area gathering Halloween Candy. We’ll definitely do this again next year if we’re still in the area.

Jude having a great time roaring at all the other residents. In his simple lion costume, Jude made quite the impression.

3 Weeks In...

Three weeks after little Grey came home from the hospital and it appears we've got a pretty decent routine working. Jude has really stepped up to the plate. He has shown a loving interest in his new little brother and is sure to include him in his daily activities. Although only 3 weeks old, we can already tell that Grey has a much more easy going personality than his intense and colicy older brother when he was 3 weeks. Grey's constant feeding cycle is to he expected. Rachel tries to get rest on Wed-Fri as Jude stays home now on Mon-Tue. Dad has taken over parent duties for Jude's unpredictable nights.

This tiny phone makes lengthy appreciations more difficult, but we are both very thankful, beyond words, that Linda could stay with us for 3 weeks before Greyson was born and after. And this weekend Carol is going to stay with Rachel for the week. This means a lot to us and we are very thankful.


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Greyson Zachary

We are proud parents tonight. Welcome Greyson. Born tonight at Swedish at 7:18 pm. 8 lbs 6 oz and 20 in long. A healthy and beautiful baby boy.






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Last Quiet Night

Were scheduled to have Greyson tomorrow. This feels like the night before you get married. Lots of thoughts going through our heads, including, "wow this is going to be the last good nights sleep for about a year."


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I Want Pants ... Well Who Doesnt!?

The other day Rachel handed me a half-dressed Jude (shirt and diaper). However, at the same time I had planned on quickly running to the backyard to fix something. Therefore, I quickly threw some shoes on half-dressed Jude to take him outside with me. Upon fastening his shoes, Jude protested: "I want pants. I want pants. I want pants" until I understood what he was saying. "You want pants?" I repeated. "Yeah." And, slowly but surely father and son are learning to communicate with each other.

Jude's Octopus Cake

(Aka Jude's Second Birthday). On August 30th, Jude celebrated his second birthday with friends and family at the Portland Children's Museum. It was very cute watching over a dozen small children (mostly toddlers) waddling, running and tripping all over the room. A big thank you to all the little kids whose moms and dads let eat octopus cake with Jude: Grant, Cole, Drew, Isaac, Macy, Ayla, Evan, Joel, Addi, Pailey, and Daylon. All super cute and loads of energy!

Also a big kudos to Jeanne and Rachel for making the coolest octopus cake ever. After researching them online, Rachel decided she could make her own, but better and cheaper. Between she and Jeanne, it was pretty brilliant.

(more pictures soon)



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Greyson on His Way

I am the happy and proud soon-to-be father of Greyson TBD Mardock. Sometime between September 25 and October 5, Grey will complete the Mardock family: dad, lovely wife, and two spry little boys. I can’t wait. Greyson, we’re waiting with great anticipation for your birth in the next few weeks! Love, Dad

The Ferrari of Tricycles

This past Saturday we woke up with a great idea to buy Jude a simple tricycle for his 2nd birthday. Novel, says I; nothing says easy lovin’ than getting a simple ready-to-ride trike from Toys R Us. This from the family who researches so long into what kind of baby carrier to buy that by the time we get it he’s too big for it. But oh, life for the Mardocks isn’t as easy as simply going to Toys R Us and getting a $20 Radio Flyer.

At Toys R Us we discover that tricycles have actually “devolved” over the past 20 years into cheap, breakable plastic garbage heaps and cost $60 and up. (Of course when I was a kid, they were American-made solid steal and rubber). Rachel and I reconsidered the simple notion of buying a trike. We decided to search around the Tacoma area for other options to no avail. All garbage. Then we discovered there was this uber-fancy German trike company called Kettler. Hand forged by real Teutonic engineers, with all the bells and whistles. The particular one we were interested, I called the “Ferrari of Tricycles.” The Air Navigator. This bad boy has real air-filled tires, plus a push handle for the parents. But then it gets better: the Air Navigator's petite frame belies the fact that it’s approved for up to a 400 pound human. Its rear wheels swivel like a shopping cart so that the parents can push the trike seamlessly without lifting and repositioning the trike (lest it veer off the sidewalk and maim the poor child). And lastly, its front wheel locks so that the wheel is always pointed straight ahead. Another must as parents push the lazy child up and down the block.

I must tell you, I had stars in my eyes. Clearly I wanted this trike so much more than Jude could ever care. At $250 though, it was just a hard justification to make. Didn’t we wake up that morning just wanting a simple $20 trike? How did we get from Junker to Ferrari? After much introspection and consideration about whether the trike should be a family heirloom or just a toy, we decided to keep the money and get the trike from Toys R Us. At $60, it’s still more than we want to pay, but I feel like we avoided an epic frivolous purchase. Certainly Jude would appreciate that money towards his college savings plan. Although with a weight limit of 400 pounds he could still easily ride the trike to college.

So ends our trike story, and onto another story: whether or not Rob and Rachel will invest $700 on the swankiest duallie stroller on the market, or whether we’ll ever get it through out heads that humans have been raising babies for millennia without the aircraft aluminum frames, Baby Bjorn carriers, and video baby monitors…

Big Boy Bed

This morning at 1:30 Rachel and I awoke to a toddler-sized sneeze, mere inches from our heads. Both startled out of our sleeps, we looked over to find Jude just watching us. Clearly he had arisen from his big-boy bed, walked silently down the hall, and was waiting for an opportunity to get our attention.

Jude took to his big-boy bed much better than we could have anticipated. A couple of days after setting it up in his room, Adam and Dani put him down for a nap, not knowing we weren’t yet using the bed (we were more just getting Jude used to the idea of having it in his room). Later that night we were having a heck of a time getting Jude to sleep in his crib. Out of exhaustion, Rachel sat down on his bed to hold him, but Jude quickly slipped out of her arms onto the bed and he promptly fell asleep for the night. And that is the story of how Jude transitioned to his big-boy bed. All the discussion, concern and scenario-planning and he simply took to it like a fish takes to water.

The crib is now ready for little baby Greyson (ETA Sept 25 – Oct 5). We hope that Grey sleeps better than Jude. We like to think of Jude as being borderline colicky as it helps us justify how tired we were for the first year; and they say your second child will have the opposite level of difficultness from your first. We shall soon see…

Begin Microblog

1: Please pardon my brevity and typos, I'm writing with my thumbs
2: Whereas 99.9% of my after-hours computer time is on my phone, and it doesn't look likely to change anytime soon, expect to see brief and incorrectly spelled blog posts
3: I've been thinking more and more about getting a tiny Bluetooth keyboard
4: Next week is my busy week - with long nights to boot. I love my wife. And I'm also thrilled that Heather is coming up to keep Rachel company for a couple of days.
5: Jude is an absolute ham and doll. I look forward to seeing him when I'm at work
6: Rachel is tickled pink at the thought of having little Greyson. She's confirmed on numerous occasions that "no more, never. I hate being pregnant."
7: We're still trying to agree on Greyson's middle name. We're now thinking Charles or Alexander... But it could change tomorrow.
8: That is all!

Pleasant Day in Bellevue

The three of us spent a warm day checking out the Eastside of Seattle today (Aka Bellevue) as part of our preliminary scouting of possible places to live. Yes, as soon as our home sells, which could be in a month or in a year, we will be moving into a rental on the East side of Lake Washington. We recently found a church that we've been attending. The people are pretty cool and the message is smart (a rare combo). The next thing to consider in a move is daycare. As Rachel and I will still be working, and as we have no family within a hundred miles, well be using full time daycare for our two boys. That equals about $2500 per month, or effectively $30,000 a year. That equals the take-home salary of someone making about $40,000 (40,000 *[1-25% tax] = 30,000). I am awestruck at how people can afford this. It makes so much more sense to invest that money. And the govt doesn't give parents hardly any tax assistance for daycare as they do for small potato expenses like a mortgage payment. What does a parent do...

Please forgive my run-on sentences and typos as I'm writing from my iPhone.

On the Market

A little over two years ago, Rachel and I found a cute old Craftsman home in the tony area of Proctor, Tacoma that we could afford, knowing that much work needed to be done. Over the past couple of years, we've textured walls, painted everything, de-popcorned the ceiling, tiled, added appliances and a fireplace insert, ripped out a yard and put a new one in, installed lots of random lights and fixtures, and who knows what else... I've lost track of it all. All said and done probably over $10,000 of improvements. During this time, Rachel's company decided to move forward their move-date to Seattle 3 years from 2013 to 2010. So to make a long story short, we decided that although we put tons of hard work into our great little Craftsman, it just isn't going to be possible to commute with babies in the back seat up to Seattle and back to Tacoma every day for a total of 2.5 hours ... every day. Hence, our home is on the market (how's that for back-story)

We will be taking a loss on the property given how much in transaction fees we're paying, but if we can get close to what we're asking, then Rachel and I can start fresh in a new place closer to our two offices in Seattle without breaking the bank. We're really excited that in a few months (or more, who knows) we'll be living 30 miles north in Seattle / Bellevue.

In the meantime, check out our home listing. See the improvements we've made. I think there's even a link to the original listing from the previous owner in a previous blog post that you could compare our improvements to.

Click here ... or ... click here.

More exciting news coming your way soon!

It worked. Now I'm sad because...

If I knew how easy it was to post from my phone, I would have updated much sooner. The fact is, between working a long hard day, commuting from Seattle to Tacoma, renovating our home, and raising a baby / toddler, I have no time other than the few moments I sit in bed on my iPhone prior to lights out. This changes everything! I'm so sad that I've blogged only about 6 times in the past year. Darn you Facebook for stealing my pithiest of one liners and for synopsizing my family's life experiences into one-line status updates when they deserved so much more color, context and verbiage.

So some news of the day includes this: we're selling our home. Oh yes! It turns out the company Rachel works for is moving to Seattle 3 years sooner than they anticipated. We can't both commute to Seattle with a baby in the back seat, so were selling our beautiful home and moving closer to work. We'll post the MLS listing in the next few days. The real estate market is pretty bad, but our house is really great and really decently priced, so who knows. It could sell in one week or one year!

Testing Nifty iPhone App

As about 95% of my non-work related computer time is spent on an iPhone, and as I truly am wanting to get back into a normal blogging routine (because facebook is such a bad historical family record!), I'm testing out this nifty iPhone app to see if it acurately posts to our blog. Clearly what is lost by using this app is Microsoft Word's spell and syntax check, because that last sentence was a whopper of a run-on!


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Jude's First Haircut

Jude officially traversed the blurry line from babyhood to toddlerhood several months ago when he picked himself off the rug and took his first primordial steps (with Also Sprach Zarathustra playing in the background – at least as I recall it). However, we were further reminded of Jude’s non-babyness the other day when we got his golden locks trimmed for the very first time. At one point prior to the appointment, we discussed whether all three of us were psychologically ready for this rite of passage. In the end, we concluded that either now or three years from now would be the idea time. Three years from now represents when a toddler begins to no longer fear for his life at the hands of a barber or hairstylist. Imagining Jude with 5 years worth of hair convinced us that now was the time.

In my mind, toddler haircuts are reminiscent of the 70s and early 80s, as has been documented below:



Notice the horribly uncomfortable atmosphere. Comfort was definitely not a priority – function was key. Fast forward to today. These kiddos have their own salons, with beautiful lighting and wallpaper, barber chairs in the shape of Jeeps and rocket ships, and TVs playing Elmo & Friends:


Overall, Jude did excellent for 2/3 of his visit. Then, he politely waved his hands back in forth to signal “all done,” put his sucker down, pulled off his smock, and clearly exclaimed “aah” (which is Judeian for “up”). He fussed when we didn’t respond to his command, but even during his fussiness, he was a pretty well behaved little guy. Kudos to the stylist, and kudos to Jude for passing this important milestone. Your hair now reminds us clearly that you are a little man. No more old ladies exclaiming what a cute little girl we have. And for those of you curious: yes, Jude’s hair is still a little curly at the bottom. Hopefully his curls last into his teens, because they’re awfully cute (and girls really seem to like them!)