Playing Catch Up

Out for a walk in the sunshine!

So this is my attempt at keeping family and friends updated as to the life we are leading down south. Sorry the posts have been so sparce. I have decided that while I am not as eloquent as my better half I will do my best to share our lives on a more regular basis.
Rian is so very busy these days and is spending almost every waking moment studying. Every other moment he is spending with our precious baby boy and me. Rian warned me from the outset of this quarter that this would be the most challenging of all the quarters. He is doing well and plugging through with a great attitude.

What Rian is doing most of the time

I continue to love being at home with Lachlan and have now joined a great group of women to study the Bible. I have enjoyed making new friends and with spring in the air I am outside more than ever.
Lachlan is growing like a little weed. He has become the youngest volunteer at one of local retirement homes and loves making the residents smile. Whenever we enter the building he is a sure show stopper to whatever they are doing. We spend most of our time in memory support helping the residents remember the lives they have so often forgot. He is truly a form of therapy and I love hearing the advice they have for me as well as all the reminiscing that goes along with seeing a little one that so often reminds them of their own. Mostly I love watching Lachlan look at each person with such innocence and with such a big gummy grin!
We have started going to baby story time at the local library and he loves listening to the stories and hearing us all sing songs. A real favorite is "head, shoulders, knees, and toes"!

Lachlan and his Ketchikan teddy bear

As far as development Lachlan loves sitting up and he loves his toys. He sees no need to rush into being mobile he enjoys what is in front of him and every now and again he will lean really far over and almost appear to be in the crawling position. He is now eating solids and is enjoying his rice cereal mixed with pears, apples, bananas, sweet potatoes, and avocado. Hmmm...next week we will try a mix, perhaps apple/pears.

Time to eat!

Lachlan outgrew his baby tub and he is still too little for the entire tub so I got him a giant duck to take his bath in. He seems to really enjoy it.

Lachlan in his new tub!

He is a little chatter box and no one can make him belly laugh like his daddy. He has a very pleasant disposition and loves to snuggle. He is still my little early bird and wakes up like clock work at 0600.

Tired boy!

Lachlan loves to swing at the playground behind our apartment.

Quarter Recap

"From the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise..."

-Psalms 8:2

Winter break is winding down and the J-team is back on the Farm after spending some time up in the Puget Sound area. Nice to get back in the rain, though after a year in Ketchikan Michele and I have met our Seattle rain quota until 2014.

While up in Seattle I worked at PND for a week and caught up with friends at work. It was nice to contribute value to a project that was not myself. After a few years in the working world, one of the hardest aspects about becoming a student again is coming to terms with being primarily a drain on resources, rather than a contributor. After working we spent time with friends and family including a long weekend with the Johnson family in a beach house my parents rented on Tulalip Shores. It was most relaxing and we really enjoyed catching up with everyone including Julia, our niece, who is three weeks older than Lachlan.

This quarter my classes tend more toward the engineering side of things and I am excited to get things started again. I am guessing this will be my heaviest quarter so this weekend I'm trying to get as much time in with Michele and Lachlan before I mentally go away. My schedule this quarter includes:

Goals and Methods for Sustainable Building Projects
Design and Construction of Concrete Structures
Organization Design for Projects and Companies
Integrated Concurrent Engineering
Behavior of Structural Systems for Buildings (bad structure, no no!)


Lachlan continues to captivate us. Every day he seems to have discovered something new and is now learning to sit on his own. He is drooling a ton and we are anticipating the sprouting of his first tooth. We are just in awe of the little gift that the Lord gave us and we pray to raise him up in a way that is pleasing to Him. We are thinking that we should probably begin to "baby proof" our little apartment in anticipation of a mobile little man.

Michele is busy getting ready for the start of the quarter and is looking forward to getting started in her mom's group and ladies Bible study here on campus. She continues to spend time with her sister and her family while I am busy with class. She is looking forward to getting out on walks again now that we are heading into some dryer weather.

In November Jeff (my brother) was able to come down for a visit.

Rian and Jeff at the UW v. Stanford football game with Lachlan looking on.

Lachlan: "Dad, you call THIS football, ugh!"

Field trip to Operating Engineer's Training Facility near Sacramento. They never let you drive the equipment in elementary school.

Lachlan's first solid food experience. "Don't like rice cereal, buddy? Just wait 'til we get to broccoli."

Michele and Lachlan out on an evening stroll in the Stanford Quad

Michele and Lachlan at Half Moon Bay, CA. Can't complain about being half an hour from the coast. In other words, one could drive to the coast, loaf for an hour, and drive back to campus in the time allotted for the average class lecture. (Not that I ever think about that.)

Lachlan's first Christmas...

..."Stockings of Fury"

Family retreat at Tulalip Shores, WA just after Christmas.

Student

--Ted Kooser

The green shell of his backpack makes him lean
into wave after wave of responsibility,

and he swings his stiff arms and cupped hands,

paddling ahead. He has extended his neck

to its full length, and his chin, hard as a beak,

breaks the cold surf. He's got his baseball cap on

backward as up he crawls, out of the froth

of a hangover and onto the sand of the future,

and lumbers, heavy with hope, into the library.

In Orbit

Livin' out in California
Seems to suit you well
But my news is all second hand

So it's hard for me to tell

--Manfred Mann's Earth Band

Forty-eight days is a long, long time. Forty-eights days ago we left Ketchikan.

We had envisioned standing on the back deck of the ferry watching the town and project fade into the sunset and fjords, buuut…Lachlan was having a hard evening. I caught a glimpse of the town passing by while waiting in line for cheeseburger since Michele and I had to eat in shifts. Michele missed the experience altogether. It’s only a seven hour ferry ride from Ketchikan to Prince Rupert, B.C. which is the nearest point to access the North America road grid. After four and a half hours the ferry crosses the mouth of the Portland Canal and the border of Alaska and Canada. It may have been my imagination but the color of the world changed there. Behind us the monotone, daunting beauty of SE Alaska. Ahead the sun was coming out; as if the asphalt strip of civilization stretching toward this point on the northern B.C. coastline had even domesticated the weather. A sigh of relief or of acceptance.

We did enjoy the rest of the trip to Seattle. Northern British Columbia was absolutely stunning. Not in the same way as Alaska. Rolling, forested hills and river valleys with green, green farms scattered few and far between.

“Michele look, GRASS! Can we stop? Can we stay?”
“No,” she said.

Lachlan did great. We didn’t get a good chance to test drive him before the big road trip since Ketchikan only has 20 miles of continuous road but for the most part he seemed to enjoy the time in the car.

Once we hit Bellingham there came a sense of closure for both of us. That place was the starting point for this whole endeavour.

Our two weeks in Seattle went by much too quickly. It was great see friends and family. Most of my time was spent working on the house. Michele and I are truly grateful for all the help we received around the place. After the whole experience I have now spent a total of 17 days/nights in the house we bought a year ago. Does that qualify as a permanent address?

On September 13th my parents convoyed with us from Seattle to Palo Alto. Again, Lachlan did great. We got down here a week before my classes started but mostly spent the time unpacking. We did make a trip to San Francisco and took Lachlan to the ocean beach for the first time. We happened to pick a day when the area was experiencing some pretty high winds off of the water. If he remembers the experience, he’ll think of the beach as the place where his face gets sandblasted and daddy can’t see.

So now I’ve been in class for three weeks now. With five classes it feels a bit like a drink from the fire hose. I’m painfully reminded that I forgot most of my mathematics beyond algebra and elementary trig approximately 20 minutes after taking my last final as an undergraduate. I’m taking engineering economics, project finance, advanced structural steel design, structural dynamics, and construction seminar. For my mental health I’m also taking a golf class. Once when I was younger I was kicked off a golf course for wearing jeans and vowed to boycott the “sport”. So far my game more closely resembles lawn mowing so I guess that means my vow still stands.

Michele is settling into life on-campus. She’s enjoying the weather and chances to get out around campus and meet other new moms in the grad student neighborhood. She has also had more time to catch up with her sister, Christie, and her family who live just down the road from campus.

Lachlan is now 2 months and 3 weeks old. At last check (last week) he measured 14-lbs 3 ounces and 25-in: a good size boy according to his doctor. He's still a pretty happy camper and is enjoying living in one place for more than two weeks. He likes walking around campus with Michele in his stroller. He likes bath time but most of all he likes his star. The star I speak of hangs above his floor mat, lights up, and plays really annoying music. Three months ago I would have immediately thrown such a device into the garbage or out the window of a moving vehicle. Now the little diddy is a fair trade for a smiling Lachlan even if I'm sitting there trying to find a non-homogeneous solution to a differential equation for harmonic loading on a moment-frame structure.

Maybe that's progress.

Now for the Photos!!

Lachlan loves bath time

Play time with dad

Study break

"Drive south until you can roll the windows down"

On Tuesday Michele and I pack up with Lachlan in tow and head south. Rather than taking the ferry straight back to Bellingham as originally planned, we will be taking the ferry to Prince Rupert, B.C. and taking the slow road down between the Canadian Rockies and BC coastal range through Prince George, the Okanogan, and finally down to western Washington and our Seattle home. Perhaps not the brightest idea with a newborn but the regular Alaska Marine Highway ferry, Columbia, got broke for the season. Having been left little choice we get to accept this inconvenience as an adventure.

Not sure how the boy will handle the ride. We don't have much road to test him out on here in Ketchikan. He still likes to eat and now weighs in at a shade under 12 pounds. He's lost most of his baby hair and is now a cue ball like his daddy was. Michele and I thought his eye color would change but it staying a slate color. Not sure where he gets that from.

We are looking forward to introducing him to family and friends and catching up with them ourselves. We've missed them very much this last year. It will be nice to get back to Seattle. Michele hasn't left the island since early May and I haven't been out of Ketchikan for nearly half a year.

Ah yes home, Seattle, home: where we will spend 14 days in our home (house? investment? money pit?) to get it ready for the next set of renters before moving on to California for the year. I will be attending Stanford this coming academic year and, if all goes well, will be done with a master degree in June. I'm continuing to study civil engineering specifically focused on design/construction integration. The program is a combination of structural and construction engineering with a little bit a management on the side so it won't be too much of a departure from my career path so far. I've put off grad school for a year now and with 20/20 hindsight going back to school this year is much more of a practical inconvenience than it would have been last fall. This year I really am excited about going to school, which is the one ingredient I was missing when I choose to go to Ketchikan over school last year. Plus we now have a 12 pound bundle of warm, hungry motivation to keep me on task. Michele will continue to stay home with Lachlan and we will live on campus. With her sister's family close by and the promise of lots of places to play with Lachlan outside in the sun (which she also hasn't seen since May:-) she may be more excited than I am.

Despite the excitement we both are feeling about our upcoming time in Seattle and the Bay Area, right now Michele and I are actually both having a hard time saying goodbye to Ketchikan. Perhaps we haven't expressed very well before or it's not something we've felt until recently but we really love this place. It might be because it is the birthplace of our first born. Maybe it is the view of the mountains and the Tongass Narrows in the morning. It could be the whales on the south side of Pennock in the morning or the black bears in Herring Cove in the evening. For me it might be the smell of a nice, wet southeast summer day on the way to work but for Michele it might be the guarantee of running into friends while running errands around town. On the other hand it might be the incredible hospitality we've experience from the folks around town and specifically our church, South Tongass Alliance. Actually this is the reason, no matter how terrible a fisherman you may actually be, the odds are still in your favor to land a big salmon no matter what side of the rod you use (I'm getting all choked up...)

Michele thinks that's a lame reason. Lachlan will understand someday.

Proverbs 24:27

"Prepare your work outside; get everything ready for yourself in the field, and after that build your house."

Project Overiew

Sleepy Boy

Happy Boy!

Evening Bear

Lachlan and Grandma Karimi

Week Two Photos

Wha'chu lookin' at!

Wildflowers out at Harriet Hunt Lake

"Lachlan, that shirt's ok for now but if you be wearing that in public 18 years from now we will need to talk."

"So full...can't see straight...but(gasp)...must keep eating!"

Michele taking Lach snorkeling on the beach

"I think it's about lunch time."

Little bundle of joy

Ok, there is the joy

And there is the sleep

More Photos of Lachlan

Getting ready to leave the hospital

First nap at home in the bassinet

Scrunched up in the swing

Lach and Tank assuming the napping positions

Michele and Lachlan out for their first walk on Creek Street

First bath (no, we didn't get the belly button wet)

Close-up in the lamby towel

Lachlan and Rian perched over the Tongass Narrows

Momma and babe 'snoozled' up together

Tired boy