Here’s a couple pictures of the star projector I made that looks like a death star.

The Story: Sometime in December, we were snowed in, Gina and the new baby were taking a nap, Isaac and I were bored, so I decided to set up our tent in our living room. That was a ridiculous amount of fun all by itself, but when I was done I started thinking of ways to make indoor camping more fun . . . fire? Maybe not. Stars . . . doable. That night I poked some holes through a sheet of black construction paper and that was good enough, but I couldn’t quit there, so I build the awesome star projector. It took me two months (because I have a family and a full-time job) but it works great so it was totally worth it. Now I can find 5 constellations, and I know why Sirius Black (from Harry Potter) turned into a big dog.

Check out this fun freeware: www.stellarium.org/

It will show you an image of the sky (day or night) where you are at. You can turn on or off lines and pictures that help you find the constellations, and you can zoom in on anything, such as the surface Pluto’s moon.

I’m not very good at sending “Thank You” cards to people when they give us presents, so I thought I would let Lillian say thanks for her birthday (literally. her actual day-of-birth) presents. . . and Isaac had a lot of fun helping Lillian open her presents.

Isaac and I had our first conversation this morning at breakfast. Here’s how it went:

Isaac: “More cereal, please.”

Doug: “Okay”

Isaac: “Thank you. Daddy cereal?” (He offered me some).

Doug: “Thank you.”

Isaac: “Welcome. Ummm”

I think he realized we had just done something special but he didn’t quite understand what it was, so he kept offering me more cereal to try and recapture the moment. It was great.

Have you ever logged on to Windows, and then spent the next ten minutes closing all the notification balloons?

Here’s how to turn those off.

WARNING: You are going to edit your registry key, so . . . be careful. Follow these directions exactly and you’ll be fine.

1. Click on the Start button in the lower left corner of your screen

2. Click Run, type regedit, and then press ENTER.

3. Navigate through the following folders:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\
Software\
Microsoft\
Windows\
CurrentVersion\
Explorer\
Advanced

4. Right-click the right pane, create a new DWORD value, and then name it EnableBalloonTips.

5. Double-click this new entry, and then give it a hexadecimal value of 0.

6. Quit Registry Editor. Log off Windows, and then log back on.

I stopped by Radio Shack this morning and picked up the last parts I need to finish my star projector. I painted it a couple of days ago and it looks kind of like the Death Star . . . so that’s pretty sweet. I’ll post pics and a write-up of the project when I get it all done. I’m super excited. I put my maglight in the projector to get an idea of what the final star-projections outcome would be, and it looked pretty sweet. Isaac liked it too. He kept running around the room trying to touch all the stars he could reach.

If you have any interest at all in looking at stars, check out this freeware at www.stellarium.org

It has about a million fun features such as, it allows you to change your view to match your location on the earth, you can zoom in on various objects like the surface of the moon of Pluto, etc. It’s a lot of fun.

Our Parents As Teachers did his 18month “test” and she asked “Does he know 8 words yet.” So I decided to count the number of words he 1) used without being prompted and 2) used correctly

all-done
all-gone
alligator
Apple
arm
baby
back pack
ball
balloon
banana
bath
bathroom
bear
becky
bed
bee
belly
belly-button
big
bike
bird
blanket
blocks
bob (as in bob the tomato)
book
bottle
brush
bubble
bucket
bug
bulldozer
bunny
candle
car
cat
cd
cereal
chair
cheese
christie
circle
coat
Coffee
cold
color
come on
cow
cracker
crayon
cup
daddy
dark
diaper change
dig
dog
door
down
duck
ears
elephant
eyes
finger
fish
flashlight
foot
fork
frog
go
grandma (grandpa)
hand
hat
head
heater
help
hillary
hot
hungry
hurt
isaac
jesus
jimmy
jr (from veggie tales)
juice
keys
kick
larry
leg
lillian
lion
little
mary
mcqueen (from Cars)
milk
mommy
monkey
moon
more
mouth
nail (as in finger nail)
nap
nemo
no
nose
okay
outside
owl
pen
pencil
phone
picture
pillow
pizza
please
potty
rock
sad
sheep
shirt
shoes
shovel
sister
sleeping
slide
snake
socks
sorry
spider
Spoon
star
straw
strawberry
stroller
sun
swing
table
teeth
thank you
throw
tickle
toes
towel
toy
train
tree
truck
turtle
tv
Uh-oh!
up
watch
water
wee!
Yes
yogurt