Our New Toy

Well a few months ago a co-worker in a different dept. went home to Europe for Christmas and ended up with a new job, not returning to the U.S. (His research grant expired in May, so he had to look for a new job anyway), he recently came back to the U.S. for the long weekend to pack up, get rid/sell his belongings and take what he could back to Europe with him. One thing we always discussed besides soccer was video games, and so he said he had a PS3 he was planning on getting rid whenever he came to pack his stuff up, so naturally, being the geeky-techy gamer I am, i showed interest. I brought it up with Sheila and she told me to sell some stuff on eBay and we might be able to buy it from him... scraped up a bunch of old items i no longer used and made some quick money... One day, I see my office door slightly open and a PS3 box starts sliding through the door... i started laughing, we caught up a bit... and found out he just wanted $100 for it, since he had purchased it for his son who decided he wanted to keep the Xbox360 they had purchased as well, He was looking to just get rid of the console. The PS3 doubles as a Blu-Ray player, so at $100 that is way cheaper than any Blu-Ray player on the market so i gladly relieved him of his PS3 and now its our new toy/Blu-Ray player.. Fun times....

Memorial Day "Camping" weekend.

Well we decided to go camping on Memorial Day weekend, our friend Rachel was born on May 25th and she is a big outdoorsy type person but by the time we got our act together and went to reserve a camp site, they were all booked... the only thing left was a cabin, in POOR condition. Literally said that on the website when we went to book the camp site. Here is Tina and her husband Joe and birthday girl Rachel, who happened to have a cold and fever that weekend. Nice way to spend your birthday, but it was a nice time. Despite still being a little cold and most of the entertainment being closed since the state park had just opened that weekend, no canoes, kayaks, innertubes or row boats available. I can't seem to find the majority of the pictures(which there weren't too many) but once I do, i'll add a bunch to the bottom..

Easter Egg Hunt

Well going back to a childhood tradition for most of us, we decided to have an Easter Egg hunt with a few of our friends. So on our wednesday night "LOST NIGHT" where Josh Dyke, Rachel DeMaggio and us get together, eat dinner and watch ABC's LOST. So before we ate dinner and watched LOST, Sheila went outside our apartment and hid 44 easter eggs(of which we only found 42, so some lucky squirrel is gonna have some chocolate and peanut butter candy for the spring. So here are some of our pictures...

Here is Josh who incurred a 10 second penalty for going outside while Sheila was hiding the eggs...

Riding in Style...

One of our weekends we decided to get away, and head up to Sheila's home in Livonia,NY(up by Rochester). Sheila was part of one of her friend Sara's bridal Shower, and David got some time with the four wheelers and the backhoe. It was a fun weekend overall, playing games with the family, riding around on the wheelers and workin' in the field, pulling scrap metal, junk and cleaning out the property... We cleared a pathway at one end of the field, where we were cleaning all the scrap metal and made a tiny, tiny jump... maybe in the future Mr. McCaffrey will create a big jump that we can use. So above is the video of me riding through the path... One of the our favorite video games on the Nintendo Wii is Raving Rabbids, has a bunch of different mini games but our favorite is the dancing mini-game so here is Ashley, Andy and Sheila playing the game in the basement, late at night after everyone went to bed. That was fun short weekend upstate with the McCaffrey's.( it doesn't seem to work, so check back later this week and I'll have it fixed.)

Extreme Porch Makeover Edition

We use to have a small empty porch, that we were hardly ever able to enjoy last summer when we first moved in, so this weekend we kicked it into high gear and decided to make it a little more inviting. This is our porch before... Then we decided to take a trip to one of our favorite stores... IKEA! and along with the visit comes new furniture and a start at decorations for our new "mood" porch. Unfortunately due to our condo regulations, no gas or charcoal grills of any kind...Only electric... yuck!

So piece by piece we started putting the furniture set together... Came together pretty quickly, a couple few issues with those pesky IKEA screws but all in all we are happy.... So now feel free to look down and view our new porch... a little crammed...but we like being close to our friends!

This is our night set up... a little more space, a little more conversation room.

Lucky The Wonder Dog

Well with Little Sophie growing up and getting all the attention, I thought I would share the love of my other little spiegel... Lucky, the jack russell terrier. It's hard to keep her still...

Normally when we've been in Florida i've been taking Lucky out for walks every day, or just about depending on our schedule... and she likes running too... so much i had to take the bike out one day since I couldn't even keep up with her...

This is lucky's favorite toy, other than her bones. She will bite onto this rope and not let go... she has a strong bite, most of the time you can even pick her up along with the rope... then she will run off with the rope and protect it at all costs... or at least until she is bored again and she brings the rope back to you to play..

And that's Lucky, Justin and Crystal's Wonder Dog...

Florida Vacation Part 2: Ben's Wedding

Ben's wedding took place on Thursday March 26th at 4pm at the First Christian Church of Kissimmee. It was a beautiful ceremony, with Sheila and I as the Matron of Honor and Best Man. Ethan was the ring bearer and did an excellent job walking down the isle with ring pillow. After a beautiful ceremony and some family pictures we headed to the reception hall in st.cloud, FL. It was a beautiful ballroom looking out over a marina and rather large lake. The happy couple went out and took a bunch of pictures by the lake with the florida sunset in the background. Meanwhile Ethan, Sheila and I... and the rest of the families... partied it up in the reception hall to some groovy tunes.

We also decorated the awesome Cadillac STS, Ben rented as their getaway car. We stitched some extra large undies and stuffed them with some pillow stuffing and strapped them to the back of the car... wrote some stuff on the car windows and filled it up with yellow and blue balloons(their colors). All in all it was a beautiful wedding on a perfect sunny day. Unfortunately sheila and I forgot to charge the battery to our camera.... but don't worry, i stole some pictures from Dad and Uncle Steve before we left....so here are some of them. Click on the picture below to be taken to a few of the pictures i uploaded.

I promise once I receive the pictures from the photographer I will post a few family ones that everyone can download for those of you who had requested a family picture.

Part 1 of our Florida Vacation

Thanks to our friends Billy and Muffin we were able to switch our flight and come down a weekend before to spend some time with them and our niece Sophia, who is a lot more alert and smiley than when we first saw... the first two days of her life... We've spent a couple days with Sophie now and are enjoying every minute of it.

We decided one night to give Justin and Crystal a break and were able to experience parent hood first hand... and we quickly decided we were not ready... we'd rather spoil our niece(Sophie) and nephew(Ethan). We stayed up till about 1am feeding her and rocking her till she fell asleep, then about 3 hours later in the middle of the night, Sheila heard Sophie crying through the monitor and told me to go check on her.... so I said yes... but never got up...(I'm too used to the snooze alarm).. 10 minutes later, sheila said "David, get up! go change Sophia's diaper". So in the middle of the night, without my glasses on or contacts in I changed my first diaper... couldn't really tell what i was doing... but it seemed to work out, and I didn't even put the diaper on backwards. Sheila prepared a bottle and fed her and rocked her to sleep again... then we both crashed the rest of the night and Crystal was kind enough to do the early morning shift(my guess, because neither one of us was waking to Sophie's crying.) This is when we usually like holding sophie, she's just in her own tiny bubble...

The next day we went to the mall to do some shopping and brought little sophie along, she really seems to enjoy car rides, especially if she has a clean diaper and full tummy... I got to sit in the back seat with her and snap some pretty funny pictures of her... she is a cutie!

This is Sophie after our shopping spree, already modeling her new hat!

My favorite relative is...

On Sophie's 2 month birthday, (which we all know is when babies come to their senses, they become more alert and start seeing and even thinking clearer, sometimes even given the rare ability to write and make very smart statements) Little adorable Sophie has made a major announcement! I'm sure by looking at the picture you can see she has declared that her Uncle David is her favorite relative. This comes as no surprise to anyone, except to maybe her Aunt Sheila who was shocked and a little perturbed by the bold, yet true declaration. Since this news, Aunt Sheila has been fighting to take over the "favorite relative" title by going on a shopping spree for little Sophie Lola... cute tops, and pants won't buy out little Sophie's pure heart! (besides I've made a few purchases just incase she plans on changing her mind.)

Now I know she is still young and succeptible to temptations and bribes from other relatives(Sheila, Andy, Ash...and of course grandpa and grandma.) but let it be known that I, David, was declared first on Sophie's favorite relative list and therefor will always be at the top of the list.

The Daily Sophie Music Video

> Sometimes its hard to get motivated to do work, especially on a friday afternoon with only an hour until clockout... but its very easy on Mac's to find ways to entertain yourself, so I decided to create our niece Sophie's first music video... We heard this song on new years eve this year while in Tampa, never heard of the band and we(spiegels & grames') all thought it was such a weird song but it was stuck in our heads the entire vacation...thus has become Sophie's theme song....so with the daily Sophie pictures we've been receiving from her mommy and daddy I put together a music video to sophie, sophie-lola...sophie-lolooloooolalo? ..... to Sophia.