thespicelands.com

We’ve got lots of catching up to do! Let’s start.

Tru had a birthday party! We decided to start celebrating half-birthdays this year as a replacement for having a birthday party 4 days before Christmas every year. This year, we did Chuck E. Cheese. Those pictures are here.

We went to Destin, FL with Mike’s dad’s family. Those pictures are here.

There are a few school pictures in the TruAndHeidi2010 folder.

We bought a house. Pictures to come later, when we actually clean it.

Tru starts kindergarten in 3 days! We’ll have pictures of that, too, and maybe video. She also starts soccer tomorrow, so there will be lots of soccer pictures to come!

I (Erin) am working full time again. I’m a software developer at Digium writing automated tests for Asterisk. I love it! Heidi goes to Primrose School during the day, and she loves it there. She is learning a ton.

Thanks for being patient during this hectic time! I promise, more posts, pictures, and videos are coming soon.

Howdie stranger. Its been *forever* since we last posted. I (Michael) have decided to abandon Facebook and Twitter as much as I’m able. I’ll try posting more frequent updates here instead. Why, you may ask?!? Mainly I am concerned that I don’t own or have future access to the information that I post. I’d rather archive it myself to serve as a reference for the kids when they are older. I still have Facebook set up to suck in our updates so all of you can still get it that way as well.

This weekend all of us (except Heidi) ran in the Twilight 5k. Tru did the 1 mile run in about 12 minutes. I was so proud of her. Now that I know she has such stamina, she’ll have to run with Erin and me. Here is a video of the event:

And as an extra, here is a funny video of Heidi and her blanket:

(For both videos, click on the button at the lower right to change from standard 340 to 720p HD (higher quality).)

Have we become lazy? Are we being taken over by our kids? Probably. But that isn’t the only reason we’ve neglected our blog.

We’ve been using facebook for a while now. It allows us to automatically send updates to the people who have noted that they care to hear (by ‘friending’ us). On this blog, we ask people who care to ‘subscribe’. They can do this using the link on the left side or by putting the RSS feed into their news reader. Who does this? Noone! This is one of the reasons we tend to favor facebook. By the very nature of it, people subscribe to get your updates by friending you. The end result? .. no posts here.

Another unfortunate trend is ‘micro updates’. We normally don’t log into facebook and do posts within facebook. We use a Twitter. For the 73% of you who don’t know what that is, it is a sevice that lets you send small little messages to your fellow twitter’ers. Also, we have ours set to update our facebook pages with any twitter updates that we give. The end result? … little micro messages as updates instead of long detailed blog postings with pictures.

What should we do? Well, for now it looks like we are sticking with facebook. We’ll still try to update you all here but we get less of a response. Should you all join facebook? No! In fact, there is something kinda strange about the parental generation being on facebook. We need to be goofier there (yes, we can get even goofier than we do here). You all keep doing what your doing and we’ll try to do better about posting updates here.

Stay tuned for some pictures of Tru’s first soccer game. Erin, by the way, when is that coming about? Normally I don’t get to see the pictures unt