As usual, Megan made another awesome cake, despite the time crunch.  Xavier wanted a Buzz Lightyear cake, so she made a big planet with an awesome Buzz gum paste figure on top of it.

You can check out the pictures from the party are here.

Of course Megan outdid herself again this year, with what may be her best cake yet.  The main part of the cake was a big decaying log, with vines and flowers and all sorts of stuff growing on it to go along with the enchanted forest theme.  Then sitting beside the log is the little pixie she made by hand, and it’s all edible!

We decided to get the kids power wheels for their birthdays this year, and so Ali got a pink Barbie Jeep.  She’s got quite a ways to go before she really knows what she’s doing, but she loves taking her little Eva doll for rides in it, even if she doesn’t like to use the steering wheel .

Lots of pictures are up in the gallery, so check them out here.

All the old pictures and albums have been brought over, and to test out the new install I uploaded a great new album with some pictures from our trip to the zoo this weekend.  The kids are getting much more interested in all the animals and they are really getting into things now.  The Fort Worth Zoo also finally finished the new Museum of Living Art (MOLA) exhibit, which is this really nice indoor/outdoor mixture of all the snakes, lizards, frogs, alligators, fish, turtles, etc.  The kids had a blast going through it, but the day did start out pretty rough.  Xavier stood up in the wagon right as I started to pull it and ended up flipping out over the back of it and smashing his head pretty hard on the concrete.  He had a huge knot and we were a bit worried he might have had a concussion there for a while, he really did hit it hard.  But the knot went down by the end of the day and he finally started acting himself again after about an hour.

Check out the new album here, and let me know if it works any better (try out the slick new slide show stuff ).

Also, when I launch the new joshandmeg.net theme, I’m going to start on a matching Gallery theme as well, so the site will finally be all tied together under one look.

In other news, spring is here in Texas!  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not looking forward to the 100+ degree weather that summer will bring, but spring is actually really nice here.  It was in the 70s all weekend and beautiful.  We even colored Easter eggs outside since it was so nice.

There hasn’t been much activity on the site lately, but that’s because any free time I’ve had for web stuff has all been working on the re-design.  The WordPress part is nearly finished, I just need to finish the search results page and the archive pages.  I did get some time today to upload some photos though.  It’s a bunch of pictures of spring-time fun and the kids coloring Easter eggs.  Check it out here, and if the gallery doesn’t seem to be working please let me know what it’s doing.  I’ve been trying to track down why not everything loads for some people, but haven’t had any luck yet.  It will be kind of slow since it’s on my server now, but it shouldn’t be too bad.

Before the two-day snowstorm hit, we made a trip down to San Antonio for Jason’s graduation from his Air Force basic training.  We had a good time and got to see most of the Metz family for a couple days, even if the hotel room was a little cramped for Xavier and Ali (they did not like being in one little place for more than about 5 minutes…).  We explored down town San Antonio, saw the Alamo, went on a little riverboat tour, and went to the San Antonio Zoo.  If you’ve never seen it, the San Antonio River Walk is a really neat experience, with lots of restaurants and shops all right on the water and winding pathways throughout.  They don’t even have any railings up, so you are literally walking just right there next to the winding waterways.  We had to keep a really close eye on the kids, but there were a lot of ducks in the river that would walk right up to you, so the kids had a great time watching and chasing after them.

I did one big album with pictures from San Antonio and of all of us playing in the snow.  Check it out here.

This year marked my first full year as a working mamma with a full-time career to handle in addition to raising the kiddos. It’s been a challenge; balancing work and family life is hard, but I’m fortunate to have the two most amazing kiddos and sweetest hubby in the world to support me.

Josh’s job is going well for him to. I dare say he actually loves his job–which is great.  He’s been truly blessed to have landed a career that allows him to endeavor in all his nerdy exploits and get paid for it.

But, of course, our year revolved around those two amazing kiddos of ours. And of course, a big year for them equates to a big, proud year for Mom and Dad.

For starters, both kids are now potty-trained!!!!  That’s right, NO MORE DIAPERS. Ali, our over-achieving two-year old, was fully potty trained by the end of October, with little effort exerted on our parts.  She seemed sort of content to stay in her pull-ups, so one day Josh and I just decided we would do away with them, and she’s been dry ever since.

Both kids are learning SO FAST right now. Xavier recognizes his letter (X) everywhere. He’s started writing his name, recognizes the letters of Ali’s name, my “M,” and can spell “red,” “brown,” “blue,” and “green.”  He colors in the lines of his coloring books, draws most of his shapes perfectly, and is an animal expert.   He’s a budding techie, and is in every way, the duplicate of his father.  He loves cars, trucks, planes and trains, all things Wolverine (or super-hero) related, and building things with Play-Dough.  Xavey is also the single most vocally affectionate person ever.  Over the course of our break, Josh and I have heard “I love you” from him at least once during each of his waking hours, often more. Don’t be fooled by that though-he’s 100% boy, and loves to do all sorts of mischievous things to get him (and Ali) in trouble.

Ali is also learning fast, and super independent. Her approach to everything is, “I do it!”  Ali knows her “A,” and loves singing, dancing, and doing anything with crayons, glitter and glue (who’d a guessed?). She is in most ways, my mini, right down to her incessant desire to have someone play with her hair or rub her back while she’s falling asleep.  She’s truly coming into her own now, and unlike me, is already nurturing her loving side (or maybe just her bossy side, in which case, yes, she’s just like me) by constantly playing with her baby dolls. Ali is our little firecracker, a big ball of beautiful, joyous energy.

Xavey’s big goal for the year is to learn how to do a flip on the trampoline (yeah, the grey hairs are starting to sprout). Ali simply wants to be Picasso and paint some more.

My immediate, easily attainable goal is to get Josh to a concert. He’s roamed around for twenty-six(ish) years now, and still has NEVER been to a concert. We need to remedy this given my love for all things rock.

Long term, our goal is still to get outta Texas.  Northeast, midwest, Pacific northwest. I’m not picky. We just want to be somewhere where our kids can actually enjoy the outdoors. That’s hard to do here, when four to five months of the year temperatures are near or above 100 degrees.

We’ve got one final gallery for the year, with all of our holiday pictures right here.  Enjoy the pictures, and Happy New Year!

Great editorial on Nintendo.  Sums up why I don’t own a Wii.  Quite frustrating, good thing Mass Effect 2 comes out soon .

We also took a trip to the zoo while they were down since the weather was so nice (60′s or so that day).  I’m now convinced that going to the zoo during the summer is just a waste of time.  Every animal was so much more active since it wasn’t so hot, and the trip was a lot of fun.

Pictures from the weekend are up right here.

That made my day.

The kids had an absolute blast during trick or treating this year.  Ali went as a pixie, and Xavier was a dragon.  The past couple years they’ve had fun of course, but they pretty much had to ride in the wagon in between houses and we couldn’t go for very long before they got tired.  Well this year they got to walk almost the whole time, and did a great job saying “trick or treat” and “thank you.”  We still brought the wagon for the ride home, and it’s a good thing too because we were out for nearly two full hours.

It’s fun watching people react so much differently to cute little kids than to bratty, not-so-cute older kids that just run up and run off.  They begrudgingly give those kids one piece of candy.  Not so with the dragon-pixie duo, we literally had to make people stop giving them stuff.  This one old couple gave them each at least 10 pieces.  I think the old couple would have given them all their candy and just gone inside for the night if we would have let them.

Pictures from the night are up right here.  And also, if you missed the Oktoberfest album be sure to check it out here.

The pumpkings:

Since you’re still reading, I’m assuming you want all the nitty-gritty details.  All in all, it went remarkably well, much better than I expected.  WordPress just required a few variable changes in a config file to point to my new database and user on Cortana.  Gallery required pretty much the exact same thing settings wise, but migrating files is where Gallery really took forever.  We’ve amassed quite a photo collection, and moving roughly 5 GB from Site5 to Cortana took most of the night.

Other than the file downloading, nothing else really took much time at all.  In fact, if it didn’t take a day or so for DNS changes to propagate to all the master servers, I think I only would have been off-line for about an hour.  Pretty good for my first big migration .  Did any of you even hit my ‘joshandmeg.net is currently offline’ page?

If you’ve got some time, click around and make sure everything still works, I’m sure I probably missed something.  One thing I did leave out purposely is the photo blog.  It hasn’t seen much activity recently, and with the upgrade to Gallery 3 I’m thinking I’ll probably just retire it.  Everything else should be fully functional though.  Let me know if you see anything broken and how the speed is in comparison to before.

Now, on to the second phase of the joshandmeg.net 3.0 project, Graphic Design (that’s you Meg ).

The new design is going to be a pretty drastic change from the way the site has looked and felt for the past five years (I know I can’t believe I’ve been keeping a web site going for five years either).  Ever since I first launched joshandmeg.net, it’s been a black and orange theme with the fairly typical web site layout of some sort of header, a sidebar, and a main content area.  The biggest change coming is a switch from the dark background, white text color scheme to a white background, dark text color choice.  Two sites I’ve recently done in this manner are badhippodesign.com and joshkephart.net, and both of those are a good preview of what the new design will look like.  I’m also hoping to layout the site in a simplistic style, with very little clutter and a focus on the posts and of course the photos on the site.  We’ll see how that goes .

Along with the visual refresh that we have planned, there are also some other improvements in store:

• an upgrade from Gallery 2 to the brand new Gallery 3
• the ability to comment on photos in the gallery
• threaded comments on blog posts
• the long awaited addition of video clips of the kids

and behind the scenes there will be a migration from the Site5 servers to my very own server up and running in my utility room .

I tend to never be able to stay on top of anything I start unless I have some sort of organized schedule and plan in place, so I whipped up a little project and a flexible schedule.  You can check it out here and follow up on the progress if you’d like.

Stay tuned.