I thought I would take the opportunity to stumble in here this morning to wish a happy-belated-digital birthday to my wife Cami. Her birthday was Sunday and I wanted to declare my love and well wishes in front of the world! Happy Birthday, honey!

I won’t divulge her age because a gentleman never speaks for a lady. I also won’t give out her work e-mail address so everyone can send her birthday wishes because that’s just common sense.

HOWEVER, if you’d like to swing over to the forums, she has an account there and you can wish her well through her personal message box. I don’t know how often she goes into the forums to check those things, but maybe now that I’ve put out the call for response front and center, she’ll drop by and pick up her messages. Maybe if you’re REALLY nice, she might put together her first post for this area!

Shout-outs to a couple of new link-buddies.

Be sure to check out The Misc. I think the writing is really sharp. The art has attitude and you can tell these guys are having fun.

Also stop and visit Tribbel. Their site design is rock-solid and I was immediately attracted to it. The strip is also very cute and nicely put together. Props to the Tribbel crew for the introductory Flash movie that starts things off right. Makes me wish I came up with it first… or knew Flash.

Happy 200 strips Theater Hopper!

Happy Birthday Nick!

I am looking forward to a weekend of fun. My good friend and fellow blogger Nick is turning another year older on Saturday. I am helping him celebrate by honoring him with my presence. Birthday presence.

What? …presents? …yeah, right.

::runs to store::

Anyway, we are going to see Mike Doughty in MN and plan to generally have a kick ass time.

I can already taste the Grain Belt.

Mmmmmm…

This was a post I was supposed to write yesterday. But due to a hectic, stressful and overloaded schedule, it didn’t happen.

Yesterday was my son Henry’s birthday. And as I did the year before, I thought it would be nice to post a picture of the little guy so everyone can see how he’s doing.

Henry is doing very well having recently had tubes put in his ears for the second time and his adenoids removed to correct chronic ear infections he was having earlier in the winter.

Since Henry turned 2, we finally cut him off from pacifiers and we’re dealing with the ramifications of that right now. He really didn’t use them very often except when we put him down at night and he would use them to calm himself down. Now that they’re gone, he has to find other methods to relax. So he’s been shooting heroin into his eyeballs for about a week now.

I kid! I kid!

Every Saturday we take Henry to a music class where he learns rhythm, songs and dancing to a beat. It’s been paying off. He often sings “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and it’s tonal doppleganger, The ABC song.

He’s a bundle of energy, that’s for sure. HIGHLY verbal and bossing us around already. He’s deeply addicted to Mickey Mouse Club on the Disney Channel and listening to Daft Punk in the car. In fact, he demands them by name! Well, almost. “Robot rock, Daddy!”

My son is awesome.

Happy birthday, buddy.

The first post was running a little long, so I thought I would break thing up a little bit before talking about the fund raising campaign for Theater Hopper: Year Three.

You guys are kicking all kinds of ass with the pledges lately. Thank you so much! On Friday, we were 52% funded. Now we’re 62% funded! We making big gains, but we only have 17 days left to make goal.

Let me put this out there for you… Next week – Monday, December 21 – is my 32nd birthday. It would be a real treat if we could raise $324 by then. With that amount, we’d be up to $2,500 pledged and that would put us $1,000 away from goal with 10 days left in the campaign.

Extrapolate that… $1,000 with 10 days to go means that if we raised $100 a day after that, we’d be funded!

It’s all about the little things. Measurable goals, milestones. If we can take the next step now, we can take a few more steps after that!

Think about it! Let’s try to bump the campaign up to $2,500 in the next 7 days. We only need $324 to do it!

Thanks again to everyone who has pledged so far. I appreciate your support!

In what is quickly becoming a tradition around these parts, I wanted to take a moment to mention my son Henry. Yesterday was his birthday and he turned 3 years-old.

I don’t talk about my kids in the blog, but I like the idea of writing about them on their birthdays. I have this vision where someday my kids will Google me and read all of the dumb crap I’ve written over the years. But then they find these articles about their birthdays and think “Hmm. Maybe the old man wasn’t such a jerk after all.”

One can hope.

I’m amazed that Henry is already 3 years-old. It’s cliche, but the time slips by so fast. I imagine time will only slip away faster and faster after this.

Henry is doing well these days, but, as always, he’s a handful. He’s constantly running around, banging his shins and begging to watch one of his “shows.” These days, that either means Wow Wow Wubbzy or Chuggington.

Henry is doing very well since Pearl was added to the mix three months ago. It’s safe to say he loves his baby sister. He constantly wants to look at her, hold her and give her kisses. Sometimes we have to ask him to knock it off. Henry’s sense of personal space hasn’t really formed yet. So he thinks nothing of running up to Pearl and patting her on the head while she’s sleeping. Such is life.

The big news in our house with Henry these days is potty training. At this point, he pretty much understands the mechanics of it. He can go to the potty, drop trou, do his business, button up and wash his hands by himself. The only trick is getting his legs to listen to his brain when it tells him “Bladder full!” or “Time to poop!” Henry is often fully engaged in whatever it is that he’s doing. So asking him to stop and take a break almost always results in a tantrum.

For his big day, Cami and decided to take Henry to Chuck E. Cheese and we couldn’t have been more thrilled with his behavior. It was fun to watch him wander around and take in all the sites. He was fascinated by every game, but had no idea how any of them worked. When we asked him if he wanted to play, he’d say “No!” in a sad tone that inferred “I don’t want to miss looking around at other things.” It wasn’t until about hour 3 that he kind of settled in and started playing on all the games and rides.

Late in the evening, exhausted after playing all night, Henry looked up at me and said sweetly, “Dad? Thank you for taking me to Chwuckee Cheeze.”

You could have knocked me over with a feather.

Happy birthday, Henry. I love you, buddy.