First day of school

Elliot has Jacob's 4th grade teacher, Mrs. Hopson.

Crawfish festival

Every year there's a big crawfish festival held at Vietnamese Martyr Catholic Church (aka Các Thánh Tử Đạo) but I've never gone in the years prior. Once I was old enough to make my own choices, I vowed to never come back.

I grew up going to that church but only have bad memories of that place. I dreaded every Saturday because that meant I'd be at Bible school. The school was so poorly ran. Classes were full of wannabe gangstas who showed no respect for the teachers or nuns. It was out of control. And the classes were taught in Vietnamese, which I barely understood. I was stuck in the second grade level for at least five years straight. It was miserable.

20 years

It's been 20 years since our first date. This is our first picture together, at a Christmas party in 2004. Here's to another twenty years and more. 💕

15 year anniversary

Our wedding party.

Today marks our 15 year anniversary. Let's look back at that day, 15 years ago when we got married (before this blog ever existed).

This week...10+ years ago

Since there's not much going on right now (pandemic yet to be over), I thought I'd reminisce. The Google Photos app has a feature called Memories that shows highlights from the same week, x years ago.

Below are pictures taken in June, starting in 2010 (before this blog started) and beyond.

Let's take a trip down memory lane.

Fitness journey and 2019 recap

Back in college (when I thought I knew everything), I was pretty sure of what exercise and fitness should look like. I would run an arbitrary number of laps around Gregory Gym. I would do bicep curls with one 10 pound dumbbell (because that's all I had). I would frequently do sessions of 8 minute abs because I wanted six pack abs. 😑

10 years!

It's been 10 years since Lynn and I had our first date. Ten years! The exact date I'm unsure of but it was on Wednesday night, the day before Thanksgiving in 2004. (I guess I could Google the date but I'm lazy.) And the first place we went out to eat was the high class establishment of TGI Fridays.

Pumpkin patch: past & present

Halloween is quickly approaching and so we made our annual visit to the pumpkin patch at St. Andrew's. The church has built such a reputation for their pumpkin patch that they call themselves the pumpkin church. Seriously, pumpkinchurch.com is where you can find them. We've done this every year since Jacob. It's our little family tradition. And being that this is a relatively new blog, I also posted pictures from years past, which definitely makes me say, "Oh snap!"

Halloween revisited

Halloween is only a couple of weeks away and we need to start working on our costumes. In the meantime, here are our costumes from previous years (since my old blog no longer exists). The first picture on the left was from 2005... before kids! I was so gansta back then. G-G-G-G-G-Unit!

Weekend of anniversaries

First the happy stuff. On September 10, 2011, Tyson turned one month old. Usually it's nothing monumental but knowing that this is most likely our last child (unless there's another accident), I wanted to do a little something for baby. Nothing big. I just made boxed brownies. Not like baby could eat it but it was more for everyone else. Well Tyson was getting some brownies indirectly via breast milk when Lynn consumed some. I wonder if he can tell. I wonder if the milk is sweeter. Wait, why am I so obsessed with breast milk?

"The call"

The call. The phone call the father-to-be receives from his pregnant wife (or girlfriend) telling him it's go time. The days leading up to the call can be quite nerve racking. Are you ready? Are you prepared to leave at a drop of a dime? This is my recollection of what happened when I received "the call" with the three kids.

I'm a loser baby, so why don't you get me a burger

Today was the end of the weight loss bet and unfortunately I was not the biggest loser. I was just a loser. Mike (Nez) won the bet with an impressive 24 lbs lost, 13.8% weight lost! The detailed results are posted in the weight loss page.

Getting the boot

My mom has finally forced me completely out of their house. (I can't say the same about my older brother but that's a whole topic by itself.) I haven't really lived with my parents since graduating high school but my stuff has always been there. Even when they moved into a new house a couple years ago, so did my stuff. Until recently all of my stuff have been in boxes, stored in a corner of an extra room. My mom would consistently nag me to take those boxes and/or trash them and I would agree but really had no intentions on doing so (I'm too lazy). But then my boxes were moved into the open living area and she threaten to throw everything away. Geez. I understand that she wants a clean house but to throw away all of my possessions? After ridding of all my "junk", I will no longer have any presence in that house, except for a few family pictures with the boys but that's only because I gave it to them to hang or display. If When Jacob and Andrew move out, I would think that I'd keep some of their material possessions in the house, as a reminder of them once living here, something tangible. Within the pile of stuff to be sorted, I found various gifts that I gave my mom as a kid, from plush animals to handmade crafts. Obliviously she never cared for them as it ended up in this pile to be trashed. Thanks mom. I know she cares for me but I feel so rejected. Now I know where I got my heartlessness from. To appease her I've been slowly cleaning/sorting/trashing a couple boxes every time I visit and came across some gems I couldn't bare to throw away.

I (used to) love drawing

As a kid, I used to draw all the time. My earliest memory of drawing was with my cousin David and we would always draw Spectreman. I remember the gold crayon was the most worn down since that's all we ever drew. If you never heard of Spectreman, it was very similar to Ultraman in which you have a giant super hero battling monsters on a cheaply-built miniature city set. Being filmed in the 80's, the show probably had ground-breaking stunts and effects but it looks really cheesy if you watch it today.