America's Favorite Pasttime

Growing up my life revolved around baseball. I was pretty good, and loved to play. In Junior High School my love of the sport wained when I started playing with people better than me and I found myself sitting on the bench more and more. So rather than working to improve myself, I quit. It still bugs me that I quit. I am not saying that I was 'pro' material, but I got a lot of joy out of playing baseball. I still do, but at a much slower pace--softball. It is also fun that my wife loves to play softball as well, and would have been pretty well recruited had she not made it clear to her High School coach that she was going to BYU. Some would say (myself included) that she has a better throw than me, particularly her accuracy. It has been fun getting out in the yard throwing with her.

Well now it is my kid's turns to play America's favorite past time, and for the past couple weeks we have been going out and playing catch with them. We are also sleeping with the foot of our mattress slightly elevated as we break in a couple newer gloves.:

Ky's 10

Happy Birthday to Ky. Today Ky turns 10...how time flies. It seems like only yesterday that the Doctor, much to his astonishment and ours, announced that we were having our first child 1 month early. I can still remember the look of shock and astonishment on Dr. Glenn's face. Priceless. Jen's and my expressions would have been just as classic to see.

Since 5:00 pm of that day Ky has been a constant joy and pleasure to parent. His is an avid reader and will quite regularly get caught up in his reading at night and not turn out his lights at the agreed upon time. He is slowly coming into his coordination, and is getting good at the guitar. Ky is a good student, and I don't believe he has gotten lower than an A- yet on his report cards (though he has come close).

As per tradition Ky woke up to a treasure hunt, which each year gets more difficult. The hint that I came up with was

Ether 12:27, last seven words.

It took him quite some time to find his presents. HEHEHEHEHEHEHEHE.

CFL Update

As I mentioned here I replaced a good portion of the lights that the kids leave on with CFL bulbs. This was primarily done out of frustration with the ever north moving cost of electricity costs in my house. This is the first month with all of my CFL bulbs in place. So what did I get for the deal?

In comparison with last year's billing cycle I used 600kWh less this billing cycle than last year. I don't attribute all this to the discontinuation of incandescent bulbs in my house as in April of last year I also decommissioned an older server that was consuming a lot of power while serving out a relatively low visited website (pics.berrett.org. But still each of the past 3 months since having the CFL's in place I have continued to reduce power consumption in the home month over month.

This summer will be interesting in comparison with last summer.

Taylor's Baptism

Well with Taylor's 8th birthday comes his ability to be baptized, and today is the day.

Taylor has been waiting for this day for quite sometime and to watch him today was quite amusing. He was bouncing off the walls with excitement. "I can't wait to be baptized," he said all the way up to the time we left for the church.

Grandpa and Uncle Brent gave the talks on baptism and the gift of the Holy Ghost respectively. Both were good and well done. Since our Stake does baptismal services only for the ward, Taylor was the only one to be baptized in our meeting, which made it all the more fun.

As we walked to the font, you could tell Taylor was excited and seemed to have a bigger bounce in his step than other days. If I would have let him I am sure that he would have ran down the hall to the baptismal font. After his baptism and confirmation he was really happy and appeared to have a perma-grin on his face.