finite speck

Last summer was learning to ride a bike for our oldest two and this summer was learning to swim. Josie picked it up much quicker than Baer, but by the beginning of this week, Baer started swimming on his own too. Besides the difference in age, Josie 6 and Baer 4, I've noticed a difference in personality coming out in overcoming challenges. My daughter will just put her head down and go after it. My son needs a lot of positive affirmation from me and others that help him get over the hurdle. It's been fun though to see the daily effort of investing pay off eventually. But it does take time. We decided to not do swim lessons and instead to get a pool pass and I would just spend time with them almost every day in the pool. And by the end of the summer, we were swimming. We have one last challenge for Baer and that is going down the water slide. He has to do it by the day the pool closes and we're even giving him ice cream at Dairy Queen. So I've got to keep loading on the

This summer we have tried to get to the pool as much as possible. Josie has really made a lot of progress in swimming. She's made it down the water slide, can swim across the pool, and can go down and touch the bottom. She's planning to go off the diving board before the end of the summer. Baer has gained more confidence, but he's not quite swimming yet. He's just got a lot more fear of the water, but he's also 2 years younger than Josie. The goal is to swim on his own in the next two weeks and go down the water slide.  It's been fun to see the progress they've made over the summer. It's a reminder to me of the importance of practice which is where improvement comes from.

My youngest is growing up. This morning might have been his first sentence. Two words put together. "Carry me." He's really starting to try to talk. And then as I was getting ready to take the kids to my in-laws' I noticed that Mac can now reach the door handle of the minivan. It's going by fast. They're getting big.

"I've been listening to your podcast." "Huh?" I said. "What is my co-worker talking about?" I thought to myself. Then it clicked. He'd been reading my blog. I said, "My blog?" That was it. It was one of the few times that someone has said something to me about reading my blog. It's not something I'm always telling people about so I'm usually surprised when it comes up. And I've kind of gotten out of the habit over the last 4 months or so of writing regularly. He mentioned it takes guts to write regularly and share some of what's going on in your life. I don't feel like I always write super personal stuff, but I've tried to do it in order to get better at writing. It was a good encouragement to keep up the blog and continue the practice of writing daily.

If you build it they will come. I believe this could be true if I will buckle down and build a new website. It's just the effort of getting going on it. I've built a website before and the one we have right now is fine, but there are things about it that could be better and it doesn't show all of our offerings anymore. I also want an area on our website that allows for us to share articles that bring value which I don't have on our current website.  My experience in building a website as a side gig is that it takes doing a little at a time. First, you need to decide on the platform you'll use and order that. Then you need to figure out where you'll buy your domain name and do that. Then where you'll host it. Then you need to layout the website on paper. Then you start building it. And for me, these tasks have mini-tasks that I can do in an hour or less. Because I usually don't have much more time than that to work on it. Lately, I've had a hard time

How does giving a presentation make you feel? Getting up in front of a group of people and speaking would not be on my list of favorite things to do for sure, but yesterday I spent my afternoon presenting to our sales team 4 times along with the rest of our marketing team. By the end, I'd say I enjoyed it. I definitely practiced the content, so it was already familiar. And I feel like our full presentations went really well. What was the goal of giving our presentation? To really educate our sales team on aspects of marketing. I think we accomplished that. I know we feel like we'd love to have gained more insights from the overall sales organization about how we can help them get dealers to market themselves, but that wasn't the goal yesterday. Yet by educating the sales team on the marketing team, I think we armed them with some things to help their dealers.

Yesterday I took my youngest on a walk and saw one of our neighbors out that had just moved over the last month to our neighborhood. They have kids close to our kids' ages and I took the opportunity to introduce myself and ask them questions. Turns out they lived in Chicago for a while, so we had that in common along with having young kids. You just never know what you might find out if you just stop and ask. They don't know many people in the area and I offered our help if they need anything. This definitely put me a little out of my comfort zone. It's always easier for me to smile and keep walking, but I know it's better to take the opportunity to get to know others. I want to keep growing in this for myself and my family. 

We were in Georgia for the 4th of July weekend and as part of the celebration down there at the pool my brother-in-law belongs to they dumped minnows into the pool and gave all the kids nets to catch them. When I first heard that they were going to do it I thought no way. But our kids loved it. I think they caught around 3 to 6 each. Even our youngest who is 2 had a good time catching them in the baby pool. They know how to have a good time down in Georgia that's for sure. I think it was one of the most relaxed pools I've ever been to and people were really enjoying all of the activities they put together for the 4th.

Right now I have maybe an hour of time where I no responsibilities for a kid other than to be here if our youngest, Mac, wakes up. Other than that I'm on my own. What should I do? I started by cleaning off some space on my phone so I can take some photos while we're visiting my wife's family. Then I thought about editing some photos for a bit or writing some content for our vacation properties. There's always something to do. It would be nice to just nap though too. Or read a book for a little bit. This hour is going to fly by and I'm going to be like what did I do? Oh, I spent time writing this blog post about what I should do with the one hour that I have that's free right now. I think I'm going to crack open a book and read for a bit while it's quiet right now.