finite speck

My youngest son is at the cutest age right now and also the toughest. He's super opinionated and wants things to happen right away. This looks like repeating himself over and over and over again until he gets a response from an adult. We've got to work with him on that! He's got some fun words he says right now and his vocabulary is growing every day with two older siblings. My favorite right now is pretzel which he struggles with his rs and it sounds like pletzel. Another cute thing he said, when my daughter was at a birthday party last night was, "I really hope she's having fun there!" We'll take it. He's thinking of others.

Since purchasing a vacation rental home in 2020 in Gulf Shores we've had at least one crazy week every year since. In 2020 it was getting that first rental ready to rent in a week. In 2021 it was doing some repairs on that place and then finding another place at the end of that week, purchasing it, and coming back for another 2 weeks to flip that place and get it ready to rent. And this year it was selling the first place we purchased and buying 5 empty lots that we plan to build another 5 vacation homes on over the next 4 years. What will next year bring? Hopefully, this is it for a few years, I think we're going to stay plenty busy now with what we have planned!

On Christmas this year for the first time it was just our little family together all day because some of our extended family has been sick. So, my wife and I planned a bunch of things to do with our kids. We took them hiking, we made snow, we had a tea party, had a coffee cake with candles in it for Jesus' birthday, and to top it off at the end of the day after we put the kids to bed we woke them up a couple minutes later to get on the Polar Express. I dressed up in a conductor outfit quickly, we played some Polar Express music, and I woke up the kids. I was so loud saying, "Hurry... we've got to get on the Polar Express." that I scared my kids. My oldest son thought that the real Polar Express was outside of our house. Well, we got them up, gave them their ticket, and got them in our minivan decked out with the Christmas lights inside of it and snacks. And we took them around our town to look at the Christmas lights. It was a highlight of the day. My youngest can...

Do you sell or do you hold on? Do you keep going or do you stop? Sometimes it's all clear and you're moving forward, but sometimes things all of a sudden become a little blurry and you're not sure if you continue on or if need to change course a bit. More and more I realize there's a lot I don't know and I'm thankful for others who are smarter than me and have had different experiences than me. Like my brothers-in-law that I at times can bounce ideas off of. I'm also thankful for prayer that though I don't know the next move my God does and He is the one who directs our steps whether we realize it or not. He can make things clearer to us if we ask.

Right now I'm in the middle of giving 10 presentations over 2 weeks to a bunch of business owners. Until I just wrote that out I don't know that I've really internalized that idea. I would have never thought 20 years ago that I'd be giving talks to owners of businesses that are doing millions of dollars in sales. But as I think about it whether it's the actual presentation or just going through the week you just have to keep going. I'm learning more and more as I gain more experiences that you can learn so much by taking on new opportunities and stretching yourself. By setting goals and going after them. The worst thing I can do is just sit and wait for someone or something else to move me along.  There's a lot to be said for just trying things to see what works. Learning from mistakes you make. Experience really is the best teacher. 

If I could commend one thing to parents of young kids like I have right now I think it would be to have a memorization plan. Have something to daily work on with your kids on memorizing. A catechism, scripture, family values,... something of value. They can easily memorize it. Especially if it's set to music and it will stick with them for their whole life. I remember songs that my parents played for me as a kid. Our family has been working through a catechism a week from New City Catechism . It's nothing special as far as how we do it. We just sing the songs together as a family before bed every night. But our kids are memorizing important truths about God every week in a question-and-answer format. If you have young kids their minds are sponges that soak up anything that they see, hear, and experience in a day. As their parents, we have the opportunity to majorly influence what those things are.

My slog lately has felt more like a sloth's slog. I see it in my desire to even write on my blog. I just don't have a ton of motivation lately. I have a lot of ideas in my head and I enjoy learning about opportunities that are out there, but I don't know where to focus on and what all it would take. One of the last things I wrote about on here is revamping our website for our vacation rental properties and I still need to get that done here over this next month. I haven't touched it in months. It's easier to get distracted by other possibilities for additional income than focusing on what we have right now. On a totally different note, our family spent a couple hours working together raking leaves for some older people who can't rake leaves anymore. Our kids loved it and it was great to do something like that as a family serving others. We were thankful for that opportunity. I was also able to do some little house projects yesterday which always makes me feel go...

We had a pin-sized hole in the floor of our shower. We were getting some water in our basement when we took a shower. So we had a choice... temporarily fix the problem or start over. We chose to do a total rehab of our bathroom. That meant that this past weekend I demoed the bathroom. I don't know how I get myself into these hard work projects, but this was up there with digging a huge hole in the backyard to fix our water issue in the basement. By the way, water is the worst enemy of a house! I spent about 2 days in our bathroom busting out the tile on the ceiling, three walls, the floor, and then concrete that was under the tile on the floor. I've got a couple hours left of work and I believe we will be ready for the skilled labor to come in and redo our bathroom. One huge thing I learned is having a hammer drill is a must. There is no way I could have done it without one. And a huge thank you to a friend that let me borrow his hammer drill. I owe him big time!

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.

Do ever think if I just do this thing every day for a certain amount of time the result would be something? I have. In fact, I know I've written past posts about it. I've said this about exercising. I've also said it about writing. The truth is it's hard to show up every day to work on a task that doesn't have a result that's noticeable right away, but those are the ones worth working on every day. The easier thing to do is work on a task that has a noticeable result right away. Like mowing the yard or cooking a meal or scrolling social media or watching a show. I was just thinking about this blog that I've been more lax in writing on over the last few months. If I wrote every day (which I used to do for the last couple of years) for the rest of this year I will almost be at 1,000 posts! That's a big milestone. But it's a daily slog. It's a daily deciding ok I'll write some thoughts down this morning.

My kids are at the age where I wish I would write down all the things that happen because it's funny. That's why I'm thankful I try to write something here most days still. Yesterday I had my older two kids help me clean our van and they did an awesome job. In fact, they worked so hard that I told my wife we needed to reward them. So we went and let them pick out popsicles at the grocery store last night. They couldn't believe how many options there were and it took them a while to figure out for sure what they wanted. My daughter kept saying, "I can't believe how many options there are." When you think about it, it is crazy that there were probably 4 or more freezers full of different kinds of popsicle and ice cream box treats! That's a lot for a couple little kids to look at and decide on.

Yesterday I got a call from a co-worker. At first, I thought she probably just needed help with a dealer that had a request since she was off yesterday. But quickly found out that she had run out of gas and needed a ride back to her car. So what do you do when someone needs help? Drop everything and go! It was only a few minutes from our place (which is why she called me), but I grabbed our kids, hopped in the car, picked her up with her gas can and we got her back to her car.  It was great to be able to help someone out in a small way like that yesterday. I kept thinking what if I was in that situation? I know I would appreciate any help I could get.  Help someone out today. Be ready to go.