Kevin & Johna .com

One of the things I love about the new WordPress tool (which is the software that runs the blog on this site) are the new built-in tags. Tags are all the rage with IT people these days because they’re designed to help you categorize information with short words or phrases that help describe the content you’re looking at.

For example, if I were to tag the photo below, I’d enter the follow words into the “tag” field: rob, jim, ladder, christmas, funny, accident waiting to happen

Yeah, I know. Don’t ask. — We have a standing joke in our family that whenever a ladder comes out, someone’s going to get hurt. Moving on.

In the WordPress blog software, you can display a tag cloud for visitors to see. The tag cloud shows all the tags that are used to describe your blog posts and assigns each word or phrase a relative font size. The idea is that in an instant someone can get a sense of which tags are used most frequently.

I went back to all posts I entered this year and updated them to have tags. I expected them to by “Kyler” intensive, and they were, but the mix wasn’t quite as unbalanced as I thought. See for yourself:

Looks like Johna needs to blog more and get into more photos! Also, I’m surprised “Disney” isn’t as big as “Kyler” in the tag cloud. I’ll have to work on that, too.

Here’s some of the latest photos of Kyler. As you can see, he’s really enjoying feeding himself, despite how dirty he usually gets.

All of this eating must be tiring. Johna looked on the baby monitor during Kyler’s afternoon nap and saw him sitting up in his crib playing. A few moments later, she went in to check on him and he was clearly so tired he didn’t even take a moment to lay down! That’s how pooped he was.

I’m a firm believer that the quality of your time off is measured by your ability to effectively keep yourself away from everything that’s going on back home. I’m a firm believer that your effectiveness in doing THAT is found in the amount of time you spend “catching up” when you get back home or back to work. (And if that doens’t make sense - you don’t have enough to do at your own office.)

Moving on…

Here are some more pictures from our recent trip to Dallas. I would have gotten these out sooner, but [insert excuse from the first paragraph here].

We simply don’t get to my parents house enough. The flight there is easy enough (just over 2 hours) but finding time off work to make the journey (and timing THAT with good air fares) is always tricky. We hadn’t visited them for nearly 6 months - which is WAY too long when you have your first child. So, before we left, we already picked out when we’d come back again so another 6 months didn’t go by.

I thought I’d share a few pictures from the trip (more to come).

We had a busy weekend! Here’s a sort of photo-journal of the whole thing:

It all started with running a bunch of errands. Kyler liked this part because he got to talk to some baby that kept following him around in store mirrors all over the place.

From there, we made a quick stop at my office to pick up a few things I left there by mistake on Friday night. Kyler wanted to check it all out.

Kyler then heard me say that I needed to finish wrapping up a shipment that was going to his Grandma and Grandpa Hansen’s house. He heard that and wanted to get down there too.

It was a busy couple of days. As we finished errands, Kyler decided to shut the shade on his stroller, kick back and unwind.

A friend of ours setup a photo shoot with a bunch of families that had babies that were all about the same age. It was a GREAT idea and you can see selected photos by visiting the photographer’s website or checking out the page for the baby photo shoot.

The shoot was at Como park, which meant we would take highway 394 to get there - except it was shut down that weekend. We took the detour that was set up.

Kids at home: never take the detour. It can only end up taking way more time than you think it will.

Anyway… 45 minutes late, we ended up at the shoot, which was just enough time to sneak in some great shots.

As a family that has a slight obsession with Dsney, the following clip should really come as no surprise to anyone.

Since he was born in September … and in Minnesota … Kyler has spent very little time outside in the sun. When we went to Florida this past January, we quickly saw that he wasn’t crazy about being out in the sun. On our first couple of days there, we bought him a hat to keep his eyes in the shade, which he found mildly acceptable.

Now that Summer is around the corner, we thought we’d try to find some sunglasses. We were curious to see if he would be OK with them or would just want them off his face. As you can see, he thought they were pretty cool.