Daddy Daycare

This has been a busy last couple days.  My beautiful wife is out of town for 5 days, 5 loooong days...  I am into day 2.  So that means I am in charge of the Karlovich house hold and our 4 year old triplets.  I think all husbands who have at least 3 kids should try this at least once in their child rearing days.  Especially in those early days around the toddler years when the kids are especially needy and take lots of supervision.  I am learning the true meaning of multi-tasking.  Currently as I blog the kids are sitting behind me playing with Play-Doh while the TV with Tom & Jerry cartoons is going in the background.  If your going to be stuck watching cartoons with your triplets you can't beat these classics.  I picked up a DVD of T&J this morning while grocery shopping at my local wholesale club. 

So the long lists of tasks I have enjoyed the last 3 days are as following:
packing lunch boxes, washing endless ammounts of clothes, making breakfast and dinner meals, giving the kids baths, grocery shopping, brushing triplets teeth, feeding the dogs, forgetting to pick up the dogs food off the floor, ironing, cleaning the house, shuttling the triplets to and from school,  administering medications for colds, and having to somehow keep the natives entertained so they don't conspire a mutiny against me.

It is similar to running a Naval vessel with a crew of 1 (me of course being the crew who jobs have included; maid servant, cook, butler, captain, and taxi driver) while having 3 guests on board who have to be waited on hand and foot.  I have no idea how my wife has done this in past while I traveled out of town.  On top of it she didn't get any breaks when she did it.  I of course have scheduled a couple baby sitters on two of the evening to help give me a sanity break.  Also my awesome father-in-law is coming to help me with the kids over the weekend until Dawn returns home Sunday.   So in reality I am sure any mother reading will not have any mercy on me.  But I do want to acknowledge the am mount of work I know my wife does on a daily basis running this ship and she deserves a medal of valor.

 

It's a Poopy Party!

It has been an exiting last week at the karlovich residence.  Logan, our last born triplet, finally started to poo poo in the potty - YAHOO!!!!!!  We are so so so proud of him!  F-I-N-A-L-Y!!!  Only took the boy 4 years and 3 months to go poopy on the big boy potty all by himself.  He has been doing the #1 in there for some time but had been crapping in the olé pants everyday for a while. 

We never thought he was going to grasp this concept.  Dawn and I were also nervous he was going to get booted from daycare / preschool one of these day for landing a stinker in his drawers.  He always managed to keep it in until he got home.  Then like clock work as soon as he hit the front door it was stinky ville in the olé underpants.  I know I know many of you will say, "well put him on the potty as soon as he gets home".  It don't work like that with this kid.  He is a stealth pooper.  You never see it coming.

The other two triplets grasped this toilet concept probably about a year ago for #1 and #2, but good old Logan wasn't quite ready to venture onto putting his touché on the tall cold toilet seat.  Yet all this changed last week when we picked him up from school one day.  The teacher said Logan had pulled the teacher into the bathroom that morning to show off his prized poopy he of he had left in the toilet.  I guess since Logon had never bragged about a #2 to her she figured this was a momentous occasion. He had flown under the radar all fall.

I don't want to count our chickens before they hatch.  Logan has had a couple #2 accidents since then, but almost everyday for the last week he has climbed the porcelain mountain and mounted the cushy Elmo toilet ring and taken care of biz.  And rest assured if he does we will know because he comes running down the hall wanting everyone to come see the handy work he left for all to see. Don't worry I flushed the potty before taking that picture even though Logan would have prefered you had seen his master piece.  He wanted to take out a Super Bowl add, and show off his super bowel.

I Tawt I Taw A Puddy Tat...

Recently my kids were out of school for two and a half weeks for the Christmas holiday. However there was one problem and only a Florida resident would understand.  It was what we southerns like to call freezing outside.  We had maybe one day that got above 55 degrees the entire two weeks. So as a result we raided the DVD stash on many afternoons to pass the time and not put on out winter jackets and brave the 40-50 degree weather.  Like I said, anyone reading this from the above the Mason-Dickson line will think I am crazy.


Well one of the nuggets in our DVD closet was a collection of Looney Toon cartoons I scored off eBay about a year ago.  These are the best when it comes to quality cartoon entertainment!  Especially when your on lock down with 3 - 4 year olds.  It was really cool to lay around and watch these with my bambino's.  These are the same cartoons I watched on Saturday mornings growing up 30 years ago.  What's even cooler is the fact that I enjoy them even more today than I did when I was a preschooler.  In addition the trips enjoyed watching them which adds to the fun when your laughing with your 4 year olds.  Liam likes to ask to watch the duck and Logan likes Tweety.  My favorites are the Road Runner ones.

I think my next eBay investment will be the entire Tom and Jerry archives. I have DVR'ed several of them for the kids the last couple years, T&J's are classics, Liam calls it Cat Funny. Might also have to do a some searching for the Little Rascals those were on the top of my fav's list also growing up.

Where's my Blackberry!!!!

So being the techy triplet dad implies two things... Number one I am the father of 4 year old triplets and number two I must be involved on technology in some fashion. I am a self proclaimed gadget guru, or at least I like to think I am and I love technology. Information technology fits my ADD personality perfectly. Its constantly changing so it holds my attention to a certain degree since most things bore me fairly quickly. Well one of the coup de grâce in technology IMHO is the ever changing smart phone. It’s like a laptop on your hip. You can surf the web, make a phone call, play a game, navigate your car, ect, ect, ect.... all from this device hanging off your belt. Well my next IMHO is the blackberry is the best when it comes to enterprise smart phone solutions, key word being "enterprise". This is provided your company has a blackberry server also known as BEZ server. If your just a fly by night techy wanna be and your company doesn't have a BEZ server or its just something for personal use then you’re probably just another iPhone candidate. To me web browsing on the iPhone via Safari can't be beat with that large iPhone screen. Having said all this, my wife (who isn't on any BEZ server) loves blackberry pearl I got her a couple years ago. Also she doesn’t use any of the email features on the phone, its strictly texting and phone calls for her. She was a previous palm Treo user and I believe she prefers her BB to the old Treo she had. Now she would probably go banana's if I got her a iPhone. But my point is you don’t have to be a corporate junkie to love the BB.

So before I digress, this post is really about this cool new app I ran across the other day in my BB app store. It’s called "Where's my Phone" by a company names Essare LLC. What’s so cool about this app is it helps you find your blackberry when you lose it. Any this has become a common occurrence at my residence on one too many mornings. With 6 little wandering hands, anything sitting on a counter or in arms reach is fair game to my kids. I wish I would have found app sooner it would have saved my kids from hearing a few mumbled curse words as I stomped around the house in search of my blackberry before leaving for work. Which also I might add was found wedged behind a door on vibrate, so calling the phone was useless in order to locate it. Also looking behind the door on the floor was also probably one of the last places I would ever look. Actually I think I gave up finding my phone and ended up finding it by accident.

Well this software solves all those problems. Using a set of preprogrammed codes, you can locate your phone through a variety of ways via email using the codes. “Where’s my phone” has about all the lost situations you can think of covered. In my situation above I described earlier, what I could have done had I had this app installed? I would have sent my blackberry a email, with a code in the subject of the email. Once my phone receives the email, it would start sending out a loud beeping alarm and also lock the phones home screen. Even if the phone was on vibrate, it would have over written this profile setting and made the phone beep. In addition it will send me back a email to let me know the phone is in alarm mode now and what battery amount is left. Another feature is the phone gets is locked, if anyone finds the phone they cannot use it. However they do have the option of calling me via a link on the phone. In addition I can send a code to my phone to call me at any number and then listen to where ever my phone is to help identify its lost location. There are other multiple tools installed like GPS and other options to help locate your lost blackberry. The GPS location from what I read is spotty, and I am still having issues getting it to work correctly on my bold. But still a cool feature none the less if you can get the GPS reporting working accurately. Just the fact that it locks the BB down for security, sends out a audible alarm (even in vibrate mode), and you can do the call back to locate feature makes it worth the 3 or 4 bucks in my humble opinion. I would have paid $5 that one morning just to find my BB and not be late for work. I am crippled without it. So this is my review on a cool find in the BB app store. Probably one of the coolest apps yet I have found yet.

The Italian Christmas Donkey

Christmas Lights...

Wow

Ed Hardy is so Thomas Kinkade

The year was 1999, my wife and I are walking through the Avenues mall in Jacksonville.  We walk by a storefront that had the look of an old cottage.  We noticed some cool looking paintings in the store window so being new homeowners and having a desire to decorate our walls, we decided to walk in and take a look.  Upon entering the store one of the sales associates nabs us and leads us over to  the main display wall.  The salesperson messes with an adjustable dimmer light shining down on what turns out to be an overpriced lithograph someone had painted various highlights.  It turns out it wasn't even Thomas Kinkade who had done the highlights but some desperate artist he supposedly commissioned to do it for him.  My wife and I were buying the sales presentation until they mentioned the price.  I don't remember how much it was but being as compulsive as my wife and I were 11 years ago with a pocket full of credit cards.  It had to be really expensive because we did a 180 and walked out of the store.  Over the next 3 years, Kinkade paintings took off like a California wildfire.  Every where you turned it was Thomas Kinkade crap:  key chains, candles, plates, screen savers, ect, ect, ect...  I am soooo glad Dawn and I didn't buy one of the lithographs that day.  I got so sick of seeing his cheesy paintings plastered over everything.  You couldn't step 3 feet into a Walgreens without catching an eye shot of some tacky trinket with a house and lamp scene plastered across it waiting for some sucker to purchase.

Having said all that, Ed Hardy...  It's getting old really quick.  It was neat about a year ago.  Now just glancing through any Sunday paper ad section your guaranteed to find 100 items with Ed Hardy plastered across them.  Even in some of the most obscure stores you will find something at least one item with a snake and tiger and the letter "Ed Hardy":  winter boots, laptops, perfume, hair dryers, and even Smart cars.  In addition they have the audacity to markup the merchandise as if it were unique.  At this point Mr Hardy is about as unique as Mr. Kinkade.  I think the official breaking point for me was about 6 months ago I went to the car wash and I purchased a Ed Hardy air freshener to hang from my rear view mirror.  I give this stuff another year and it's history and man will I be glad!