Blink and you miss it.

Obsession. I will be the first to admit that I have severe obsessive tendencies if left unchecked. I like to call it focused attention, but Stefanie flat out laughs at that. I am lucky that Asher has the same problem because it diverts some of her ire from me. Combine our all-consuming house with my obsessive nature, Stefanie's current state of nesting as she expects the baby, and my fear that the baby will come too soon, and I am focused like a laser beam.

I took a break from home improvement and finally got around to downloading pictures from my camera into the computer. On one hand I was impressed that with all we have going on, I had taken so many pictures. On the other hand, I was depressed that the pictures were like foggy recollections. "Oh yeah, Ella started Kindergarten... We went to San Diego... What is that one? I think I remember something about that..."

Although it is out of order, I needed to post some pictures of Ella and her first day. Unfortunately, I can't recall much about it. I know she went; I have the evidence. I also can say that she was mostly excited about dressing for Kindergarten. She planed out her outfit a number of times for days before her debut. You can see here right before we walked to school how cute she looks. This was actually the dressing up dress rehearsal a few days before Kindergarten.

I find that if I keep my head buried in the walls and attic of our new project, I will miss the most important part of my life. My resolution is to take some time for my family, pace myself on this project. After all, when you own a home there will always be something to do. No sense rushing through a job that never ends. Farris Bueller said, "Life moves pretty fast, if don't stop and look around every once in a while, you might miss it." It seems that is especially true with your family.

The rest of Ella's pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/jsutter11/EllaSFirstDayOfSchool

The Past Few Months

What have we been up to the past few months? Well, most of you probably know that we moved. We moved less than a mile away, but the house is bigger, the lot is bigger, and the neighborhood is a bit nicer. I do have pictures. This is the outside of our house:

And this is the inside of our house:
Yes, we decided to gut the thing. After all, anyone can move into a new house the week before school starts, while you daughter is starting kindergarten, 2 weeks before you leave on a week-long trip to the Carribean, and while your wife is 7 months pregnant. Only the stupid... I mean stout-hearted will gut it before they move in.

The house was a foreclosure, so we bought it from a bank. The previous owners had put in new carpets a year ago. They looked good, so we figured, live in the house for a year and slowly change stuff. When we started to move in, we noticed a peculiar smell. We decided to pull back some carpets and noticed that the owners didn't really enforce the "peeing outside" concept with their animals. Every floor in the house was full of pet urine. Before we could move in, we began the tedious job of ripping out the carpet and treating or replacing the subfloor (one of the worse sections pictured here). Meanwhile we started living in a single bedroom at our friend Alma's house. It was quite a lot of togetherness.

The long and the short of this story is that the last few months have been a lot of work. We had a lot of "Might as well a..." as we started working on the house. Since we needed new carpets, we might as well a texture the ceilings and walls upstairs and put in a new banner. Since we are going to do new floors in the kitchen, we might as well raise the ceiling. You get the idea.

On the positive side, when things cool down, i am going to market my new weight loss program. Here is the recipe:

2 parts stress
3 parts no sleep
1 part physical exhaustion
2 parts Monster soda

I swear this works. But keep it under wraps until I develop a marketing strategy.

Downieville

June 1-3, 2007



My favorite place to mountain bike is Downieville. Amazing trails, tough climbs, crazy decents; yea, that about sums it up. I went this year with Tom, Aaron, Rob, and Jim. We had a great time camping at Union Flat.

June 1: We left Sonoma at 6. We arrived at our campsite about 11. We decided that we would go for a "quick" ride. 3 hours later, we reached the top of the 14 mile climb to Packer Saddle. We struggled our way down Butcher Creek trail which is the downhill course. Crazy rocks, steep, and narrow. We limped into town 5 hours later excited from the amazing ride, but we were still limping. We had to ride another 6 miles back to camp, and that was painful.

June 2: We thought we were being smart by choosing the shuttle ride to the top. Unfortunately, a wrong turn on the way down turned into a 90 minute addition of hill climbing, creek crossings, and confusion. When we finally found Pauley Creek trail, we experienced the most amazing riding. Since none of us ride with body armor and huge downhill bikes, this trail suited us perfectly.

June 3: Some of our group, decided to ride to the top through Sierra City, and others decided to take the shuttle. We met at the top of a grueling ride with a couple of wrong turns. This is actually the toughest climb I can remember. The trail was 8 miles of climbing an exposed mountain side on loose shale. When we got to the top, it was nice to know where we were going as we made our way to Pauley Creek trail again. The girl at the bike shop suggested adding on "Big Boulder" trail, but we didn't want to push our luck. The decent was excellent.

Singing Beauties

Ella, Meghan, and Marley take center stage at the Sonoma square for a singing competition. What I find amazing is that my cell phone can video record them singing and then post it directly to YouTube.

Bear Flag Track Meet

Friday, April 18, 2007 marked the second time a Sutter has competed in Sonoma's Bear Flag Track Meet. This year we had 2 kids involved as Asher and Ella both decided to race. The meet is held at the Sonoma High School track and involves kids from age 5-12. Asher and Ella signed up for the 100 meter and the 200 meter. Their excitement built all week; Asher felt anticipation since he did so well last year, and Ella was excited to be part of the show.

Ella went first. You can see in the video she was the youngest of the group. Seriousness covered her face. Unfortunately, she learned a lesson about being the last as they finished the 100 meter race. She tried so hard and never gave up, but her heart was broken as she realized that she was last to finish. She was so sad, that she decided she didn't want to compete in the 200 meter race.

Asher placed first in both races last year, but he prepared himself to finish somewhere in the middle this year since he moved to the next age group. To our surprise he smoked his heat and took first. He went on to the 200 meter and also finished first. He likes that first lane because you get to pass everyone on the inside, but he almost ran out of steam as the race finished.

The competition is interesting. I want my children to experience it, but it is tough to watch. I worry that Ella will not want to compete next year because of the bad experience, or that she will get down on herself. She made the comment that she wasn't any good at running. Until this race, she thought she was fast. Asher has won every time he raced, so it will be interesting when he races someone faster. Regardless of the competition, we all had a great time. I hope you enjoy the video.

Changes to the Line-Up

This might be our Christmas card for 2007 sent out early. That would be a shocker. However, I don't think it counts when one of the children is a nameless gray figure. So this works more like a birth announcement letting our family and friends officially know that the fourth Sutter will be landing sometime in Fall of 2007.

Stefanie is 10 weeks into this pregnancy, and it remains a bit of a challenge. I operated under the mistaken assumption that pregnancy was like other things in life, it should get easier with practice. The reason I extended this idea to pregnancy stems from watching Monte Python's The Meaning of Life and seeing the baby just fall out while the mother does the dishes. For some reason that has always stuck with me. In my subconscious mind, I assumed that Stefanie would hardly notice her pregnancy, but I have been wrong. Instead of suffering from morning sickness, Stefanie suffers from all-day long sickness. This is true--water actually makes her nauseous. She has trouble shopping because she smells food through the packaging, and she needs to vomit. Don't get me wrong, the first trimester was always hard for us, but I had a different idea of how things would go this time.

THe sickness notwithstanding, we are extremely happy for this fourth child. All we are hoping for is to make it into the second trimester as soon as possible. I think we might find out the sex of the child early this time. We loved not knowing with the others, but I think the kids really want to know. In any case we will keep you updated.

Soccer Star

Yesterday marked the beginning of the end for Asher's first round of indoor soccer; it was the beginning of the playoffs. There are only 4 teams in his age groups, so every team gets to play. Still Asher was so excited and was sure his team would win. We were a little concerned, because he was such a poor sport the last time they lost, he was grounded for quite a bit. Fortunately, he went in with a healthy attitude about winning or losing the game.

I have been helping the coach with the team. It is interesting to see first hand how the team plays and improves. We couldn't believe how well all the kids plays. It was sort of shocking to us. We have spent weeks coaching the kids on some important skills and strategies, but we have never seen much of a result on the field. We went over it again before the game, and apparently something clicked. The coach and I were dumbfounded and actually looked at each other during the game and commented, "I think they finally listened." More to the point, they finally got it. Perhaps it is just persistence with kids this age? I don't know. But they finally played like a great team.

Asher had an especially good game. He scored two goals and had three assists. He has been waiting for a goal through two seasons now and got two of them in the playoffs. He was all grins as the game ended. We'll see what happens next week in the finals.