December recap

My goodness, it has been busy.  I successfully passed both my classes with A's.  I wasn't so sure about Research Writing, but I got through them.  I start the next semester January 11th.  I'll be taking two classes on Monday and Tuesday nights for eight weeks before heading into the next bunch of classes. 

Well, I completely missed posting about Tristan's fourth birthday and his birthday party.  I also didn't post about putting up Christmas lights and decorations.  And of course, I didn't post about Christmas yesterday.

Ten days ago, Tristan turned four.  I really can't believe that four years has gone by since he first came into our lives.  He is quite the kiddo.  He's very smart and articulate.  However, he can be quite bossy, hard-headed, and impatient.  What young boy isn't, though?  In celebration of his fourth birthday, we had a party for him at L'il Biggs (kind of like Chuckie Cheese's but without the big mouse).  He and some friends got to play and have fun.  It almost ended in disaster though.  He got sick just an hour before the party and luckily we brought a bucket with us because he got sick in the car, too.  He was so upset and miserable.  We couldn't cancel so close to party time.  So, we gave it a shot.  If all else, we'd be there to greet guests, pay for the party and let the guests have fun while we took Tristan home.  But I guess, fun was his remedy of choice.  He must have gotten whatever was bugging him out of his system.

We had a Transformers themed party since he is obsessed with them.  Almost every gift he received was something Transformers related.

And Tristan got to play air hockey for the first time.  He was super excited.

So, overall he had an enjoyable time.  In fact, at one point during the party, he came up to me and told me, "Mommy, this is the best birthday party!" 

Tristan has definitely blossomed into a big boy.  He is, for the most part, a good big brother and such a fun, energetic child.  I can't wait to see how much he develops and grows in this next year. 

Gingerbread House

I am short on time as of late (I don't even have Christmas lights up - just the tree, a wreath, and our mantle decorations), so I bought a neat little Gingerbread House kit for Tristan to help decorate.  He was super excited about it.  He kept bugging me about it when we got home but I told him that it would have to wait until his sister went to bed.

A familiar kit you find in just about any supermarket or Walmart you visit.  I even saw a gingerbread train at Albertson's. 

Tristan was absolutely proud of his creation.  I controlled the icing and he controlled the candy (for the most part).  That icing was so difficult to work with and I cut the corner a little to bit so being precise was next to near impossible.

Of course, Daddy had fun trying to "eat" the gingerbread house, while Tristan adamantly insisted he not do so.

Enjoying the bed

I'm testing out a new blog writing software that is compatible with Mac.  I'm really missing LiveWriter, but it is only compatible with Windows.  There is some awesome looking software for Mac for blog writing purposes but they cost upwards of about $40.  I found this add-on for FireFox that works write off of my browser called ScribeFire.  I'm mainly looking for ample writing space, instead of Blogger's tiny little window that takes less than a quarter of your screen, and image manipulation, making pictures larger and such without degrading picture quality.  I know I probably won't get the cool border looking stuff that LiveWriter has without paying for software.

So far, this add-on is promising.  I can adjust the screen to take up all of my browser window or less depending on if I need to browse at the same time. 

Now for the pictures.   Here are pictures of the children enjoying the loft bed.

Well, the picture insertion is somewhat of a pain.  Blogger allows you to upload up to five images at a time.  This add-on only uploads one at a time (and you have to wait for it to fully upload).  Editing of pictures is limited to resizing it and alignment (left, center, right) and text wrap. 


Some cool features:
Post splitter (see line just above)
Add YouTube video
Custom HTML and HTML editing (if you're good at that stuff)
Editing previous entries
Post preview (seeing your entry on your actual blog before posting it)
Adding Technorati tags, TrackBack URLS, Timestamp modification
Editing multiple blogs
Ability to save your post even though this is a browser based application

The flipside:
While the in browser editing is cool, if you're a tab user the editing software will be on every tab.  This reduces your browsing space if you like to keep the editor large. 
The picture editing is very limited and super slow
Limited font styles available (Live Writer pretty much had whatever fonts you had in Word and fonts you installed on your PC I believe)

If you have a Mac and you are looking for free blog writing software, this one may work.  It is only an add-on so it isn't a complete program that you have to install.  You'll need Firefox and you'll need to search for ScribeFire on the add-ons page. 

I'll be testing out another Mac compatible software with another posting as well.