Baylessfamily.org

So, in an attempt to decorate my bedroom I moved a beautiful bookshelf that James made me for my 19th birthday up from the basement and put it in our room. It’s so pretty and it has been sitting in the storage room ever since our “office” became Miles’ room. I made bookends for it out of wooden letters, paper, and mod podge. I still need to pull up most of my books from the basement but, you get the idea. Pretty!

Christmas has come and gone and the wrapping paper and toys are finally cleaned up! As the children grow older Christmas is becoming more and more fun. Savanna woke up at 6 excited as can be! She laid down on the floor in our bedroom playing games on the IPod until 7, then we woke up Miles and Avery and started the madness of present opening. They were so cute and excited. Avery was especially sweet, she was so animated and excited about everything. She had a smile on her face the whole day! After opening presents we had breakfast at home. Every year since we’ve been married we have gone to James’ parents house for Christmas breakfast but we shook things up a bit this year and stayed home for awhile. We had eggs, sausage, cinnamon rolls and orange rolls, it was yum. After breakfast we went to church. We figured this was going to be difficult, how were the kids going to behave for and hour and 15 minutes on such an exciting day? I have to tell you, they surprised us. They did just fine and I actually got to hear some of the talks. It was a really good experience. Our Bishop spoke about the first Christmas Eve he worked as an EMT. He said that he thought working that night would be super easy, it was Christmas, everyone would be with family and loved ones and taken care of, nothing bad would happen. He said the first call they went on was a heroine overdose, the next five or six calls were attempted suicides. He realized then that not everyone had a happy Christmas and that there were a lot of people who were in need of compassion and help this time of year. It made me remember that Christmas is just another day and to be grateful for what I have and to remember others. It might seem like that story would have been depressing for a Christmas morning, but I thought it was something we all needed to hear.
After church we headed up to the Bayless’ for presents and games and a wonderful Christmas dinner. The entire day was wonderful. Our whole family was together. Something that struck me at the end of the day was how well behaved my kids were. They were just sweet as pie all day. Like I said, Avery’s smile never left her face. James’ brother commented on how good they were being for such a crazy day, maybe that was my Christmas present, happy kids! I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas!

Yay Christmas! Although I always loved Christmas as a kid, as I got older I became sort of a Scrooge. Christmas just started to stress me out! All the money being spent, the zillions of family get-togethers, and the unavoidable let down when it was all over. But this year something is different, I am so excited for Christmas and I’m having so much fun with my kids! They are at a good age, Christmas is so magical and fun and they are starting to remember our family’s traditions and are excited to start new ones. Yay! We have jumped right into the season with some fun stuff! The day after Thanksgiving we went to the annual Christmas Lights Parade here in Spanish Fork. We have gone for the past few years and it’s awesome! It has this very small town feel with homemade floats, inflatable Frosty the Snowman tied to a Jazzy, and a Elk head dressed up like Rudolph attached to the front of a truck pulling a trailer full of snowmobiles wrapped in Christmas lights. Like I said, awesome! The kids loooove it! One of the floats was a trailer that had a light up Nativity on it. When it passed us Miles shouted out “Bye Baby Jesus!” After the parade we went home and set up the Christmas tree. We pretty much let the kids do it all and we have such a mish mosh collection of ornaments that it looks a little like Christmas throw-up, but it’s cute. The next week I took the kids to see Santa at Macey’s grocery store. I am too much of a wuss to brave the malls at Christmas time so I thought it was a good option. He was a very convincing looking Santa I thought and both Savanna and Miles sat on his lap for the first time. Avery was too shy, maybe next year. The next day my mom came down and we baked and decorated Christmas cookies. This was really fun, the kids really got into it! Avery loved rolling the dough with the rolling pin. We also made ginger bread men. I don’t know why I thought to make them so big, they puffed up so much in the oven! And finally, my oh-so-creative daughter made herself a crown and skirt out of wrapping paper. ‘Tis the season!

For the last 6 years I have struggled at home with poor internet. When I first moved into the Cambria townhomes development, things were pretty good but already outdated. We had 2 T1 lines into the park shared over a cable TV system that delivered a wacky bundle of internet service and Dish Network TV over the coaxial cable plant in the neighborhood. This was a poor design choice on the part of Trophy Homes (the builder, since gone out of business I think), since coax has been a second place to fiber for at least the last 10 years when it comes to any kind of wide area network design.

So, of course, after a year or so went by and the houses were filling up, the bandwidth was choking. The provider for the network, a weird Mom+Pop company called Whyr’d, upped the connection to 3 and I think at some point, possibly a 4th T1 line. Each T1 is about 1.5 megabit of capacity so at peak we had about 6 megabit of capacity for the neighborhood (over 200 family units). Of course this wasn’t enough. Not to mention the fact that somehow, despite T1 lines being ultra reliable, in my experience, they couldn’t keep the system working for more than a week or two at a time. Constant outages and poor performance were the norm. Basically I just got used to not being able to use the internet at home for more than the most basic tasks of logging into my work computer or checking email etc.

So after a couple years, Trophy Homes turned over management of the HOA to the owners and bowed out. Soon after the new owner managed HOA took over it started trying to push Whyr’d to adhere to their contract which stated some penalties for outages and stuff. Basically Whyr’d told us to fly a kite and kept coming back with excuse after excuse but never did anything to improve the situation despite numerous options for improvement.

Eventually things got really bad and we decided to cut them off and bring in a new provider. Veracity got the low bid in I guess so they were chosen, mostly because they promised to bring in a 100 megabit fiber link for everyone to use. At the same time it was decided to bring in a real satellite provider and put a dish on each building so owners could have proper TV choices. Unfortunately, at this point, Whyr’d tried to bring up some legal thing about them owning the cable plant between the buildings. Besides being illegal and ridiculous, it was basically the last straw for that company because they went out of business at pretty much the same time we decided to fight it in court. It went to arbitration and, long story short, we won. Unfortunately that process took 2 or 3 years, so in the interrim we had Veracity providing internet service to the park over a huge shared wireless network covering the whole place with like 100 wireless access points and stuff all over. It was terrible. Constant, pervasive packet loss of 5% or more. Even when it was working well, I could only get about 3-5 megabit. The worst part was that since it was all wireless, I either had to have a wireless card installed in every device I wanted to use in my home (expensive and cumbersome) or get a wireless router with 2 radios in it to act as both client to connect to the Veracity network and as an access point for my own use for my wireless devices.

I felt I had no choice but to buy the expensive 2 radio wireless router. I found a good deal on a Linksys E3000 refurb for $99 (normally $160 at that time). It worked well enough but it was basically bombarded with constant traffic from the wireless network everyone was connected to (over 200 other devices I would bet) so it would overheat and freeze up on occasion. Consumer devices just aren’t designed to work in that kind of network. Nothing is really.

So, finally after the arbitration was declared in our favor, a plan was put in place to do fiber connections from the clubhouse to each building. After several months of work, they got the fiber in and sent out word that we needed to schedule to have a tech from Veracity come to our homes and wire in the new connection from the network switch in each building to our network port of choice inside the home.

I jumped on that and scheduled for the next day. I waited with bated breath.

The tech never showed. I called and found that he had gone home sick. So I set another appointment and waited for him again.

Another no-show. Grr. Set another appointment and again, the tech never showed up.

Now I was angry. It had been almost 2 weeks trying to get a simple wire connected into my house. I called and chewed out the customer service rep since they not only had failed to get the tech to show up 3 times in a row, but it turned out that they had no record of ever actually setting any appointments for me!

Well, the 4th time was apparently the charm. Last night he finally came (an hour late though) and took all of 5 minutes to put the connector on the cable and plug the other end into the switch downstairs. Would have done it myself if I knew that was all they had to do.

Anyway, it works:

That’s some serious speed.

Best part is that is seems very reliable so far. I just hope it stays that way.

So 3 thumbs down to Veracity for failing to properly schedule a technician 3 times in a row, something that should be very easy.

One very big thumbs up for finally providing the speed we were supposed to have 2 years ago.

My husband, Savanna, Miles, and Avery. My home, my car, food on my table, Savanna’s school and teacher. My mom, dad, Charles and Trish and Asher. James’ family and the two new sister’s we got this year. James’ ability to work like a mad man everyday and be able to pay every bill that is thrown at us. The great gift I have to be home raising my kids. My Heavenly Father and Jesus, my church and all the people in my ward who teach me and my children the gospel. My best friends’ baby girl that she is being blessed with after four sons. My health and my family’s health. My exercising buddies and the motivation I get from them to stay in shape. In addition to these and many, many more, I am utterly and extremely grateful that I am not going shopping on Black Friday. HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

For memory sake I wanted to post the pics of each of my kids as The Duck for Halloween. So Cute!

I would have titled this post “Halloween!!!”, but that would be so unoriginal. Is that a word? Anyway, Halloween!!!. Every year we go to Vineyard Nursery Pumpkinland. They have a corn maze, different farm animals to see, bouncy houses, a playground and a kid friendly spook alley. The kids love it! My mom came with me and she is still talking about how well behaved the kids were. I think it was the only time we have done an activity with no fits or fighting, my kids are getting older I guess.
This year for Halloween I really wanted to make the kids’ costumes. Neither James or I could remember a time when we were kids that we had a store bought costume. Our mom’s always made one or we scrounged something up and put one together ourselves. So I wanted to be creative this year and make something. Now, when I say make I mean I will hot glue or safety pin anything and farm out the rest of the work to more talented people. Savanna wanted to be a Lady Bug, easy! We got a red sweatshirt and wings at DI, felt, headband, pipe cleaners and pom poms at Joann’s, and she owns a pair of red pants. A little glue, some pins and, voila! The sweetest Lady Bug ever! Miles’ was little more challenging, he wanted to be the Eon Kid. Has anyone ever heard of it? My kids are Netflix experts and can log-in, search for and start their movies themselves. The Eon Kid was something they found, an animated super hero/slash robot awesome kid that Miles’ loves. I tried to steer him towards something else for awhile because it looked hard, but he was set on it. We found the suit at DI, (the tag said Shadow Ninja) and an old bike helmet. The “Iron Fist” is my old ski glove with felt hot glued to it. The leg armor are soda boxes painted red. Oh the sacrifice I made for him, all those Vanilla Cokes I had to drink. My brother painted the helmet to match the Eon Kids’ and I think it turned out very cool! Miles was so happy and excited! Avery wore a duck costume we already had, both Savanna and Miles have worn it. All in all I spent $16! I was proud, and they were happy! Trick-or-treating was awesome. They were all well behaved and very friendly, telling everyone thank you and Happy Halloween and Avery would say “quack quack” when she got her candy. Fun Holiday!

For my mom’s birthday we had a pumpkin carving party! Halloween was always a big deal at our house growing up. My mom decorated the yard super scary like and she always dressed up and took us trick-or-treating, and we always carved pumpkins! So what better way to celebrate my Moms’ October birthday then to carve pumpkins! We had a great time. My brother Charles brought his new puppy Asher (Trish was out of town), and of course, my mom came. We had pizza and treats and pumpkin birthday cake. The kids had so much fun. They love grandma and Uncle Charles and the newest family member, Asher. It got a little loud and crazy, but that’s pretty normal around here. Happy Birthday Mom!