Rice Cereal

Tate is now eating some food. Mainly Popeye's. He also has been eating rice cereal as the video below indicates. You can call him a lot of things...but you can't call him skinny. Enjoy:

The Manila Iniative

On Wednesday, March 12 the MSM is going to be be going on a quest to find the classified materials that The Manila Initiative mistakenly lost. Here is the first of three videos leading up to the middle school scavenger hunt event.

Student, Teacher

I really should be writing a paper right now (even during my student teaching I still have class once a week at night) but I felt that I should post some pictures of Tate instead. The kid is pretty cute. He has been sleeping well at night and he appears to be a morning person. I love picking him up in the morning and un-swaddling him. He smiles and stretches and just looks happy to be alive. Today was day 30 of student teaching and I am starting to get a hang of things. It is still kind of weird being called Mr. Bowen (I would prefer Sir Bowen) but I will adjust eventually I suppose. Until then, here are some more pictures of the young Mr. Bowen.

Not really a fan of the ol' flash.
Super Tate!
Staring contest.
Dimples.
Goodnight.

Cuatro Meses

Tate turned 4 months old on Saturday. He celebrated much in the same way that he will upon turning 90 - by eating soft, easy to digest foods, sleeping, laughing, and being confused. He is turning in to a real baby now. It's weird. He looks like a little boy. Mel and I spent the weekend around the house. Nothing too exciting but justifiable since it was raining. Today was my 29th day of student teaching. I picked up the substitute teacher app. so that I can sub during my off-periods. It is amazing money! Just ask Lauren and Whitey! I have been editing a lot of videos lately and below you will find some footage of Tate from last month. Enjoy:

Goodbye HD DVD's, Hello Rice Cereal

Upon hearing that the HD DVD player has gone the way of the cassette tape, I couldn't help but be disappointed considering Mel and I own one of these now obsolete units. Luckily we got a good deal on it and it still plays normal DVD's. Breast milk could also be going the way of the HD DVD as Tate has now developed an affinity for rice cereal. He had his 4-month checkup on Monday and his results were rather positive: 24 inches long - 51%; 17 cm. head - 90%; and 15 pounds, 3 oz. - 90%. In other words, the kid is short and stout like his dad. He has been sleeping close to 11 hours a night which has been lovely. He is super cute when he first wakes up in the morning, smiling and cooing like a young jaybird. Mel and I are continuing to enjoy parenthood. Bauer meanwhile is less than impressed and is in the process of trying to divorce us and get adopted by the Perry's. We'll see what happens. I have taken a ton of footage of him lately and now that I have finished the MSM snow trip video I will get started on editing a video for him. Below you will find some pictures of Tate and the aforementioned Biggest Snow video from the MSM winter camp trip to Hume Lake a couple weeks ago. It is pretty entertaining - especially Kyle Clark's snowboarding antics. Check it out.

A picture Justin took and edited for school (stolen from his blog)
Tate loves rice cereal.

Biggest Snow, 2008.

Valentate

Yesterday Tate experienced his first Valentine's Day. He simply loved it. I made dinner and we had a romantic evening with our child and dog. It was one of the most romantic evenings in our young married life. Tate is sleeping close to 11 hours a night now which is quite lovely. He has a 16 week doctor's appointment on Monday and it wil be interesting to see how much he weighs and all that stuff. Student teaching has been going pretty well and I am starting to get the hang of it. I got a Valentine from a student yesterday and other student told me that I am their favorite teacher. It's hard to be humble when you're this good.

He loves the flash.

Tate's new chair.

Bill who?

High school conversation of the day:

I was observing one of Mr. Levey's junior English classes today and while sitting in the back of the class I was able to overhear one of my favorite high school statements of my experience thus far. After showing a 60 Minutes segment on Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Mr. Levey asked the class some topical questions and made some observations for the students. One such observation was to point out the fact that many people "support Hillary due to a fondness or admiration that they may have for her husband." At this, one student turned to the girl behind her and inexplicably asked, "who is Hillary's husband." No joke. This would have been inexcusable even if Bill Clinton was not featured in the video segment...BUT HE WAS. After the student told her that Bill was Hillary's husband she simply said, "Oh," and turned back around. Amazing.

Tyler's outtakes. Enjoy

Hell, uh Old?

High school interaction of the week:

I was talking to some of the student's in one of my junior English classes about videos games the other day, among other things. I told them that I have a Wii and they all made fun of me since they are primarily XBOX aficionados. I told them that I liked the fact that you can download a bunch of old games for the Wii. One student asked me if Pokemon Snap was available for download and I told him that it was. A bunch of students got really excited and talked about how much they used to love that game. The student proceeded to tell me that even though I am "hella old" I would still love the game. "I'm hella old?," I responded. To this he said "yeah" (as if it was a dumb question). I asked how old he thought I was and he guessed somewhere in my 20's. He was right. This was the first of what I assume will be many more humbling moments in teaching. Here I thought I was the young, hip teacher. Turns out, I'm "hella old."

• Colbert + Huckabee = Amazing. Click here.

D-B'08

I would like to formally announce that I am suspending my campaign for president of the United States in 2008. I am withdrawing my name from the candidacy after much consideration and heartfelt recommendations from my advisers, and one specifically arduous deliberation with my top adviser, Charles.. It has been a good run and I would like to commend my supporters on their diligent campaigning and for spreading the good name of D-Bo and our campaign slogain, "Politicians lie, D-Bo Don't." As of now I do not plan on endorsing another candidate and will likely take a long sebatacle from politics altogether. Thank you for your support and love. To the immigrants in Tempe, gracias. To the grandmothers in Tampa, thank you. To the steel workers in Detroit, thanks. To the rich people in Beverly Hills, my deepest gratitude. To my handlers, tread lightly. To my loyal supporters, stay the course. As I always say, "it's not the campaign that makes the man, it's the man that makes the campaign, and he, the world."

Cribs

The other day I assembled a crib and changing table for Tate. He is about 15 pounds now and was growing too big for the pack-'n-play we were using for his crib. Mel and I went to IKEA last month to buy a kitchen cart island thingy and ended up purchasing a crib and changing table as well. Needless to say we have an endless amount of space in our bedroom so the thought of adding a crib and changing table to our room was met with little opposition on my part. Something like that. In the end the crib and table fit quite nicely and Tate seems to enjoy it quite a bit. He looks so tiny in it though! Mel is back in school now and Tate has been spending time with his grandparents. Mel misses being at home with her baby and hopefully she will be able to do so next year (unless someone wants to sponsor us now???). I have officially taken over one of the English classes which has been pretty nerve-racking/exciting. Cal is on the block schedule which means I am with the students for 100 minutes every other day (as opposed to seeing them everyday for 45 minutes). It has been interesting trying to balance my schedule between going to school at night, student teaching during the day, Middle School Ministry, and spending time with my family but it has worked out.

It looks like the animals are going to attack him.

Yet another picture he asked us to take.

Hume

This weekend the MSM went to Hume Lake for their middle school winter camp. Like last year, it was a fun, exhausting weekend. Unlike last year, there was snow. Lots of snow. Mounds of snow. In fact, it snowed 4 feet while we were there. Our guys made it to the second round of the broom hockey tournament and some even cried when they lost. No joke. It was intense. We played a rousing game of snow football too and yes, some guys (guy) cried on the losing team. Again, it was intense. Three students gave their lives to the Lord which was great. I had a conversation with one of them (Jamie - the guy I hit in the face twice with a dodgeball a year ago) after the speaker's talk the last night and it went really well. He had a lot of great questions and we talked for about an hour. It was really encouraging and puts the rest of the weekend's events in to perspective. On Saturday night they had a box sled race. Each church was asked to build a sled using only cardboard and duct tape and were timed going down the sled hill and judged based on style and creativity. The event took place at close to midnight under the neon glow of multiple spotlights amidst a deluge of falling snow. It was pretty incredible. Our 4-man sled held up pretty well, but lacked speed, style, and manueverability. In short, we lost. No one cried this time though. Yesterday, in an attempt to make it home early enough to catch the Super Bowl, we departed Hume at 11:30 am. Hume had a plow lead the cars out of the lake basin. We missed the first departure time and had to wait for the plow to return to catch the next group. However, a bus got stuck on the road at the summit and we had to wait a couple hours until they cleared it out of the way. Fortunately we were able to get some lunch and hang out in the cafeteria. We finally left Hume at around 1:15pm (or so we thought). About 8 miles up the mountain we suddenly were forced to stop. We found out that another bus got stuck on the road and when a bus tried to pass the other bus, it too got stuck. So there we were at 6500 ft., under a blanket of falling snow, waiting for the CHP to pull out the buses. Long story short...the Hume staff informed us that we may have to stay the night and since we didn't have cell coverage there it was sort of a nightmare. Fortunately they were able to move the buses and we were back on the road around 5:45pm after being stuck in our cars for 4 hours. We made it home by 10:30. It was a good trip despite the debacle at the end. I will post a video from the trip in the next couple weeks.

Biggest Snow, '08.