Sunday, December 19, 2010

Niles communicates & Fireman Santa

While Niles has been communicating with the tones of his grunts and cries since April 29th he has moved to the next level. He has been waving, giving verbal cues to his desires, and use some simple sign language. We have been working on milk, done, more, etc and he has these in his lexicon right now. There is a short cut of Jonas and a marathon song that lasted for about 15 minutes on the way to see Santa #1. When we arrived at Santa #1 the boys got out of the van just in time to see the fire-engines zoom away on a call. Jonas and Niles saw their neighbor fireman Jay zoom off in the #4. Santa was wonderful and Jonas got to ring his bells, but the initial pictures didn't go so well for the kids. See the picture below for the details. There is a great article about the Santa, check it out. I know that Santa is a public employee and in this day and age in our state is vilified by our soon to be new Governor for being so "affluent" and actually having a retirement program. I'm sure Gov Walker will be sure to take away a lot of the desire for good people to do public sector work. (By the way the top 1% of income earners grab more than 23% of the total income and also pay a tax-rate that is equal to those in poverty. The highest one percent used to be taxed at 70-94% after WWI until the 1970s, but now they average around 18%....so they can have more money I guess like our new Senator Johnson with his 9.5 million dollars in earnings but lucky for him didn't pay any income taxes (that's zero income taxes) for those 11 years, he probably would not have been able to feed his family if he had to pay taxes like everyone else that is not a millionaire. Bottom line, we better continue to reduce the wages and compensation of the middle class so that the millionaires don't have to pay any taxes and can hire more workers like Johnson did by hiring prisoners from a WI prison because they were inexpensive workers...ahh greed in the name of capitalism and politics) I digress.....happy holidays everyone.


Monday, December 6, 2010

First Snowfall



From beards to Thanksgiving, to Niles first face plant in the snow to no-napping Jonas pass-outs, to first x-mas tree and beyond this slideshow has it all. Enjoy the holiday season.