I don’t think that I had ever voiced this desire to anyone, but by pure coincidence a Rubik’s Cube is precisely the birthday gift that Oscar picked out for me. This had to be some sort of sign, right? The universe was clearly telling me it was time to fulfill this goal.

So, for the past few weeks I’ve been studying the various cube solving strategies and practicing whenever I had time. Just yesterday I managed to complete the cube for the first time and am now at the point where I can consistently solve it! Lest anyone get too impressed, there’s not much too it beyond recognizing a handful of patterns and memorizing a series of associated algorithms (pretty much the same thing I do for my day job). Nonetheless, I’m proud to have finally mastered the cube and would be crossing this off my list if I had one.

In order to preserve a record of my achievement, I shot a video which you can find below. Note that I’m not particularly fast yet so I’ve sped up the video to 1.5x so that you don’t have to suffer through 4 minutes of me spinning plastic cubes around.

Enjoy.

Rubik’s Cube from Brian DeHamer on Vimeo.

After I’d finished editing the video and showed it to Oscar, I asked him how he was able to jump from room-to-room so quickly. He responded simply “magic”.

Browsing the pictures on the little screen on Matt’s camera, we able to determine that the card belonged to a family and had about a year’s worth of pictures including a little girl’s birthday, a wedding, and the birth of a baby boy (luckily, there were no pictures of the actual birth). Once we realized what we had, I decided I was going to make it my mission to return the card to the family that had lost it. It would have been pretty easy had their name or address been embedded somewhere, but all we had to solve the mystery was about 200 pictures of them, their friends and their family.

When we got back to San Diego I loaded the card into my computer and started going through the photos in detail looking for any clues that would help. The first thing we noticed was that, in one of the pictures of the family’s newborn son we could make out the ID badge of one of the nurses from the hospital. A quick Google of the hospital name told us that the hospital was in Lincoln, Nebraska. It would have been nice if we’d discovered they were from some small town somewhere, but Lincoln still has a population of 250K. Didn’t quite narrow it down as much as I had hoped.

There were a number of photos of a young girl’s birthday and we assumed that the girl must be the daughter of the camera owner given that she was in so many of the pictures. One of the pictures of her birthday cake revealed that her name was Addie. In another picture we found Addie’s name on what to looked to be the scoreboard of a minor league ballpark. The text on the scoreboard was a birthday message for Addie and included her last name. Now we were getting somewhere.

We had the final piece of puzzle when eagled-eyed Anna spotted the father’s name embroidered on a Christmas stocking in the background of one of the pictures. With his first and last name as well as city and state in hand we consulted the almighty Google and were pleasantly suprised to find the family’s phone number and address come back as the first hit (you should Google yourself sometime to see what personal information there is out there).

I dialed their number and spent a few minutes talking to the wife of the man we had Googled. The card was indeed theirs and, much like ourselves, they had spent Christmas in Kauai. She was quite grateful to hear that someone had taken the time to track them down. Mission Accomplished!

So, make sure you leave a file on memory cards with your name/address or at least leave enough clues on there that someone will be able to track you down if you lose it.

The Boot Camp Challenge is a three mile run and obstacle course held annually at MCRD. The participants run the perimeter of the recruit depot and have to complete various obstacles along the way including tunnel crawls, log climbs, and push up stations. Of course there are Marine Drill Instructors stationed at each of the obstacles to offer the racers “gentle encouragement”.

There were easily a couple thousand racers out there ranging from the hard core, elite athletes to the 3- and 5-person teams. Anna and her good friend Noelle entered with three other girls as “Team Tubesock”. Anyone participating as part of a team was required to cross the finish line as a team (leave no woman behind). All five members of Team Tubesock crossed the finish line with an impressive time of 32 minutes.

The kids and I are incredibly proud of our super-star athlete. In fact, Oscar is insisting that we make a gold medal for Anna later today.

Team Tubesock posing before the race.

This shot was taken just before the finish line. If you look closely you’ll see that Anna skinned her right knee pretty good during the race — an injury sustained while navigating one of the low crawl obstacles under heavy enemy fire. We expect her to make a full recovery.

Oscar is playing soccer now has to wear shin guards to practice. We sort of had to explain to him what exactly "shin guards" were and ultimately related it back to "armor for your legs" (after all, any self-respecting 3-year-old boy knows what armor is).

Of course, if armor on your shins is good, then armor on your shins, knees, arms, head and face has got to be even better!  That’s how we ended up with this:

Personally, I’m not sure that wearing all this armor is going to do you much if you don’t have the good sense to at least wear some pants . . . but I’m sure not going to be the one to try and suggest that to this guy.

For our less tech-savvy readers, the backpack with shipping tubes attached is of course a jetpack.

We went shoe shopping for the kids over the weekend and Oscar picked out a pretty sporty looking pair of sneakers for himself. As he was leaving the store with his new shoes on, we noticed how tall he looked and decided to measure him once we got home. Oscar has his own tape measure for the express purpose of checking his height and we quickly discovered that, with the help of the new shoes, he had pushed past the 42 inch mark!

42 inches might seem like a bit of an arbitrary milestone, but its one that has been on Oscar’s mind for over a year now.  See, 42 inches just happens to be the minimum rider height for the two “real” roller coasters at Sea World here in San Diego. Oscar has been aching to get on the roller coasters since he was old enough to understand what they were. Anyone that’s seen his Legoland video, knows that Oscar is a bit of a thrill-seeker.

After discovering the magic of the new shoes, Anna half-jokingly said “you guys should go to Sea World and ride the roller coaster.”  Well, Oscar and I take this sort of thing very seriously, so we did just that. At 6:00pm on Saturday night Oscar and I hopped in the car and headed over to Sea World for Oscar’s inaugural run on the “Journey to Atlantis”.  Unfortunately, in all of our excitement, we sort of forgot how crowded it can be at Sea World on a summer night. It took us about 10 minutes to get into the park and then we spent another 45 minutes in line for the ride.  It wasn’t an ideal situation, but Oscar was extremely patient and didn’t complain once.

You’ll find some video of our ride below. Oscar absolutely loved the entire thing and his reaction was well worth every minute we spent in line.  He’s already planning our next trip (which will be early in the morning before the lines get too crazy). 

Oscar doesn’t know it yet, but we’re heading up to Disneyland in September (our first time with the kids).  I can’t wait to see what he thinks of Space Mountain and the Matterhorn.

Oscar and I must have visited the park a half-dozen times last summer, but hadn’t made it out there yet this year so we decided to make it today’s Family Fun Friday activity. The pool with the play structure goes from 0 to 3 1/2 feet at its deepest and Laurel had a great time floating and crawling around at the shallow end (unfortunately, we were having too much fun with her to get any pictures). Meanwhile, Oscar probably spent a good hour perfecting his water slide technique.

I was a little too excited about our pool adventure and actually got the family there a good 30 minutes before the beginning of the afternoon swim session (Oscar was very patient)

One of about 200 runs down the water slide

Who’s that hunk emerging from the pool?

We kept the plan a secret from Oscar and got him in the car this morning by telling him that I was sick and needed to go to the doctor. He sat very patiently in the car all the way up to Carlsbad and it wasn’t until he saw the giant Lego sculptures in the parking lot that he figured out what we were really doing. “You were just joking me, Dad?” he said with a big grin on his face. We played the same trick on him that last time we went there — something tells me he isn’t going to fall for it a third time.

Below is some video of Oscar riding The Dragon which is probably his favorite ride. He got on it twice today, once with Anna and once with me. And as Oscar points out in the video, they did instruct us not to use cameras while on the ride — bad Dad.

As long as you purchase at least one copy of your book Blurb will allow you to sell copies of it to anyone who is interested.  A couple of the grandma’s expressed interest in getting a copy of Laurel’s book — click on the link below to place an order.  Use can also use the “Book Preview” link to download a PDF preview of the first few pages.  Enjoy!

Laurel – Year One

By Brian DeHamer

Book Preview

This is his go-to position anytime that he’s tired or having a melt-down.  When he was a baby, Anna and I tried introducing a pacifier a few times, but he never really took to it — he always preferred the thumb.  We were happy that he’d found an easy way to comfort himself and the fact that he didn’t have to carry around those dumb pacifiers was simply a bonus.

We recognized that we were going to have to break him of the habit at some point, but have been putting it off.  In fact, I don’t think either Anna or I have ever said anything to him about his thumb sucking.  Yet, last night when Oscar and I were sitting down to watch cartoons he made the announcement to me that he wasn’t going to suck his thumb anymore.  Throughout the show (which would normally be prime thumb time) I could see him really making a conscious effort not to move his hand up to his face.  A couple of times he moved his thumb up to his mouth and then moved it away quickly.  He was clearly working extremely hard to keep his thumb sucking reflex in check.  Imagine someone trying to kick a nicotine habit while holding a pack of cigarettes that they can’t put down.

We have no idea where this sudden determination to not suck his thumb came from.  We’re guessing that one of his friends at school may have said something to him about it.  Wherever it came from, he’s certainly showing a level of self-consciousness that we haven’t previously seen.  Back when we were struggling with the whole potty training thing, a number of his friends made comments about his diapers but he always just shrugged them off.  I never got the impression that he was feeling any sort of peer pressure about the potty training and he certainly wasn’t bowing to the parental pressure. 

But here he is, deciding by himself that he’s going to go cold turkey on the thumb.  This kid is growing up!

When we were reading stories before bed last night, he was again struggling to keep his thumb from his mouth.  At one point he broke down crying and said to me, "Dad, I really want to suck my thumb."  I told him he could if he really wanted to, but he wouldn’t do it.  It was very sweet and a little heart-breaking at the same time. 

I have no idea how long this interest in self-improvement is going to last, but it has been fascinating to watch so far.  Leave your messages of encouragement/support for Oscar in the comments and we’ll make sure he gets them.