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April 24th, 2004
Mankato, Minnesota

It sure as heck doesn't seem like 5 years, but here we are at our 'Wooden' anniversary. Who's idea was it to come up with a material for the anniversary gift we're going to give each other? Seriously. What am I supposed to do? Go out to the woodpile and find the nicest log I can?

"Here you go, Laura. Happy wooden anniversary."

Anyway, I broke out the wedding album and scanned up a few of my favorite shots of our wedding. We did the whole camera on each table thing, too...but man. Like 95% of the pictures were horrible. I guess heavy drinking and photography just don't mix.

Here I am up at the altar with my beautiful bride. You can't see it here, but later when the priest started yammering on about raising our kids in the Catholic faith, etc, etc... I had my fingers crossed. Whatever, dude. I just want to marry this woman, not devote my life to your crazy fairy tales.

Here we see the large groom attack the little bride like he hasn't been fed in roughly 4 days. I don't know what it is, but I feel like I'm looking at Tony Soprano whenever I see pictures of me in this tuxedo. "You may kiss the bride." Don't mind if I do, padre.

The groomsmen and ushers in full effect. My brother is the one with the giant mouth, doing the Hong Kong action movie pose. I just wanted to see how high up I could get my legs. Guess I'm lucky I didn't fall and break my dumb head open.

This was shot at the place where we had our reception in Dirty ol' Mankato. It sort of looks like we're in an abandoned shopping mall, but this picture, I think turned out really cool. The photographers had some good ideas and some others that weren't so great. Bless their f-stopping little hearts.

Beautiful ol' Laura. Not a day goes by where I'm not thankful to be married to this woman.

Happy Anniversary!

(enjoy your wood)

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Seriously. My new kid hasn't been here for over 2 weeks already. Has he? Seriously? Must be. I went back to work yesterday and I'm just stunned by how quickly the time has flown. It's frightening, actually.

If someone's got the spare time and the funding, I've got a research project idea. Let's see if there's some sort of time flux thing that happens to people with every kid they add. My theory? The more kids you have, the quicker the time flies. There's gotta be something to it.

To that end, Jake is going to be my final installment in the kid saga. We're done. Two boys is more than enough to keep us busy.

So...I thought I'd just get on here and talk about the whole 'going into labor' story and all the craziness that ensued when Big Jake made his appearance. But honestly? There really wasn't anything to it.

This is coming from the guy who didn't have to push an almost 10-pounder through his crotch...

But seriously, folks. You can ask Laura and she'll tell you, the difference between having Travis and having Jacob is like night and day. She pushed for 4 hours when she was in labor with Travis.

With Jake? 46 minutes.

We were at the hospital for the entire two days. This time around? We cut out early, after a day of sitting around and not doing much.

I can tell you that Jake was born on one of the coldest days in Minnesota history and that, like his older brother, decided to wait until the day after his due date to arrive. That's just the way the Troupe brothers roll.

Laura bounced back almost immediately after Jake was out the chute. Really. She will be the first to tell you this pregnancy was 10x harder than the first time around.


- She went to bed early, usually around 8pm when Travis did. Heck, sometimes she was asleep before TKT Part 2.
- She snored like a grizzly bear for the last 4-5 months of the pregnancy, which caused yours truly to have to sleep elsewhere. I can usually sleep through a hurricane, but Hurricane Laura proved too much even for me.
- She had heartburn and an upset stomach on an almost daily basis.
- Morning sickness? Not so much.

But things went well and it's hard to believe the little guy is here and part of the family. It's definitely strange not being able to have anyone but our kids sit in the back seats of our cars and just weird as all get-out to change diapers, mix up bottles, etc... I thought I'd be rusty when it came time to re-diaper the little guy, but I've got it down to a science. Even after 4 years!

The greastest thing? Travis is so excited about having a little brother now. Almost daily, he peeks in at Jake while he's sleeping and says:

"Look at that cute yittle (that's how he says 'little') guy."

or

"Hey brother." (which immediately reminds me of Arrested Development)


Anyway...life is good. Thanks to all for your well wishes and words of congratulations. If you're in the neighborhood, stop by.

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Okay, so you may or may not know that my MG book 'The Poisoned Apple' has zombies in it. Unless you have the initials TKT then you haven't read it (and even then there's a mega possibility you haven't read it because I'm sure loads of people have those initials) so why would you know it's full of zombies. I have mentioned it a few times, but then I mention zombies alot. I think!!!

Anyhow, stop rambling girl and get on with the point of the blog post. That is, I just found a really cool blog called My So Called Undeath. It features characters from Daniel Waters novel 'Generation Dead'. Go check it out.

I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of my copy from Amazon - why oh why do I always opt for the mega slow free shipping.

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