August 2018

After a vacation for the three of us in Utah, followed by an extended vacation for Becky and Alex in Arizona, August was back to New York and back to normal. It has been either raining buckets, or warm and humid this past month in our neck of the woods. Everyone here says autumn is the best time of year, and we are looking forward to seeing what the next season brings. Here is what we've been up to lately.

Sleep Training

Rob: Visiting family in July gave us the chance to have many conversations about kids, which prompted us to change up some of our routines with Alex. For instance, Alex usually wakes up a couple times a night and we give him a bottle, then he goes back to sleep. We realized this routine has gone on too long, and we needed to just bite the bullet and do some sleep training. Alex caught a cold (probably from the plane trip) after he and Becky got back from Arizona, and wouldn't take his bottle that night because he probably had a soar throat. So it was a rough night where he woke and went back to sleep several times without a bottle. And so that was how we initiated sleep training, somewhat involuntarily. The following nights we continued abstaining from the bottle, and he cried a bit but eventually went back to sleep. Pretty quickly, he was sleeping through the night with only the occasional whimper. We sleep much better now, and only wish we did this sooner.

3rd Anniversary 

Rob: We are in a state of frugality this year, so we celebrated our three years of marriage on August 15 in a modest fashion. A woman in our branch was kind enough to watch Alex for us that night, and we went out to dinner at The Olive Garden -- not the trendiest place, but we had a gift card and this seemed like a good time to use it since we try to avoid taking Alex with us to sit-down restaurants these days. In tribute to our anniversary, we wrote an earlier post about the songs we chose for our wedding playlist three years ago that you can read here.

Stake Picnic

Rob: There are several state parks within driving distance, particularly near the Finger Lakes region. We went to a stake picnic at one called Robert Treman State Park. They had a BBQ and a variety of things for the kids, including a marble setup with various tracks to roll marbles down. Kind of an odd thing, but it kept Alex's full attention for quite some time. In other church news, Becky has a calling teaching Sunday School to the young adults, and I have an additional calling in the Young Men's presidency. Neither of these is a huge commitment in a branch, as there aren't many (or sometimes any) people in these groups.

Tap Dance

Rob: One of Becky's many hidden talents is tap dancing. She first learned it when she took an intro course when she attended BYU. The theater department at Binghamton University where I work was offering various informal 8-week dance classes to the community, including tap, so I told Becky she should sign up. It's a good way for Becky to take a break from motherhood, and get out of the house doing something she enjoys every once in a while.

Work

Rob: August has been a busy month at work. One project I have been working on for most of my time in this job was planning for a consultant to come to campus and meet with some high-level administration, faculty and local partners to do an assessment and make some recommendations regarding a proposed research center on campus. After coordinating about 26 schedules over a 48-hour period, the consultation visit went very well. I have worked at this job now for almost as long as I worked at my previous job, and I have seen a sharp contrast in how much I enjoy this work environment and feel appreciated in comparison to my previous job, which didn't pan out. Although I wish I were closer to our families, so far he I am very happy with my career change. I still do some science writing on the side. In August, I wrote a story for a magazine about oolitic sand, a topic near and dear to my heart because I did a college research project on it. You can read it here.

House Shopping

Rob: Now that we've lived in the area for a while, we have a better idea of where we would like to settle down. So we got ourselves a real estate agent and started looking at some houses. Chenango Bridge is the area we landed in after first moving here, and as it turns out, it is a really nice area with good schools that we like (see recent "Neighbhorhood Scenery" post here). We wouldn't mind staying, but not many houses in our price range pop up around here. Binghamton is the most populated area with a lot of cheaper houses and is very close to the university, but the schools there aren't so great. So we've also been looking in another area that is also close to the university that has much better schools called Vestal. It is, of course, a bit more expensive there. So we can tell already that this will be no easy decision for us. Our lease runs until next Febraury, so buying a house isn't urgent quite yet. But now that we have been out to see several houses, we have a much better idea of what we can get within our budget. This month turned out to be a good time to look at houses, because it has been raining buckets and causing some basement flooding in the area, which is not uncommon. So we have been able to see how some houses stand up in the rain. Most of them had at least some leakage or evidence of flooding in the basement. In our house that we rent now, a significant amount of water came into the basement as the ground got saturated, but fortunately it all went straight down a drain. In 2006 and 2011 there was significant flooding in the area, including the overflow of the Susquehanna River into some of the community, so that is also an important consideration when looking at different location. In any case, we are eager to put down roots and start investing in a piece of property where we can make long term plans.

For more pictures and videos of what we've been up to in August, go here.