My youngest daughter Jessalyn is 4 and has only been to a few birthday parties. Her take on a birthday party is one of the following or a combo of any of these:

Place:

• at a park
• while camping
• at the beach
• in the living room
• in someones back yard
• a restaurant

With some of these activities:

• see people you’ve never seen before and hide from everyone
• only close family and a few close friends
• eat food
• sing happy birthday
• eat cake
• eat pizza
• watch others take a wack at piñata
• watch a baby eat a special cake no one else wants to eat because he put his face all over it

My 32nd birthday is tomorrow and Jessalyn is VERY excited and I’m curious as to what she thinks my birthday will be and what combonation above she thinks will be occurring. I didn’t plan my birthday this year my wife did, my understanding is that she hasn’t told Jessalyn about it since she wasn’t quite sure what the activity would be. It was either going to be a trip to the mountains to see and play in the snow or a trip to Disney Ice to go ice skating. Jessalyn hasn’t done much of the former and has never done the latter. Due to the harsh weather that we have been having here in California it looks like we’ll be going to Disney Ice and have fun ice skating. Lately Jessalyn and I have been reading this book before bed called “Skating with Bears” by Andrew Breakspeare. It’s about a boy that isnt good at skating and sneaks out and night and puts his skates on and tries to learn. These mounds of snow near the rink turn into bears and they help him learn to skate. With us reading this book from time to time she’s been asking me about skating and if I’ve ever done it before. We talked about how I use to go skating yearly and how I also use to roller blade quite a bit. The connection of skating and roller blading didn’t quite work out in her head until one day I put them on and showed her. I’d imagine once we take her ice skating she’ll get the connection even more.

Ice skating and my birthday have quite a history. When I was a kid we would pile in as many friends as we could into the car and drive up to Blue Jay to go ice skating at the Ice Castle. We must have went to the Ice Castle at least 4 or 5 years in a row. In 2001 I wanted to go to the Ice Castle for my birthday and that year after a major storm the Ice Castle was severely damaged when the roof collapsed and they closed the place. A few years later we went ice skating at Disney Ice which looks like is now called The Rinks Anaheim Ice and we’ve been going there ever since. I wouldn’t mind making my birthday all about ice skating, everyone but Jen loves doing it. She typically sits on the side or in the bleachers and watches and takes pictures of us. Some day I’ll get her on the ice!

Jessalyn and Dad

My Daughter Jessalyn turns 4 today; she’s grown from this little tiny infant to an awesome 4 year old “big girl”.  It’s funny the nicknames you give your kids and how sometimes they contradict themselves. I call Jess by many names: “big girl”, “short stuff”, “sweetie”, “sweet pea” (she gave herself that one) and my fave “love bug”. Big girl and short stuff are all relative and it just shows how much she’s grown over the last few years.

We’ll be celebrating her birthday at Disneyland and she’s extremely excited to get to buy some stuff with the money that Disneyland is giving her due to us having Annual Passes. Your gift from them can be the value of a ticket or a few other things. She’s had her eye on this awesome Disneyland castle so we’re thinking she may end up with that.

Jessalyn, thanks for giving loving me the way that you do and letting me be the best Dad that I can be for you. It means a lot to me and I hope it means a lot to you.

My wife Jen and I bought Disneyland Annual passes yesterday (3/20/09) and we’ve been working on ways to make technology help us on our trips to The Park. Before we bought our passes (and went to Disneyland) yesterday I started looking on the iPhone to find some apps related to Disneyland and found these two:

• Disneyland California Mini Guide [iTunes, $0.99]
  Not the most in depth look at Disneyland by any means but it does not require internet access for the app to work. It displays a map ala google maps of the Disneyland park that can be scrolled around. It includes POI links to various attractions and where the bathrooms are (great since I have a 3 year old going into potty training). Also, the map can find you via GPS if your using an iPhone.
  

• Disneyland Resort Time Guide [iTunes, $0.99]
  This app does one thing and that one thing quite well display times for various events happening at the Disneyland Resort. The data is updated via an internet connection so if your have an iPod Touch you can just update via WiFi before hitting the park. On the iPhone you can update whenever since your internet connected via your data plan. This app is great because it shows all the things you need to know to get the most from your visit: Disneyland Park (DL) Park Hours, Magic Morning Hours, Parade Event, Fireworks, Billy Hill & the Hillbillies, Fantasmic, Flag Retreat Ceremony, Closed for Refurbishment and etc. It also includes times for Disney’s California Adventure (DCA) and times for Downtown Disney (including who is playing at House of Blues that night).
  

• I also started looking for online resources to help us out one of which is having our Deluxe Passes blackout dates on our iPhones. To pull this off on our Mac’s in iCal we “subscribe” to google calendar that has all these times listed. You can do the same on a PC using Outlook, check out the icons below to inport the Deluxe Pass blackout dates:
  
• Official Disneyland Resort Podcast [iTunes Link]
  What a great video podcast coming straight from the Disney company.
• RideMax is a great service for planning out your Disney trip. For $29.99 a year you plan out your day in the most incredible way. Instead of me explaining how the service works you can read their PR speak:
  RideMax is a computer software program guaranteed to help you save time waiting in line at Walt Disney World and Disneyland.RideMax allows you to specify the attractions you wish to ride during your visit, then uses a sophisticated scheduling algorithm to order your attractions so that the amount of time you spend in line is minimized.Using historical wait time statistics for each attraction as a foundation, RideMax analyzes millions of different ride sequences in order to create a minimum-wait-time itinerary. This schedule is tailored to the expected crowd patterns on the day of your visit, for the attractions you want to ride!

I know this is a partial list so if your an Annual Pass holder and have other tricks of the trade please let me know by leaving a comment and I’ll update the list above.

Brandon and Corey

My brother Brandon is getting married tomorrow and today we’re trekking out to Hesperia where his soon to be bride lives to take part in the festivities. Today is their wedding rehearsal, my youngest Jessalyn is in the wedding as the flower girl and I hope we can practice dropping flowers enough that she does awesome in the wedding. After that is the rehearsal dinner and then we’re staying the night out there since it’s about 78 miles one way. Friday is the wedding day, from what I gathered from Corey is that March 6th is her parents wedding day so she wanted to have it on the same day as theirs. I hope the traffic out to Hesperia isn’t bad for everyone tomorrow since the way there is also the most popular route from LA to Las Vegas, this is also why were staying the night out there instead of fighting traffic to make it to the wedding in time.

The wedding day I’d imagine will be filled with excitement and will be a joyful occasion, I’m glad to see my brother settling down and I’m happy to see hes settling down with such a great girl.

http://www.coreyandbrandon.com

I will be streaming some of the back end stuff happening before and after the wedding so feel free to checkout my live page.

So does the family that tweet together stay together? My wife @jentucker and I @jasontuckerboth use twitter and I was curious if other couples do the same thing. I thought I'd start a hashtag that tracks couples that twitter together. Feel free to post to twitter to join in on this meme by clicking here and put in your couples names at the end of the tweet. Below are the results of this experiment: [inline] [/inline]
View the results over at search.twitter.com

This weekend is Caitlin's birthday and she has some friends over spending the night to celebrate. She and her Mom agreed to X number of friends over to spend the night, it looks as if that number doubled or something. The small apartment we live in has been quite loud downstairs where the girls have taken over. From what I'm gathering the girls are planning on TPing some ones house in our neighborhood. All I know is these girls couldn't keep quiet to save their collected lives so I'm sure but this may be their last time ever doing something like this. I remember growing up we'd pick a random "rich house" and TP it. I have no idea why we went about it that way since we didn't have any way of finding out what their resulting reaction was. I'm debating on staying up or not, this weekend's nights are suppose to be filled with shooting stars. Chris and I after seeing The Day The Earth Stood Still with a friend of his came home to the girls outside looking at the sky ohhing and aaahhing at the shooting stars. I looked on twitter and others were reporting seeong LOTS of them Chris and I wanted a better experience so we got in the car and drove up the hill to find a decent spot to look at the sky with very little poluting light around us. We found a good spot and did some ohhh and ahhhs of our own until we got too cold to stand being outside in pitch black. I'm off to bed, it's getting late. Let's see what happens with these girls tonight.

My daughter is 3 years old amazes me to no end when it comes to her and technology. Yesterday Jen and I were upstairs in bed watching TV and Jess comes in and asks to play with my iPhone. I had it over and she begins flipping around the screens looking for "Mr Chalky" which is what she calls iChalky. She finds it and loads it up and begins playing with it while lying between Jen and I. Jess grabs the guy and moves him around, then uses the push pin object to pin the arms and legs of the guy down so those ligaments are unable to be moved. She grabs the torso and flicks it up and watches his body wiggle like crazy. She presses the swirl icon and sees a list of words that she can even begin to read. Shes selecting this and that and find the area she wants "Change Chalky's Face" after that she selects from memory "Use a photo in your album" and finds one of herself from the selectable interface. Shes giggling that she found a funny one then attempts to move the head around the opening so her head will show up to replace Chalky's. The photo she picked isn't the best one without some finagling but she selects it anyway. After that she is laughing and shows Jen and I what she did.

So I showed her how to use the pinch method to resize and zoom into the photo a bit. Nows shes a pro, going in there and selecting her favorite victim, Caitlin her 13 year old sister and pinning her down and poking and proding at her.

Another thing that happened this weekend is that Jessalyn realized that she did something bad when she tried to play KidPix on her computer. She came rushing in to the room I was in saying "Pidkick is broke.. dad help". She was holding the Stylus in her hand and I noticed that the "nub" was missing from the front of it. I took her in the room and tried to get it to work. Without the nub the tablet doesn't know that your "clicking" and it thinks your only moving it around like a mouse. Jess said "I'm sad that its lost, lets fix it". Annoyed both at it being missing and for her pulling it out I looked for a stop gap solution. Walking around the bedroom I looked on the ground I found this 1"-1.5" piece of wicker of some sort. I stuff that into the tip of the stylus and sure enough it worked perfectly. After looking online I found that you can get a 5 pack of replace nubs for $5 from the maker so that not so bad.

[blipit id=554310] Jessalyn playing KidPix with the tablet

[blipit id=1417425] On my way to work this morning I saw this amazing rainbow. I pulled out the jailbroken iPhone and recorded the video using cycorder. After doing so I gave my wife and call and told her to go outside so we could share this awesome view. Happy Birthday Jen!

My daughter Jessalyn and I drove down to Santa Ana to go to the Discovery Science Center to explore and see the special event BubbleFest. Jessalyn had a blast looking at all of the exhibits and interacting with all of the kid friendly things they have there. Wet sand, Van de Graaff generators, Clifford's town, Yellow Submarine, Dinosaurs and lots of bubbles are just some of the great things at this facility. http://www.discoverycube.org/

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Saturday: Jessalyn turned 2 on the 25th of this month. We spent the morning watching her favorite cartoons, Uncle Brandon got her a tricycle and watched her brother play football. Later in the day we sang Happy Birthday and she got to rip into her presents. She tried to burn herself a few times with the candle on the cake but no hospital visits were needed :) I took a picture of her every so often to make a "Day in the Life of Jessalyn" using 247 pictures click the link below to check that out: A Day in the Life of Jessalyn Sunday: I tried to teach Jessalyn how to ride her new trike, it didn't go as well as I planned. The seat was too far back for her little legs to reach the pedals all the way. Some adjustments to the trike were in order. Now she can touch but is having a hard time getting the mechanics down. Later  we went to go get some "pink" ice cream at Cold Stone Creamery "Da Da, Pink ice" *point point*. So we had some strawberry ice cream and then visited her Great Grandma. We had a good time over there, she's still quite as a mouse when we get there then 5 minutes before we leave shes talking up a storm. I think if my grandma wants to hear Jess speak shes gunna need to come over to our house! Jen should be putting the finishing touches on the Jessalyn's 2 Year Recap like she did last year: 1 year later I'll post a link to her posting about the 2 year mark when she'd done with it. All these things and more are on http://www.jasonandjen.com