Adventures with a Poodle & Baby

Blog website change

In a cost savings decision, we will no longer carry the www.jacobdillenbeck.net domain name. Access to this blog will still be active and available through the direct address of: http://poodlecafe.typepad.com/

Please make a note of this and update your favorites and bookmarks accordinly. Thanks for reading!

Change in Services

For now we'll be closing the books on the Jacob Picture of the Day. We're streamlining our many online accounts and payments and have decided to consolidate "All Things Jacob" down to this blog. The tomdillenbeck.net website will remain as a professional only website moving forward and the blog and facebook accounts will be the personal interest sites.

Jacob's Preschool Christmas Video

Jacob Puts Away the Dishes - Video

Good Movie for Jacob & Parents?

Here's a question for everyone -
Jacob loves to watch movies. Some we also like to watch, others are annoying. Some we like to watch for the first 50 times, but then at the 51st viewing it gets old.

Barney - Jacob's first love, we never liked it
Thomas the Train - A big hit all around, but they're short
Willy Wonka, Mary Poppins, Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang - All great movies for all of us.
Veggie Tales - he likes only sometimes and but they only hold his attention for 15 minutes.

Are there other movies like Willy Wonka, Mary Poppins that you know of?

He doesn't really care for animated Disney movies, for some reason. But we have a ton of them - maybe when he gets older. But for now, I would like to find other Chitty-Chitty type movies.

Resolution - Are You Doing It?

I'm just wondering how many of you are doing New Year's Resolutions. Please comment to let me know.

JPOW Is Up

The new Jacob's Picture of the Week (JPOW) is pretty much ready for use. It's basically the same as the Picture of the Day only we'll be updating on the weekend only.

There is a new archive for the weekly format - it will have the entire year of weekly thumbnails on one page.

JPOD becoming JPOW?

Since I can't seem to keep up with the Jacob Picture of the Day (JPOD) like I once did, I'm considering making it the Jacob Picture of the Week. Partly because now that he's approaching two years old, he's changes will be slower. We also find that he's not a part of regular life and it's almost awkward to take pictures of normal life just to capture the moment for the JPOD. Maybe there'll be at least one interesting thing per week - or maybe not and it will be normal situation pictures anyways. Well, that's the direction that I think we'll head as soon as his August 15th birthday arrives.

Blog is bonkers

I have no ideal why the blog is all messed up. Most of our content on the left is missing, including Jacob's Picture of the Day thumbnail and link. We just uploaded a few days worth of pictures. We've all been sick this weekend, but at least we had fun at Greenfield Village before it we got too bad.
See our pictures at: http://www.tomdillenbeck.net/jpod/

Jacob's Talking Outside Video

We're Back Online

We've just emerged from the dark side of the moon - it feels like we've been holding out breath without contact to the outside world while we were without internet access at home. We moved in on Saturday to the new house in Woodhaven, on Monday Comcast came to hook up our cable & internet but I didn't have time to get it working until Tuesday night.
Now we're back, along with the Picture of the Day. Enjoy.

Decorating the Blog

Now that our presents are all wrapped, the tree is trimmed and we're ready for Christmas there's just one thing left to do - decorate the blog for a festive winter scene. Merry Christmas Blog.

Video of Jacob & Sasha

Here's a video from the Nate & Heidi's blog, Life in the Farm:

Family Fun

Here's a recent fun project I was asked to do by Karen's family. This is her Uncle Bob and Aunt Marianne's family, where they were each photographed individually at a murder-mystery dinner a couple years ago. Apparently they didn't have any recent family photos and they were being given a photo album for their anniversary by others in the family who requested this be made up. The text is a reference to Alias promos.

Jacob's Picture of the Day - New Feature

Now that we've been doing the Picture of the Day for 1 year with Jacob, we have a new feature. In the top right corner you'll notice a thumbnail for the picture that was on a year ago. After you go to that photo or any other, you can always click on "Jacob's Picture of the Day" to return to the current day.

Also, if you're checking things out, under Picture Archives we've recently added the Archive by Month so you can quickly move around to the pictures by month.

Let us know how you like the JPOD and if we can improve it at all.

Jacob's Video Journal - Crawling

Check out this video. If you don't have a cable modem or faster, it may take an hour to download. The video is 3 minutes and has sound.

KidsWifeWorkLife

This weekend we're in Traverse City for a relaxing 3-day vacation. On the way up we listened to some new podcasts, some on architecture and some on parenting. Most of these were new podcasts that we were trying out and we came across a really good one called KidsWifeWorkLife - A Podcast about kids, marriage, work and life.
It's basically this couple with 2 young children talking for about an hour on different topics from their life raising kids, etc. Mike and Chris talked about their recent garage sale, funny stories about their kids, a day on the coast, a children's book review and a song. It really sounds like you're sitting down with good friends in your living room after the kids have gone to bed and talking about your life. They're so down to earth, real and funny that we were laughing a lot.
If you're into podcast and have kids - check it out. It's even worth getting into to podcasting just to hear this. You don't need an iPod, just download iTunes player for free or visit their website for other options.

Jacob's First YouTube Video

Watch with amazement as Jacob almost crawls, and then gives up to investigate some lint.

Jacob's Travels

Using Google Maps, we've set up a map to see all the places that Jacob has visited. There's a link on our blog sidebar for easy access. Check it out.

Is JPOD the death of the Blog?

Of course we live busy lives. There's only a short time in the day for doing computer updates and now that time seems to be spent preparing Jacob's Picture Of the Day. So that's why our fans haven't been seeing as much blogging. Here's another idea, we could do a Podcast instead! Such as the Gilmore Girls Podcast I came across this week where Dave and Alicia (young married couple) blather on in "around the house" dialect and have somehow become one of the most popular podcasts on iTunes.

The other thing that JPOD does is makes for less pictures in the blog itself. The cider mill pictures were added because they go along with our history in text and I'm not sure if we'll every look back and compare JPOD pics to Blog entries. So we'll still try to add pics to the blog as they relate to the days events.

But maybe the biggest reason there's less blogging these days is that Jacob's progress is much slower now then leading up to the birth and the first week or so home. He sleeps, eats, smiles, coos at his mom and the bird in his gym, cries when he's hungry or bored, gets bathed, driven around town, and when he's happy he'll stick out his tongue. More updates will be posted as they happen.