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George, Julie, and Michael are happy to announce the newest member of the family!

Samuel Joseph Jaros

Well the Holidays have officially begun. So happy Thanksgiving to everyone. This year has been a really wonderful year. Watching Michael grow up has been really exciting. Just today he started to do arithmetic!

We've been working on counting and last night he counted to ten for the first time. And this morning, while getting ready for church I was holding one of Mike's shoes and he was holding one. He said, "Michael have one shoe. Daddy have one shoe." So I said, "Mike, if you have one shoe and I have one shoe, how many shoes are there?" He quickly answered "Two shoes!" Then we did it with diggers (he wanted to bring his to the church nursery, where there was already a digger): "If Michael has one digger and church has one digger, how many diggers are there?" "Two diggers!" Julie and I are real impressed.

He's also been helping Julie cook (making pizza crust right now), and even helped Julie make most of the dishes she brought for Thanksgiving.

I got all caught up with the family photo album last night, so there's a bunch of new pictures and videos of Michael from October and November. Enjoy! We are!
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This weekend was very nice. We didn't do anything too exciting, but just enjoyed it, especially Sunday. After church on Sunday I spent most of the day playing with Mike and watching football. We started the day out by using Google Images to find pictures of "woo woos" and trucks.Mike was being very cute pointing to the thumbnails he wanted to see larger, saying "dat one". For some reason he especially liked a few pictures of trucks that had flipped over and/or spilled their load. He'd point to them and say "Uh oh" and laugh, especially the picture of the giant dump truck that was upside down.

Then at noon I turned on the Bears game and Mike got very excited. He was jumping around, pointing to the TV yelling "Go Bears!" and "Woo Hoo!". He'd run up to the TV and point, yell "Go Bears!", run to me, climb on my lap, jump up and down yelling "Go Bears, go Bears!", fall off my lap (literally belly flop off, trusting I'd catch him before he hit the floor), run up to the TV and repeat the whole process. When I found his Bears football he got very excited and we played catch for quite a while (interspersed with shouts of "Go Bears" and occasional running in circles around the football yelling "Woo Hoo"). Mike is getting very good at throwing and even catching the football now.

At one point, after a big defensive hit on the Titans, I told him the Bears guys hit like trains. From that point on "Go Bears" was interspersed with "Choo Choo guys!" Toward the end of the game, as the Bears were losing, I started groaning and shouting "Oh No". Mike picked up on that, too and started saying "Go Bea... Oh noooo." It was too cute.

After the game Mike came up to me and asked for "Uh ohs trucks". So we spent the afternoon finding more overturned trucks, fire engines, and police cars on Google Images and watching race cars on TV. He was delighted. It was a very nice weekend, but now that Mike knows he can see pictures of trucks on my computer he asks for more "Uh ohs trucks" and "woo woos" every few minutes.

Tonight we went to Lowes for a while. Michael spent most of the time with the lawn mowers while Julie and I took turns shopping. There were just a few mowers left from the summer display and more snow blowers now. Michael found the snow blowers just as impressive as the mowers. He even tried pushing one down the aisle, but it was a little bit too heavy. He gave up after a few feet. But he did something tonight that really impressed me. He discovered the crank on one of the snow blowers that caused the blower tower to rotate. So he turned the crank and thought it was pretty neat. Then he stopped, went up to where the crank shaft met the blower tower, pointed to the shaft and said, clear as a bell, "This...", then pointed to the blower, "turns this." I was amazed. Do I have some sort of mechanical genius on my hands? Maybe. I bought him a glow stick I was so proud. He loved it.