On Saturday, Jenni, Jack, and I lugged computers over to Clark’s house for some video gaming to celebrate Clark’s and my birthdays. January 20th was a good midpoint between our birthdays.
I had recently put together a new computer and there’s no better way to ‘test out’ a new computer than playing video games. And the new computer was glorious to play games on.
Several of Clark’s groomsmen were present and they played Rune while Jack, Jenni, and I played Marvel Ultimate Alliance. Later, Jenni and Mary played Battle for Middle Earth 2 while Jack and I joined in on Rune. The amount of mouse clicking was insane as we played Rune for an hour.
We played a big game of Battle for Middle Earth 2 with five human players against three computer players toward the end of the gaming party. The computer team didn’t pose much of a challenge the first game, but they almost took me out in our second game. Fortunately, everyone came to bail me out, I recovered from my loss, and we had a very satisfying victory.
Sunday, we went to church and quickly got back to our apartment for a big family gathering celebrating Travis’ birthday. We had 13 people in our small apartment. There was great food and lots of laughs, but the best laugh came during the group picture:
We were blessed that God allowed us to surprise the whole family with our big announcement. And the punchline couldn’t have been set up better. I had set up my father-in-law’s Canon S3 camera on a table with my Canon 300D for a group picture. I set his camera on video mode and recorded the whole photo session. After the excitement settled down, we revisited the video and enjoyed watching everyone’s reactions.
Two nights before, we had a special way of telling Jack. We tried to tackle him down and make him say “Uncle.” Unfortunately for us, he’s been working out and we couldn’t pin him down. Finally, when we were all huffing and puffing from wrestling, Jenni asked Jack to say it anyway. After that, Jenni let Jack know that he was going to be an uncle.
Going back in time, how Jennilyn broke the news to me deserves special praise. I came home after a lengthy day at work, the day after a big snow storm covered Beaverton like frosting on a cake. She told me that she took some pictures that day and wanted me to look at them. I plopped onto our computer chair, opened up Picasa, and found pictures of Jenni holding something that looked like a thermometer. But it wasn’t a thermometer.
“Are you really?” I asked.
“That’s what it says,” she replied.
“Really?” Jennilyn nodded at me. “Cool.” I responded wide-eyed.
“Aren’t you proud of me?! I used a digital pregnancy test!” Jenni exclaimed.
“Guess we’ll have to get rid of your art desk to make room for this baby,” I thought out loud. How come I manage to say silly things at times like these?