Interesting Times

Carina seems to be transitioning into threeyearoldhood pretty well; she’s mostly back to normal for us, but she seems to enjoy testing others to see what she can get away with.  Follow-through is really all that is needed for her to see you’re serious.  She enjoys talking a lot more these days, often during storytime we’ll digress and talk for several minutes about dogs or school or the babies.

The twins are coming along nicely.  Eleanor is rolling left and right quickly across the floor, we’re starting to have to use the baby gate so she doesn’t roll down some stairs by accident.  She almost has the commando crawl down.  Drake is getting to be very good at sitting up, except for the occasional faceplant on a toy in front of him.  He can roll over a little, and does push-ups like a champ, but isn’t very mobile yet as Jen has noted.  I’ve been pouring through a movie or two a week recently, as I get 40-60 minutes a night while feeding the babies before I get to bed.  I’ll post some of my favorites soon.

Work these days is an interesting mix.  Being a phase engineer for Orion is fun; lots of exposure to all of the subsystems on the vehicle.  There are some great challenges we’re solving as we try not to be distracted too much by all of the politics going on.  Every week the future outlook changes; many people have stopped worrying about it by now and focus on figuring out how to get Orion flying.  After over a year of near-hibernation, my old role in MSL is starting to reawaken.  It is a welcome distraction from the many meetings of Orion, as I get to work with old and new friends as we hammer down a few things left in the flight software and begin to think hard about how we’re going to fly this spacecraft.