drewroman.com

We’re celebrating Christmas here, but Happy/Merry <insert holiday here> to all of you!

Michael, Drew, Cynthia and the Dogs (Milo, Nabi and Lily)

I’ve been slacking off quite a bit lately with posting, so here’s a post with some pics of the boy.

Michael just turned a year old and is doing great. He’s eating us out of house and home, burning through diapers like it’s nobody’s business and growing out of his clothes faster than we can buy them.

He has 6 teeth now, an extremely fast crawler, starting to pull himself up and is curious about EVERYTHING. We will certainly be in trouble soon.

We finally got a break in the rainy weather here in Maryland and today was beautiful, 70 degrees and sunny. Cynthia was working, so I decided that Michael and I would go have lunch and walk around the lake by Columbia Town Center. We were out for around 3 hours and he was having a ball, smiling and laughing at everyone we saw. What a great day! Time for a nap!

Went and had portraits taken today. Michael’s 7 and a half months old now. We’re not really sure exactly how much he weighs lately or how long he is, but he definitely weighs over 25 pounds now and wearing 9-12 month sized clothes.

I may be posting up a few more of the pictures later, but just wanted to get a few up for everyone’s enjoyment.

We had them taken at the Sear’s at the Columbia Town Center, the woman that took the pictures did a great job at keeping him smiling and got some pretty good shots.

Living in a townhouse can pose some interesting challenges. One of mine was mowing the small patch of grass in the front of our house. Our front lawn consists of a patch of grass approximately 10′x12′. A few years ago, I set out to find a better way.

When I was a kid I remember mowing the grass with a reel mower, which was great as you could hang it up on the wall, no fooling around with gas, nothing but a little kid power required to get the grass mowed. We tried that for a little while here, but one downside to reel mowers is that they work best when the grass hasn’t grown too high and you need a little bit of room to get the reel moving at a speed that actually cuts the grass instead of just bending it over.

Still not wanting to mess with gas, I tried using an electric weed whacker for a while. The patch of grass is small enough to actually get away with this and with a steady hand, actually doesn’t come out looking too bad. A day or two after cutting the grass the downsides of that approach would show up, patches that I missed or cut unevenly, that were now looking like sh**.

I was thinking at this stage that I needed a regular mower, but regular mowers were still not an option. I still didn’t want to mess around with gas as I didn’t have a good place to store it. Another factor working against me was that our townhouse in in the middle of the set, I wasn’t about to lug a big mower through the house, especially a gas powered one.

I started my search, but all I could find at first were 18″ corded electrics, there were also a few larger cordless ones at the time. Those would probably do the trick, but I still wasn’t happy, I needed something smaller and lighter. After a while I finally found the Lawn Pup, but they weren’t in stock anywhere. Good old Ebay came through and I had my Lawn Pup a few days later for around $80 or so, lightly used. It has a 13″ blade, the body made of a sturdy plastic and it’s powerful enough to hold up to all but the heaviest of grass.

It looks like a child’s toy, especially in person, some people give me funny looks when I bring it outside, but those looks fade quickly once I start mowing the grass. The bad thing is that I don’t believe that they make them anymore, and can’t find them anywhere, which is too bad. What I’d love to see is a cordless version, I would buy one in a minute if someone made one…

I did find a few possible replacements if my Lawn Pup gives out on me before we move into a single-family home.