2011??? Already!

Ok so I have not kept this up. I will be making a concerted effort to update at least once a month this year. It's not a resolution just a goal.

So since my last post, Dominic is now just a few months from being a 3 year old. We have been blessed to not have a terrible 2 year old like everyone talks about. He is not perfect but we know how lucky we are to have him as our son. He is still smart as a whip and learns more everyday. We are hoping to get him into pre-school this year after he is fully potty trained.

Molly and I had a talk in September about expanding our family. We decided to try and get pregnant again. We were once again blessed with success. We are due at the beginning of June. We found out at the end of this month what we are having. We are just hoping for another happy healthy baby. Molly is now leaning for a girl and I for another studly little man! We have decided that 2 kids will be it. That was the deal when we got married.

Spring in February?

We got out and enjoyed some of the sunshine this past weekend. Took Dominic to the park and he just loved te swings. He usually gets bored after a minute or two. We could not get him out of it this time. He wanted Molly and I to swing next to him. He kept pointing at the swings next to him and commanding us to swing with him. Before the swing we climbed the little climbing wall there and slid down the slides. We are having so much fun with him. We are very lucky!





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Our lives for the next 4 months....

Time for a Molly and John update. We are all caught up on Dominic for now. Molly and I are training for another Triathlon. This year we are doing a Half Ironman. This will be in Sunriver Oregon on June 26th. The race begins with a 1.2 mile open water swim followed by a mountainous 58 mile road bike ride finished off be a half marathon, 13.1 miles. This will be our longest attempt to date. We both have done sprint and Olympic distance triathlons before in 2007 before Dominic was born.

Molly, the athletic animal she is, did the Portland marathon last year,2009. She did great. I plan on doing the 2010 Portland marathon with her this year. We have a very active year planned for sure. We are in the beginning stages of our training for the year. I was sick for almost a full 2 months to start 2010. Sick enough to not be able to start training early like I had hoped. Molly has been dealing with some joint pain issues so she has been delayed too. I have been able to train now for the last 2 weeks and have been very happy with my progress, minus the swimming. I have the hardest time with the swimming for whatever reason. I will be devoting a lot of late nights to the Superior pool for the next few months.

It is a tricky thing trying to balance work, family and training time. I am mainly training after Dominic goes to bed, 8pm. I also am doing longer rides and runs during his naps on my days off. That has worked out well for maximizing my family and training times without neglecting either. As for time with my lovely wife, I have not figured all that out yet. We seem to find time for eachother though and that is great. When we are in longer training days it will become harder to balance it all. We know what we signed up for though and sacrifice is part of it.

We have 4 events scheduled for 2010 starting off with the Pear Blossom 10 mile run here in Medford. I have an extra triathlon scheduled, the Graniteman, which is a nice warm up for the Half Ironman. It includes a .75 mile swim in Applegate Lake, followed by a 14 mile mountain bike ride around the lake and finished up with a 5 mile run. Should be fun! Molly will not be doing this because of the treachorous mountain bike section. She may do one of the running events there the same day. I hope we can stay healthy and complete all of our active lofty goals for 2010. Wish us luck!!

Where did the time go???

It has been so long since my last post that I do not know where to start. My most important story over the last 10 months is definitely our little angel Dominic. He has changed and grown in so many wonderful ways. His vocabulary increases daily now and we can hardly believe the words he can manage. His pronunciation is better than a lot of adults we know. We are very proud. He is a very smart boy. He walks, runs, jumps and climbs very well. He seems to have no limits. He really likes riding his "bikey" around the neighborhood. He can ride that thing forever it seems. We have started working with him on spelling and reading as well. WOuld be nice for him to know how to do all of this by the age of 3. He knows a lot of letters and can spell some words already. We got him a couple of spelling games and constantly read to him. We are having a blast with him. Everyday is a new adventure.

He is a very loving boy and always has kisses for his adoring parents. His bedtime is 8 oclock and most times he does not fuss. He mostly goes screaming happily down the hall to his room saying "nite nite" all the way into his room. He has taken up sleeping with his favorite toy of the day. Lately that has been a generously donated "choo choo" form Aunt Robin. It is pretty big and he holds on to it with a vice like grip and off to sleep he goes. He sleeps through until around 7 most days. So mom and I get time to relax and get some sleep too. I will try and post more often so not so much time goes by between updates. Thanks for checking out my Blog.

Dominic's first year

Sorry it's been a while since I have posted. Been a very busy year as you can imagine. Having a baby under a year old keeps us pretty busy. Well Dominic will be a year old very soon. We have had such a great time raising him in his first year. He has been a very happy and healthy boy. We are truly blessed. We have had so many firsts with him.

He started crawling at 6 months. Since then Molly and I have had quite a busy time at home making sure he does not get into things he should not get into. For the most part he has a great natural ability to know what is safe and what is not. He is careful enough with things that are not stable that he has never pulled anthing down on him that could hurt him. Since he has become better at crawling he has become quite the speedster. He picked up a habit of trying to crawl with something in either or both of his hands?! A difficult task to be sure. He learned to stand up using furniture at about 9 months. I taught him to get down off of furniture at 9 months as well. He is quick learner.

He has been able to say Da da and Ma ma for quite a while already. I recently taught him to nod his head Yes and to clap on command. He is a very good clapper. We just got through with his first round of swimming lessons where he did very well too. Surprise surprise, I think My son is good at everything. I am pretty sure that is my job. Within the last month he has begun to stand up all by himself in the middle of the floor. He can stand there and squat all the way down and then stand right back up again. He seems to be very strong. On Easter morning he took his first steps at church with grandma. Molly and I saw him take a step once before but not really walk. Later on Easter day he did take about 7-8 steps for us at home. Molly and I both got to see it and we were very excited. He has not really started to walk a lot just when he feels like it. We are not in a hurry to have him running around on us just yet so it is ok with us.

Well thank you for checking my Blog out. As for the rest of our lives, we are doing great. Molly is keeping busy with lots of web design business. Our store Southern Oregon Subaru Volvo Mitsubishi is doing very good. We are very fortunate to sell such great products that keep our clients happy and coming back. The banks are loosening up their wallets as well so we are getting a lot of loans approved. This is a great time to be buying a vehicle. Interest rates are low and our vehicles are ready for new homes. I will try and keep my posts up to date from now on. Life is slowing a little so I should have the time.

Our first Family Trip!!!

During my family leave, we took our first road trip as a family. We decided to visit our friends, Mark and Esther and their beautiful 1 year old daughter, Amelia. Dominic, our son, was only 3 weeks old at the time. They live in Chico, California. Since we were already going that far into Ca. we decided to go to Yosemite and then to the bay area to visit my dad and Dominic's grandpa. We decided to take our time and come back when we wanted to. No time limits at all.

So we headed out on a Monday and began our open ended trip. We spent a few days in Chico visiting with Mark Esther and Amelia. We had a great time with them and they were very gracious hosts. This was the first time we saw their daughter. We had not seen Mark and Esther for 4 long years. We realized we were being bad friends. We will not wait that long again. Amelia was a lot of fun and very interested in Dominic. She was just learning to walk and was very entertaining. It was a very nice visit. We will not wait 4 years to see our friends again.

Now it was off to Yosemite. Neither of us had ever been to Yosemite before. We were very excited to see all the beauty it had to offer. We had our hikes all picked out before we got there. We love to hike. We stayed in one of the cabins in Yosemite valley. The cabin was located in Curry village. we were very close to everything we needed staying there. We decided to bring our breakfast and lunches with us and eat dinner there at one of the restaurants. That worked out well for packing the food. there was a lot less to worry about. Dominic was a great traveler. Sleeping most of the way, sometimes 4-5 hours at a time. We missed a turn or two on the way but we finally ended up at entrance to Yosemite. We were very eager to see the beauty of the park. We began driving down the road to the valley and were a little unimpressed. We made it through the first tunnel and were blown away with the first siting of El capitan and Half Dome. Words can not describe the beauty of this valley. We arrived in late May. A great time to go by the way. The weather was perfect and the many waterfalls were spectacular. We spent a few days hiking all around the park with little Dominic strapped to the front of us. He slept most of the time while we hiked. We hiked about ten miles while we were there. Keep in mind, Molly had given birht to Dominic only a few weeks before all of this hiking. People were blown away that she was doing so much so soon after giving birth. Everyone was very inpressed. We got a lot of attention because of how small Dominic was. We are training him to be an outdoor kid.

It was hard to leave such a beautiful place. We finally left and headed down to the bay area to visit my dad. We longed to be back in Yosemite when we saw the brown hills and smoggy sky of the Silicon Valley. We were there to visit family so we braved it for them. We arrived much earlier than we had planned so had to kill some time. We drove around for a while taking Molly on a tour of my boyhood homestead. It was interesting to see how it had all changed in the last 25 years. We had a great visit with my dad and his wife Ruth. They fed us well and made sure we were comfortable. The next day we went and visited my aunt Janan and uncle Harry who live in Campbell. They were very excited to meet Dominic. We had lots of fun with them too. We spent a few hours with them and then decided to go to Santa Cruz. We both love the beach. It was not very hot in Santa Cruz so we drove a long the coastline. We stopped at a popular surf spot where they had a surf contest going on. We watched the contest for a while. I missed hanging out in Santa Cruz. I spent a lot of time there as a kid and teenager. We headed back over to my dad's house for a nice dinner with my dad and Ruth and my step brother Daniel and step sister Canela. A good time was had by all.

All in all we had a great trip. We had a great time with our visiting and sight seeing. We highly recommend going to Yosemite sometime in your life. It is impossible to describe it's beauty. Everywhere you look is like looking at a postcard. We still talk about it and can't believe we had not been there before now. I lived in the bay area most of my life. I had no idea that such a beautiful place like Yosemite was just 4 hours away. We will be going back next year for sure.

Little baby Dominic Joel Bermea has arrived!!!!!

As of April 26th, 2008, I am a Daddy!! Our son was born on this monumental day. Molly did great before during and after the delivery. She is so strong. She started having contractions on saturday, the 26th, morning. I was out at the race track in the morning. By the time I got home it was time to start timing the contractions. I wanted to stay home for a few more hours so I could watch the hockey game that was on. We made it through two periods of hockey and decided we better get to the hospital. They have a nice plasma tv in the delivery room so I did not miss much of the game. We arrived at the hospital close to 2 pm. We made our phone calls to our mom's and Molly's good friend Jen. Jen is a delivery nurse at RVMC. She was a great help.

Molly was dialated to 6cm. by the time she was first checked. The nurses figured since this is her first baby it would take a long time to deliver. Molly was alert and still smiling all the way up to 7cm. At about 5pm the contractions got harder and she began to do her breathing and focus on her pain meter. Thanks to Jen Nidalmia for that great birthing tool. Jen Nidalmia is a midwife and the wife of my friend Randy. Molly went from 7-10 cm. very quickly. Her water still had not broken. When Molly was fully dialated, the nurses still thought it could be hours until the baby was delivered. Molly has always been an over achiever. At about 5:45pm Molly's water broke and she was ready to push. The only problem was our Dr. was out of town and the on call Dr. was in surgery. The nurses asked her not to push! Molly was ready to push so she did not wait long to do so. The second on call Dr. showed up just in time to see the baby moving down the birth canal. Molly pushed so well that in less than 15 minutes from her water breaking Little baby Dominic was here. He was born at 6pm sharp.

Everyone from the nurses to the Dr's were very impressed with how Molly was able to push. It was a very fast delivery. We were at the hospital about four hours and our baby was with us already. I still can't believe how fast Molly was able to deliver our first lovely child. She never ceases to amaze me. Thank you Molly for taking such care with our boy. You are an awesome Mother.

Dominic came out and had to be intibated to get him breathing strong. After a few minutes he was in mom's arms. He was very alert and curious. He was also very strong, like his mom. He could already lift his head off of Molly's chest. Most babies sleep a long time when they are first born. Dominic was up for at least 4 hours visiting with all of his family. We had about 15 people visit us the first night. It was a lot of fun. It was great that Molly delivered in the early evening and not in the middle of the night. We were able to leave the hospital the very next morning. Once again due to how strong Molly is and how quickly she is able to heal. We checked out at 11am and brought baby Dominic home for the first time.....