Jimmy Mancusi Dot Com

June is a busy month for birthdays in my family, so here are a few:

Happy Birthday Mom! (today)
Happy Birthday Uncle Tony (today)
Happy Birthday Cori (yesterday)
Happy Birthday to Amanda's Grandfather Fred (yesterday)

Hope you all had a great day, and hopefully I remembered to call you :)

Since father's day has just past, and my daughter Emily's 1st birthday is quickly approaching (June 26th), I thought I would summarize some of my fatherhood experiences from the first year.

There have been way to many amazing things that have happened this year to write about here, but I will try to hit on a few of the key points.

1.

My sister has recently picked up the hobby of knitting, which she is actually pretty good at, at least I think so. She has been hell bent on making my daughter Emily a sweater for a while now. She is currently on her 2nd version of the sweater, and based on the text message I got from her last night, I think version 3 is right around the corner.

Her problem doesn't lie in technique or anything like that, it seems to be just plain old bad luck. The first version of the sweater currently resides at my house, but has never been worn by my daughter. By the time the sweater was complete Emily was way too big for it, in fact she might have always been to big for it. So we joking said the sweater was for her stuffed monkey, who is affectionately nick named Nanners. Nanners has also yet to wear the sweater, but there is a much better chance that it will fit him.

OK, so perhaps version 1 wasn't bad luck and was a bit of misjudgment, but i swear version 2 is purely bad luck. We have seen the 2nd version of the sweater which my sister has been feverishly working on to complete by Emily's first birthday (June 26th), and it was looking great, and she made it numerous sizes to large purposely. Then having at least 75% of the sweater complete she realized she may not have enough yarn to complete it. Not being able to find the yarn in the store she ordered more online. Of course when she placed the order she ordered the exact same thing, but thats not what arrived. The label is the same but the yarn is a visibly different color. My sister was optimistic that she might be able to finish the sweater with the remaining yarn, or if she needed the other yarn that things would turn out fine and the sweater would be saved. Around 7 last night I got a text message saying "We're gonna need a bigger monkey" so I am guessing the sweater didn't come out the way she wanted it to.

No big deal for her, plenty of time to get a version 3 created by the time winter rolls around, but it's not so simple for me. Where am I going to find all these stuffed monkeys of various sizes!?

Emily, my daughter, had her first birthday on June 26th, and we celebrated with a party this past Saturday (28th). We had the party at my brother and sister in law's house, which turned out to be a fantastic idea since it was over 90 degrees and they have a pool. Even though they have a very well heated pool (maybe I will get into that later, my brother in law thinks the pool is too cold if its under 88!) it was extremely refreshing and I spent most of the day in the pool. This was made possible simply because of my nieces, since watching them in the pool was considered helping I got away with this scott free!

We had a very good turn out, and most of my extended family made it down even though they had to drive an extra hour or so past my house, so thank you for making it out. I am still in the process of collecting pictures, we actually didn't get that many with our camera but my father and my mother in law were busy with their as always, so I will have more at a later date. For now you can head over to my flickr page and check out what we have. We even have a few pictures up there form the day after, enjoying some of the new toys Emily got.

Thanks again to everyone that came and to my in laws for letting us host the party at their place!

So at some point during Emily's party I started jumping into the pool with my niece Cady, at first mimicking the jumps that she would do and somehow it lead to me doing belly flops for the amusement of my family and friends. Last year I tried a couple of times to get the perfect picture right before impact on a belly flop and came up a bit short, so I figured I would try again. After 2 or 3 flops with my dad trying to snap a picture with his camera (I will add this pictures to flickr soon), I remembered that my camera had a multi-burst mode which takes 16 pictures in a couple of seconds. It was still really hard to get the perfect picture since it was normally to early or to late to get everything, but I think they came out pretty well. You can see in the picture above I had pretty good form on that one, unfortunately the 16 frames wasn't near enough.

Another picture after the break and a little more after math...

Surprise!

This weekend we had a surprise birthday party for my sister in law Sheryl. The party went really well and we think she was surprised but I haven't heard the verdict on whether or not we really got her. I wont tell you how old Sheryl is, that wouldn't be nice, but if you were to say take 20 and double it, you would be on the money ;)

The surprise plan went off pretty seamlessly but I think she may have been onto something. One of her friends was suppose to get her out of the house around noon, and return around 2. We left our house with the intention of getting there to help set up around noon, but we ended up circling random neighborhoods in the area waiting for a text message letting us know she had left the house. As soon as she left the house we had to circle a bit more to make sure she passed us on her way out. This is when Amanda got a call from Sheryl asking what she was up to today. We found out later that she had placed a few of these calls to different friends trying to figure out what they were doing today/tonight, which is why I think she might have been onto us.

Even if she was onto us, I still think she was surprised. We had all the cars parked off site, and shuttled everyone to the house. So when she pulled up there were no cars. She opened the garage to park, and we were all standing there waiting for her. Either way we all had a blast so it was a success.

Happy Birthday Sheryl.

Many of you that have known me for a long time know my father has had some heart issues over the past 6 years. For anyone who hasn't known this here is a quick recap of what has happened so far.

About 6 years ago (not exactly sure on dates) my dad wasn't feeling well and ended up going to the hospital. They ran tests and found out that there was bacteria growing on one of the valves in my father's heart. Since there was risk that the bacteria could break off and cause a major stroke, he needed open heart surgery the next day. Everything went well and we were out of the hospital and on to recovery. Then a year or so later they found that he had bacteria on another valve, so once again we were off to the hospital for a second open heart surgery.

My father has had a few issues or side effects from the two surgeries, including some memory problems and fatigue. The fatigue continues to get worse since one of the valves in his heart is leaking. This leak is a condition that normally only people who have multiple heart surgeries get, or as we like to call them, the lucky ones.

The title of the picture to the right is "Houston Has A Big Heart", and I find that very fitting with everything that has transpired over the past week.

As I mentioned in an early post, my parents flew out to Houston so my dad could have a "procedure" to fix a leak in his heart. As with most things in life, there were a few speed bumps in the process. Once my dad got out there, they ran some tests to get an idea of what they were dealing with before they jump into his heart. When they did these tests they found what turned out to be tissue from one of his original valves that was removed years ago. With this tissue in the heart, the doctors weren't sure if they could preform the procedure as they planned and it looked like we were heading toward another open heart surgery...