Here we have young Simon and Aron writing a letter on the wii to Santa.. or something. It’s not really specified who is the recipient but its a tradition here for them to comandeer a computer and write up a small piece of text. Neither of them can read, or write of course but that doesn’t stop them.

By the way, if you want a penpal it can be arranged for you to send emails to Aron, that he can reply to with the wii. He would love it!  Just let me know in the comments below and I promise you a steady (if slightly cryptic) correspondence.

Posted via email from martingumucio’s posterous

Much to my dismay it only took two weeks before it got in trouble. An 1/4″ audio-cable lost the tip of its connector inside one of the audio-out jacks. Horror! It has never happened to me before, but i learned my lesson: Don’t use cheap cables and adapters! Not only was one of the outputs unuseable, but the piece of metal stuck inside also distorted the sound coming out from the headphone jack. Disaster.

This weekend I finally took the time to open the Micron up to see how the plug was constructed internally, just to check if this was something i could take care of myself.

The construction is very rugged and tour-ready, its built like a tank with recessed keys and everything. It turns out that the same goes for field servicing. Opening it up is a very straightforward affair:

How to safely open the Alesis Micron:

• Unscrew the caps for the audio-jacks on the rear of the unit.
• Flip the unit over
• Loosen the screws around the perimeter of the unit, leave the recessed screws near the center alone, they keep the keyboard in place.
• Flip the unit over again and place the unit with the front towards you, carefully, you can now lift away the entire cover of the synth by first easing it away from the audio-jacks in the rear and the keyboard edge at the front. The bottom-plate that you just unscrewed will stay in place thanks to the weight of the keyboard that is attached to it.
• Lift the lid CAREFULLY as there is a ribbon connector that you need to unplug to avoid damaging its short cable. Its in the top-right corner and powers the lcd-screen.
• Thats all. Easy!

I was surprised at the old-school design with one chip per voice, seen in one of the images below. The plug turned out to be easy to open by the way, and my Micron is back in action, below you can see it in the hands of my trusty assistant Simon.

Here you have a typical morning at casa Gumucio Bergström. The kids normally wake up sometime between 5 and 6 am and the day gradually starts for kids and adults with the help of gruel and coffee respectively. Simon is currently on low-fiber high-fat diet, and no its not Atkins, its because doctors orders because he hasn’t been gaining weight like he should lately. Free play, kids morning television and breakfast then goes on until around after 8am.

At 9 am its time for Arons daycare, a short 5 minute walk away, so we take the double stroller pictured above. Simon normally falls asleep during this trip, making it the ideal start for any excursions by bus or car. You may notice that the stroller is actually meant to have the smallest kid in the back seat, well both Aron and Simon agrees that this way is much more fun. Simon can enjoy the scenery and Aron gets to pilot the train/bus/boat from his driver seat.

After leaving Aron at daycare I have Simon for myself for 6 whole hours, he is an excellent partner for adventure as everything big or small is greeted with the same enthusiasm.

However i did take a pic of the nearby outdoors gym.   Yes indeed! Finally a gym for fat people!  Consider it a response to This post on Dante and Magdas blog.

Aron testing the seated row.

I am enjoying the first calm week in a while, with no special agenda to fill my evenings I am using the time to just relax and sleep. It turned out it was a good week to do so because Aron and Simon are both having trouble sleeping. Aron wakes up at 5am after a restless night, and that is on a good night. On bad nights he wakes up almost every hour. Thankfully we just completed a campaign to promote rest and sleep with Aron so now he at least accepts the fact that he has to sleep in his own bed.

Anyway as I’m writing this it’s soon 8 am and I have been up for 3 hours.

Simon weighs in at 9 kilos now for his 5 month bday. He has a wonderful calm about him, completely different from Arons red-hot temper at the same age. He has just started joining us at the table when we eat, and loves crunching up newspaper paper with his little hands and is just getting the motor skills to identity toys, grab them and drop them on the floor.

December was such a cramped month, that I haven’t had the chance to blog about this before. The 13:th of december 2009, we baptised Simon Alexander Gumucio Bergström!

Three babies were getting baptised during the ceremony that took place in the church of Helga Trefaldighet, a sweet little chapel from the 11:th century.  Aron was a champion and sat with us at the front the whole time without making a scene. December is a difficult month, and Simon can count many relatives that live outside of town, but to our great joy almost everybody could attend,  making this a great party.

The speech the priest held was great. Patrik is a old friend and so knew we were in safe hands, among the highlights in the speech was when it covered how being baptized is like recieving the fingerprint of god, much like the church itself in one of its pillars actually holds a clear fingerprint from a worker, dating from when it was built, literally ages ago. It also got humurous when the audience was asked to keep a special place in their hearts for the children being baptised: To send them a mail once in a while, and why not join their groups on facebook?

We were also allowed to enjoy beautiful solo singing from Gabriel, accompanied by Anders Dillmar, the same instrumentalist that played at our wedding.

After the ceremony we gathered for a little coffee and cookies, from Magnus, Susanna and Gabriel we also got a preview from the musical City of Angels to offer our guests.

Thank you all!

I just wanted to share this photo of Simon with you. It’s from our visit today to the eye doctors in Stockholm where Aron tested his eyes. Aron did very well indeed on the tests and will now officially make the move from contact lenses to normal glasses. It is going to feel very strange to suddenly stop  the daily struggle with him to wear the contact lenses, but we know that he will appreciate the change.

This also means that today was our last visit to St Eriks barnsjukhus, they have tended to Arons ocular needs for the first part of his life, he got his first contact lens prescription here at the age of two months. Thanks for everything!

Simon now weights 7.6 kg and is 63 cm tall. Not bad for someone just turning2.5 months old!

Another week zipped by, a very social one this time. While I was away in Sundsvall for a work conference we had visits from K and A, and we promise you that there will come a time when coming here wont be like a huge work-camp for you guys! Thanks for all the help. A & C also payed us a visit and we hope they had a good visit in the big city.

Aron had a rather nasty accident on thursday when he managed to tilt our bar-cupboard on top of himself and one of the mirrors broke. He cut his face, but thankfully needed no stiches. We got quick and professional help and he is now back to his former self, but now with stories about “Erik” the nurse who helped him. He also wants to clean our faces and put band-aids on them, hopefully soon he will be back to 100%.

Simon is doing great, growing like crazy! Yesterday is his date to get weighted and measured, it’s going to be interesting to see what his stats are, he already feels like he is approaching Valentina in size,

Link tip for today:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/10/18/obama-team-continues-effort-isolate-fox-news/