This little boy is trying to learn to walk, and won't give up. What he does at the end will make you smile. 


Age: 11 months

Over the past 12 months we took at least one picture of Jacqueline every day (except 11/16) and posted those photos on Flickr. I’ve put together a video with those photos that you can watch below.

Also be sure to check out the Baby365 videos from the year before!

Nine months ago today, Jacqueline was born. I can’t believe it has been 9 months already, she’s growing so fast. I’ve got some video I took today, I’ll get it posted tomorrow if I can get time to put it together.

Check out baby Jacqueline’s new hat!

   

I got that hat from the fine folks from MailChimp while at the CMS Expo conference in Chicago this week. I thought that was no way it would fit on her, but fortunately she has my big head!

It will easily fall off, but one day she’ll fit it snugly!

I took the day off of work today, and took Natalie and baby Jacqueline to the baby’s first baseball game.

I went to the Oakland A’s game (playing the Red Sox of course) with Mike Walsh, a fellow coworker at DotNetNuke. I wanted to scout out the stadium, and figure out how taking the baby to today’s day game was. The seats last night were great, section 111 row 12, just up from the field. The weather was perfect, the game, eh, not so much, the Sox lost 0-5.

Today’s game was different. The weather, not so great, more on that later. The seats, they were even better, though only one row closer and 2 closer to home plate.

We got to the parking lot just as the Star Spangled Banner was being sung. We got into the game and to our seats, after walking through the rain! It started raining on the way into the stadium. By the time we got to the seats though it actually stopped raining.

We watched the first couple of innings, and the baby enjoyed looking at all the new people around. About the third inning we brought out some formula and the baby took a bottle and passed out in my lap. We shifted her over to Natalie so I could run up to concessions and get us some lunch. While I was up there I missed a homerun, and then the rain started.

I ended up back at the seats for a couple of minutes, but then we decided to call it a day. Too much rain, no ponchos, and the stadium staff told us out umbrella was too big! So we headed home.

Overall a good day with the baby, even if we missed the end of the game.

Today, Natalie and I took Jacqueline to the park down the street to get outside a bit. We stuck her in the swing and let her play in the grass.

The swing just kind of exists for her, she can’t really do much except sit there and hold on! Here’s a video of some of that excitement.

The grass was much more entertaining for her, she has never experienced grass before, and she found it useful to hold on to while trying to maintain her balance.

So Jacqueline got to try out Carrots for the first time yesterday. Here’s a video of that, at least the beginning. I have an ending video as well where things really start to go downhill! I’ll try to get it up next week when I get home.

Today was our longest day away from the house with the baby, and all in all things went very well.

We left around 10am and headed up towards Vacaville, timing it so that the baby had a bottle around 8:30, and was up until we hit the road at 10. She fell asleep and woke about 20 minutes into our lunch at Panera Bread at Nut Tree in Vacaville. From there she had a bottle and was awake for more of the next couple of hours as we did a little shopping at the outlet mall in Vacaville.

Then we headed off to a Super Bowl party in Fairfield, Jacqueline got another bottle there, but didn’t get down to sleep till probably almost 5pm, it was loud, and she wasn’t too big a fan of the cheering (mostly from silly Steelers fans) but she held up very well.

She got another bottle right before we left and slept the whole ride home. Natalie fed her again when we got home, though I think she slept through most of that feeding. We’ll see how she sleeps tonight, hopefully most of the night! I’m off to bed early as well, I am going to hit the office early so I can spend a few hours in the  afternoon dealing with the Nissan Leaf which is at the dealer waiting.

Six years ago today I met the most beautiful woman in the world. We met for dinner at Applebees, we closed the place down. We had talked on Match.com for a few days prior to meeting, but January 29th, 2005 was the first time we saw each other face to face.

Less than nine months later we were engaged, and less than two years later we were married. We’ve been married 4 years now, and have a beautiful baby girl (almost 4 months).

I love you Natalie.

So today’s blog post is going to be boring one, but hey, it’s my blog right? Was up late last night, working on a variety of things, but mainly on homework. I’m now halfway through the assignments for my Money and Banking course, I need to get my midterm exam setup somewhere here in the area and get finished up with the rest of the assignments to do the final. I have to be done by the 8th of February, as that’s when my online course expires!

So here it goes. The second attempt at writing this blog post. I had it 50% complete about 10 minutes ago, but then Windows Live Writer started typing backwards and then completely crapped out and went away. 2010 In Review

I haven’t blogged here on the website in a while (though I’ve blogged quite a bit elsewhere, that’s what you see here as the latest posts).

If you’re a friend on Facebook you can follow along on the status of the baby, you can also check out baby Jacqueline’s website for some updates (from twitter, on the left) and photos (from flickr on the homepage there).

As of right now Natalie is trying to sleep a little, got something to take the edge off the pain a bit, we’ll see how long that lasts and how things progress.

-Chris & Natalie

Today was our first ultrasound, we got the see our baby's heartbeat for the first time. HOLY CRIKEY this just got really real, in a good way. Natalie was brought to tears, I realized this as my cue to get up from my chair and hold her hand!

Based on the ultrasound we are now told our due date is 10/1/2010, not near as cool as 10/10/10, but it will have to do! My buddy Jim will be pulling for us to delay a day and go 10/2/10 in honor of his birthday. Dude will be 34 by then, crikey he’s old :)

So we are getting more and more excited about the coming baby. In the doctor’s office today I picked up a flyer for a cord-blood bank, something I had never heard of before this morning. I read through the flyer and the basic gist is they will take your baby’s umbilical cord blood and cryogenically store it for an amount of time in case you need it. They say the stem cells in cord blood can be used to cure all sorts of diseases. I thought this sounded like a cool idea, and figured I would check out the pricing: basically it was $150 for the kit to collect and ship the blood back to the cord-blood bank.

Then you paid something like $1800 for 18 years of storage, or $96/mo, or $65/mo for a two year term. Kind of pricey I thought. So I thought about that, and figured I would do some research over the coming months to see if this is something we wanted to do. Well, low and behold I loaded up MSN.com this evening (putting off packing for the trip to California) and saw a headline talking about cord-blood banks! Off to read it I went.

Take a read yourself, the basic gist of the article, and the feedback from the various doctors and medical societies mentioned in the article is that private cord-blood banks are pretty much a waste of money. So now I have it in my head that we don’t use a cord-blood bank, but we’ve got another 7 months or so to decide, we’ll see what happens in that time frame and what other research says.

Now I’m off to work on packing more, we’ve got a long road trip starting in the morning.

So what was going to be a single big announcement, that I’ve been sitting on for a number of weeks now, recently got trumped. So before I talk about the first announcement, I’ll talk about the one that trumped it!

Natalie and I are having a baby! So far we’re only about 5 or 6 weeks in, with a tentative due date of 10/16/2010, though I am really hoping we can pop that kid out on 10/10/10! We are most definitely excited about this, though it wasn’t exactly planned, it definitely is something we look forward to. I keep telling her I want twin boys, and my good buddy Leigh over the pond suggest that if we do we name them Jack and Daniel, I love it!

Now, for the original announcement ;) We are moving to California! Years ago I left home. I went to Missouri. I went to school. I got a job. I changed jobs (a few times). I lived in Missouri for 14 years, my parents even lived there for a while, but to be honest, I never really considered it home, it was just where I was in life. Just over 6 months ago we moved to Colorado. We purchased our first home. We love it, but even Colorado still doesn’t quite feel like home, it does more so than Missouri ever did, but there is still something missing here. (We actually love Parker Colorado, and have the best neighbors ever, they are some of our closest friends.)

I’ve always thought of home as California. I went to high school (3 of 4 years anyways) in California. I left for college, and I always said I would go back if I could make things work out. Well things are working out. Natalie and I put the house on the market two weeks ago and we are moving to California! I won’t torture everyone in the way I did with our move to Colorado (think goingtocolorado.com) but I will try to keep friends and family who are interested up to date as things progress.

I can’t go into other details just yet, what I’ll be doing there, who I will be working for, but I can tell you that I start working in California on March 1st. I look forward to catching up with friends from high school and ages past, and Natalie looks forward to winters that don’t get below freezing constantly :)

If you are interested in purchasing a great house in Parker Colorado be sure to check out ours, it is for sale!