So, I feel bad that I haven't said more about the baby on my blog. I could write something everyday about our little baby, and I should.

Actually, we aren't seeing much change yet in Mia, so we mostly just read about what our baby is doing. One of the visible things however is the persistent morning sickness. She hasn't been able to wake up and just get going with her day. That is frusterating. We are both trying to come up with ways to help her, but so far nothing seems to work. We hope that it will pass soon. I don't know what either of us would do if Mia was sick all nine months. In fact, let's not think about it.

Mia is under the impression that her stomach is getting bigger, but I don't see much difference. We can tell that the baby has shifted up into the location it will be for the rest of the pregnancy. And in a couple of weeks we get to go in for an ultrasound to determine the . I hope that we can find out on our first visit.

Overall we are still very excited about having a baby. I have been telling people at work, and almost everyone at church knows now, so we are really in full-swing here.

Today is Memorial Day. I want to write down my feelings about today, because I have a long family history of military service.

My father and both my grandfathers served in the military. I lived on and near many military bases. While I have not served myself, I am grateful for the men and women who defend this country. I know that there are many reasons that people enlist but there is always a realization that they must be willing to be deployed to defend the freedom that is so precious to us. I admire that.

With so many opportunities open to Americans, I am proud that our country still has men and women who are willing to join the Armed Forces. I am humbled that so many men and women are willing to put our society above themselves because they believe so strongly in the ideals that America espouses.

I would like to salute my family members who have served. Please let me know if I have forgotten anyone.

Lyle J
John H
Arthur J
Kim J
Sheila J
Ken W
David G

Did I say that I had figured everything out in my last post. I did have figured out that the instance of the movie clip that was designated to load my pictures did not have the proper area behind it set up to receive the pictures. But I had handled that when last I wrote.

Afterwards I discovered that my pictures were all coming in too large, which was a problem with the size setting of the area that I had to adjust to receive the pictures. I finally figured that out today.
Also today I discovered that Photoshop allows you to change the size an entire batch of photos automatically. That saved me tons of time. Of course I still have to rename all of them and enter the names into my XML documents.
And I had to figure out today why my HTML Template in Dreamweaver that I am going to use for these pages was coming up screwy. It still isn't quite what I want, but I am writing the navigation with a JavaScript file, so that will be easy to fix, meaning I only have to do it once and all my pages will be changed. I love that.

So, I have most of the technical difficulties behind me. Now it is just a matter of doing the work so that each page has it own little slideshow. I think I should be able to get that done this week. So, by next week (or so) I really should have pictures up on my Web site. Finally... have I said that already?

WOW! It wasn't easy, but I finally figured everything out and I am going to start posting my pictures soon. All I have to do now is tweak them a bit, find the right setting and so forth for the best resolution without making the files too large.

I am going to work on making the interface look better, but since I have it working, I don't want to keep it tied down for too long.

All in all, I am glad that I found this. I will definitely want to use it in other ways. For instance, I might use it for my navigation or something. But those are projects for another day, right now, I am just interested in finally posting some pictures to my Web site.

Last week I bought a new monitor. It was the perfect time because we were shopping for maternity clothes which meant that money was being spent on my wife and I could sneak in a request of my own. Now, instead of the 13" monitor from 1998 that I have been using for 6 years, I have a nice 17" CRT with a flat screen. I wish that it was one of the nifty LCD thin monitors, but I will take it one step at a time.

But, with a new monitor in hand, I have been more eager to update my Web site. I have spent the weekend looking for a nice Flash slideshow that I can use to show off my photos. There are plenty out there, but most involved lots of complicated JavaScript and very little Flash.

Finally, I found a very nice Flash interface that uses an XML document to pass the URL location of pictures to a movie clip with the Flash movie. Simple and elegant, the perfect solution. I spent most of today customizing the interface shell, then dropped in the script and tried it out.

Nothing happened. Actually something happened but not what I wanted. The interface shell came up for a second, then the whole thing disappeared. If I remove the XML document from its reference area the interface shell shows up -- but it doesn't have any pictures.

I made some headway in getting the example to work (you can see it in the Picturing section of my site) but can't get mine to work. I think that it either has something to do with the XML.Onload function or the movie clip I am trying to load to.
If anyone has ideas, I would love to hear them. Otherwise, I will keep fiddling until I get it right. And once I do, I am going to post some pictures... finally.

We took some video yesterday so that we could start documenting the pregnancy. It was the first time in a while that we have used the camera. I feel bad that we have it and have missed recording so many monumental things in our lives. But, we now have a bit of video and some pictures.

I am going to be changing the format of our pictures online, soon you will be able to check them out right from my site. I make a note here when the pictures are ready.

We went to the hospital today to hear the baby's heartbeat. The doctor said it might take a while to find, but as soon as she put the monitor on Mia's stomach we could hear it. The beat was very quick, about 160 beats per minute. Fortunately this is normal for a developing baby, but I was still amazed that such a little growing heart could sustain such a quick beat for so long.

We are very excited to know that our little kiddo is growing normally. Having a strong heartbeat greatly reduced the chance of an early miscarriage. This isn't something we have been too concerned with, but the extra reassurance is comforting.

The baby is about as long a tube of lipstick by now. He/She has little arms and legs with fingers and toes. Also, little teeth buds are growing in. The skin is still translucent, but the organs are all starting to take shape. This is an exciting time for the little fetus.

We are going to be taking pictures every week of the growing belly that is housing the little growing body. It will be a neat record of our pregnancy.

In a couple of weeks we will get to find out the of the baby. We have some names we are considering, but we don't want to divulge them just yet.

The weather in Boston has turned very Summer-esque recently. We are getting much more heat even though the humidity has not ramped up. The trees are green again, a much welcome sight after such a long winter.

I installed our air conditioners this week. We probably don't need them yet, but I had some free time. Last year we thought that we would be able to live on fans and open windows all summer. But about the third heatwave in July convinced us that we needed something more. Unfortunately by that time the only thing left were the bigger, more expensive units. We got one that had enough cooling power for three rooms. The we mangled our bedroom window frame getting it installed, and tried to us more fans to get the cool air out of the bedroom and into the rest of the house. It didn't work so well. We ended up sitting in front of fans in the living room, then piling blankets onto the bed at night.

This year, Mia decided that if she was going to be pregnant during the summer, she was going to get an AC for the bedroom, and put the big one out in the living room. So I installed the new AC in the bedroom with a friend of mine. Once again it was a big pain and we ended up mangling the frame even more. Then we went to the living room, expecting another fight. We had the AC installed in about five minutes. I wish all home improvement could be that easy. Of course it might help if I was more handy. I might have to try working on that.

Today is Mother's Day, and I can't wait any longer to post this.

We are pregnant. Mia is going to have a baby!! We are very excited and called all of our family early so they could tell people at Church. We thought it was a very nice way to say Happy Mother's Day by letting our mother's and Grandmother's know that they are going to have a new generation to dote on very soon. I don't think they will mind.

So the details are few right now, but I will give as many as I can. We are due November 30, 2004. That seems like so far away, but I am sure it will come very quickly. We don't know what the baby is yet, but we do know that the little kiddo is making Mia very sick in the mornings. Especially if she tries to move around too much after eating breakfast. Sigh, such is life I suppose.

At our first appointment with the Doctor, Mia had to get some drawn. She had not been able to keep anything down that morning, and ended up fainting in the office. It was scary at the time, but I was glad that I was there for her. We came home and I decided not to go back into work that day.

We are going to try keeping a photo log of the pregnancy on my main site, check out the progress our little baby is making week by week.

So once again I have failed to keep up with my blog. But, it is never to late to try and change, we will see if I do.

Last week we had a talent show at Church. I read some of my poems there. It is always fun to have the chance to share what I have written because I think that it is fun material. The audience also liked it, though it was hard to hear over the kids running around playing in the ural hall.

Reading my poems has made me realize that I don't do enough writing, I am going to try and start up again. That means more reading and less TV. It also means that I am going to have to be dedicated to it. It can be so easy to just ignore something because it takes effort. You keep ignoring them until you realize that those are the things you would rather be doing, effort or no.

There is so much that the human mind can imagine, I need to tap into it and let it come out.