Mood Swings

This is a story from several months back, but an amusing one nonetheless. It serves to show how moody little ones can be. Jack is often happy as can be one moment only to break down in tears the next. This is one of those stories. You see, Jack loves to play in the kitchen. His mother always seems to be in there cooking or cleaning, so he spends a lot of time in there with her. In fact, one of his favorite activities of all time is to help her unload the dishwasher. Actually, his real desire is to climb into the dishwasher, which brings us to this story. On the day in question, he figured out how to open the storage drawer located under the oven. After banging around some of the cookie sheets and other shiny metal things stored there, he decided to actually climb into the drawer. He was extremely proud of this feat, and he sat there and smiled for quite a while.

However, once the excitement wore off, the time came when he wanted to move on to something else. This is about the time he realized that he couldn't figure out how to get out of the drawer! Instant mood change. Tears of frustration overcame him. Instead of immediately rescuing the poor boy, his mother continued to take pictures of him, presumably so we could have shots like the one to the left that we'll be able to use to make fun of him for years to come.

Coming Attraction

In an effort to jump back into the land of blogging with a punch, I am pleased to announce that we are expecting another baby! Our little zygote will continue to grow and grow until he or she is ready to greet the world sometime toward the end of next March, about a month before Jack's second birthday. When asked his thoughts on becoming a big brother, he gleefully pointed to his mother's toes and said, "Piggies!" Obviously, he cannot express in words how excited he is. His mother and I couldn't be more thrilled either!

Keep In Touch

I am ashamed to say that this has been the longest break between postings here since the inception of this blog. The biggest reason is related to the previous post--my average time on the internet has gone from a good ten hours per day down to maybe one if I'm lucky. Another reason that accounts for one week of no updates was our recent summer vacation to Ocean City, MD (more on this in the next post).

There are two observations I'd like to make here. First, I know firsthand how frustrating it can be when you check someone's blog on a somewhat-daily basis, expecting quasi-regular updates and feeling let down when weeks go by with no change. Second, I am aware that the people that do read my blog, few as they are, are still checking here for updates on a regular basis. (According to the Site Meter, the site is averaging three hits per day.)

I shall now propose a couple solutions for enhancing the experience that is this blog. First is a promise I must make to myself, to update on a more regular basis. This goes back to the original intent of why many of us talked about creating blogs in the first place: to keep in touch with one another now that we are all in different cities and, in most cases, states. To quantify "more regular basis," I will make it a point to update at least once a week. To pull this off, I will take the approach of smaller updates and more pictures. I've been pretty happy with what I've seen of flickr so far, so I intend to use it more in conjunction with the basic Blogger setup.

The final solutions are the responsibility of you, the reader. First, I'm sure all of us who are writing blogs get some small satisfaction in knowing that what we are writing is actually being read by someone else. So please, PLEASE comment liberally on any and all posts. I will try, as I have in the past, to reciprocate on other's blogs too. Second, I suggest making it easy on yourself in terms of checking for updates. Don't just come to this page, see that it hasn't changed, and get all upset with me and click on to the next site. Take advantage of the wonderful world of syndication. I tried to make it easier for folks with the creation of the H-Blog, but I've found something that's much, much better than my ad hoc solution: Bloglines. This site allows you to create a feed for any site that provides for syndication. Blogger sites do this automatically. Same with LiveJournal. I have all your blogs set up as well as some commercially-syndicated sites like Wired News (see my current subscriptions here). I visit Bloglines once a day and it aggregates everything that has updated since my last visit. If you update your blog, the new posting shows up there. If you haven't updated, I don't have to go to your site to find that out. I get everyone's updates on one page. It's a pretty slick tool, well worth checking out, and should eliminate some amount of frustration. I even have Ross' blog in there, even though it looks like his blog will never be updated again. But, if it is, I'll be the first to know about it!

Anyway, thanks to everyone for bearing with me. I know that Ben will leave comments here to keep me to my promise of more regular updates, so you need not worry that I won't follow through. So, keep checking often, preferably through a tool like Bloglines, continue commenting here, and continue writing posts on your own blog. With that, I'm sure we can keep this thing going...