Happy Birthday, Juliana! My how the year has flown! A year ago today, you came into our lives and changed them forever. It’s difficult now to remember what life was like before you came along – it seems that our lives didn’t truly begin until you became a part of them. Now, our world revolves around you. We love you so much! Every day with you is pure joy.

A little about you on your first birthday:

You are our little ham! You are not shy. You love to be the center of attention and to make people smile with your cheesy, toothy grin and crinkled little nose. You’ll point at people with your little pointer finger or smile at the back of their heads until you can get their attention.

You are always happy and full of expression. Your latest darling expression is your “Oh” face, that comes out whenever you’re excited or surprised, one that we’ll hopefully catch on camera here soon.

You love to give hugs and kisses, especially to your little doggy known to you as “hah hah hah” (panting sound which is baby sign language for doggy). A Juliana kiss = a good hard bite to the nose.

Your favorite baby signs are “more”, “all done” (especially when Mommy is using the aspirator on your nose), and “doggy.”

You are now walking and talking and climbing stairs. And your favorite and first word, aside from “daddy”, is “uh oh”. You love to drop items from your high chair and say “uh oh”. And as much as your mommy tries to teach you “ma-ma”, it seems she will be “daddy” for a while.

You are very delicate and detail-oriented. You have a knack for finding the tiniest particles on the floor. And you have a thing for textures, particularly carpets - the first thing you do when we set you down is feel the carpet between your fingers.

You love to eat. You love your vegetables - green beans, carrots, sweet potatoes, you name it, but you’d happily subsist on bread (just like your Grandpa Schwerdt) and freeze-dried apples if we let you.

Your favorite game is chase with Mommy and Daddy, whether it’s one of us chasing you up the stairs or running with you around the house while being chased by the other.

You love to wake up in our bed in the morning, and you always greet us with a smile. You especially like to wake Daddy by standing up in bed and patting him in the face.

You are our little angel. We love you with all our hearts. We love watching you learn and grow - life gets better with each new discovery. We can’t wait to see what’s in store for you this coming year. Happy Birthday!

Love, Mommy & Daddy

Lately we’ve been spending quite a bit of time on Facebook including their ’status updates’. For the Facebook unitiated this is a little sentence or two blurb stating what you’re up to. Right below this post you can see my most recent Facebook status update talking about the miserable traffic management around my favorite grocery store.

Since we started this blog with the thought in mind of it being a sort of family journal, we’ve added a little functionality to our blog that will post our Facebook updates so that in 20 years time we can get a glimpse into some of the things we were saying and doing that didn’t merit the effort of a blog post.

As I was looking for an application that could pull all this together for me I’ve stumbled on what will probably be the new thing in ‘09. Lifestreaming…For all I know it was big in ‘08, but I’m going to go ahead and assume I’m not completely out of it just yet. The short of Lifestreaming is pulling together all the things you do on the web - Facebook (social networking), Flickr (pictures), YouTube (videos), Blogger (blogs - duh), MicroBlogging (Twitter), etc…And creating an up to date snapshot of what you’re doing in your life.

There are dedicated applications (jaiku, tumblr, lifestreams) that do this for you, but I want something that I can control and isn’t subject to the whims of some Web 2.0 startups venture capital.

My life may not be all that exciting, but if my kids can read this in 20-30 years and yawn… Then I will consider my efforts successul.

Maybe that is a little blunt. I really like the blog, but hate the private part…If your blog is private, odds are I won’t read it or at least not very often and that makes me cry a little on the inside.

Why can be summed up in two little words, “Google Reader.” I have 50+ blogs I follow (some more closely than others), and Google Reader pulls them all together so I can see who has a new post. If I had to check each one of those blogs every day/week/month….Well, it just wouldn’t happen.

The rub? Going private on Blogger breaks Google Reader, which is ironic considering they’re both run by Google.

Some good friends have private blogs and I completely understand their motivation for going private, but despite my best efforts to check in every now and again it just isn’t happening (plus the requesting access is really annoying).

Anyway, this is my whiny blog post for the day, no more I promise.