Van Lew Homepage

Holly and I enjoy watching Jenna grow and learn so much. Sometimes she does things that are just too cute not to share.

This morning, she was crawling around the house playing with toys. She had a “binky” in her mouth. She was being so content that we let her be. After a few minutes Holly comes around the kitchen island to find that Jenna had found another binky, decided she didn’t want the one in her mouth and put them both away so they wouldn’t get dirty. Photo below!

Because of our little bundle of joy, I haven’t really had time to play around with my web site much.  Quite frankly, I was a little bored with writing everything from scratch so I wanted to come up with an easy solution to get updates out.  I also wanted a way to embed my PicasaWeb photo albums so I wouldn’t have to move all my photos somewhere else.  Well I think I found the right solution so I am going to try it out for a while.

It’s called WordPress.  I thought hmm, maybe I can just install this blogging engine and see if developers had already developed plugins to do what I was hoping it would do for me.  As it turns out, they had.  WordPress seems pretty awesome so far.  There are tons of plugins and even more themes.  I’ve recently been obsessed with playing with themes and options to get it to look JUST the way I want it.  As you can see from the time of this post, I’ve been at it quite long.  :)

With this move to a blogging engine, I’m hoping Holly and I can update our family and friends in the “blogosphere” a little more frequently.

Anyway, that’s all for now.  Happy blogging and good night.

She’s here. She was six weeks old yesterday and just like I thought, our lives have changed. I didn’t realize just how much our lives would change, however. I thought a lack of sleep would be workable but this is beyond a lack. I’ve already forgotten what sleeping through the night feels like.

Of course, I’m not complaining by any means. She is a gorgeous little girl and, for all intents and purposes, a good little girl. In the last week or so she’s been a little upset but you’d be upset too if you had tummy aches. We’re not exactly sure what is causing it but we are working through it.

I’m off to work for now. Holly and Jenna are still sound asleep so everyone be quiet. :)

Little Jenna Rylee Van Lew is here! She is absolutely the cutest thing I have ever seen. I am, of course, a little biased but seriously, she’s cute. I kept a little timeline of key events leading up to the birth of little Jenna and when they happened. After Jenna was born, we both tried to sleep, hence very little activity. :o)

02 March 2009
19:30 – Started having strong contractions
20:30 – Left for hospital
21:05 – Arrived at hospital
22:00 – Told to walk for hour
11:00 – 3cm, 80%, Station 0

03 March 2009
00:15 – Admitted
01:36 – Epidural put in
02:26 – Water broken by Dr. Jackson
02:28 – 4cm, 90%, Station 0
02:30 – Dr will check back in 2 hrs
04;41 – 5cm, 90%, Station 0
06:15 – Started ptocin
07:30 – Increased ptocin
09:00 – 9.5cm, 100%, Station +1
10:30 – 10cm, 100%, Station +2
10:35 – Started pushing
10:50 – Little Jenna Rylee is born!

04 March 2009
14:23 – Left hospital with Jenna Rylee

So apparently there is no way to contact baby in the womb. Someone could have told us about this earlier. We’ve been trying to come up with a clever way to let baby know that her due date is fast approaching and there are a lot of people eager to meet her, ourselves included.

Now, her due date isn’t until Wednesday (March 4th) but we don’t want her to be late on her first assignment. So to anyone reading this, if you know of a toll free number we can call to get a hold of baby, please let us know. We’d love to speak with her and let her know the importance of being on time. :)

In six weeks, our world will become completely different. I can’t wait.

In six weeks, our lives will change forever. I can’t wait.

Already, you say? Yes! Already! I implemented an AJAX script so that when you go back and forth between photos in the gallery, it doesn’t do a full page reload. A full page reload can take a lot longer to come back. This does a partial reload of the image only. I downloaded the AJAX Control Toolkit and used their SlideShow sample as a base. It’s pretty neat, you should check it out. It’ll even tell you what photo you’re on and how many are in the whole album. Yay!

Well after a long hiatus, our photo gallery is back up and running. Similar to my blog, I utilized Google’s APIs to tap into the data I have at Google. For my photo gallery, I used the Picasa Web APIs to tap into my Picasa Web Albums. I hope you like the new look. I know I do. :)

So I’ve been toying with Google’s Blogger API for a couple of days now and, seeing as how you’re probably reading this off of jason.vanlew.net, I finally got it working. It’s pretty cool (and nerdy). I use their API to connect to blogger.com and retrieve my blog and entries in a feed which I then use to display them here on my web site.

Right now, it’s pretty basic. It just shows you the post. But in the next few days (or weeks, or whenever I have time) I’ll be reading up on adding more content like comments and the ability to add and view them.

Go me. I’m awesome.

It’s been right around 2 months since they started building our cabin up in the woods. They have moved pretty fast, considering it snowed up there twice… in May! They have had some other inclement weather as well but they’ve kept pace.

Anyway, I’m so excited I can’t even think straight. Holly and I have been purchasing furniture for it so it’s been feeling even more real to me lately.

Plus, we’ve put up a webcam that takes a picture of the progress every hour. You can see that at http://cabincam.vanlewclan.net/ or by clicking on the “Cabin Cam Site” link in the related links section on the right-hand side of this page.

The last update I heard (which was actually about a month ago) was that they were anticipating being done by the end of August. We are all crossing our fingers that we’ll get to spend Labor Day weekend up there to break ‘er in. That would be awesome!