Aint she cute?

Also, we have decided to spend this great time celebrating our Saviours birth by weening Caleb of his soother.  Maybe not the best time in the world, but fun none the less.

Pray for Caleb.

We’re hoping Christmas will be a big enough distraction, but we’re really not sure!

Caleb and Mum are busy today making cookies for Santa, Caleb’s enjoying whacking the candy-canes with the hammer to break them up for the cookies.

Meanwhile I thought I would update you all.  If you have no ideas for someone for Christmas, check out the logo for Kiva on the right of the page.  It’s all about micro-financing, makes a lot of sense when you really think about it.

What else is new, not a lot.  Still enjoying work, heading off to Ottawa in a month for a negotiation course which will be a lot of fun Im sure!

Hope all is well with all of you and you have a fantastic Christmas!

Grace Erin Allen was born 0930 on Friday 14th September, weighing in at 7 lbs and 14 oz, with red hair and cute feminine features.  Both Stacey and I think she looks a lot like Caleb at this age.

Grace has continued to be nocturnal, as she was during the pregnancy, but we are slowly weening her from her bad habits.

I have put up a few pictures for you, be sure lots more will be coming up.  Both mum and baby are doing really well, Caleb is adjusting really well too - he is going to be a great big brother.  Grace was a c-section, and the recovery time is about 6 weeks for mum, please think about Stacey at this time as she cannot do all the things she would love to.

More pics coming soon, I promise.

Canada are a huge coupon culture.  Superstore (like Tesco’s) gives out a coupon once a month - spend $250 at once and we will give you $30 off your bill.  When we bought our Wii, we had to queue up before the store opened to buy it (demand was so high), the guy came out and gave us numbers in the order that we arrived - to keep things calm and Canadian.  The same guy also gave us a coupon for $30 off our purchase.  Only in Canada would you queue up before a store opened to buy a product and they would still give you over 10% off!

What else is new…  I have taken a week off work and am enjoying getting things ready for baby number 2, also found a cool game online - America’s Army.  Very cool and very free (my favourite).  It does tend to make Americans look awesome, but it was designed by the American Army, so what do you expect?
Stacey is getting bigger, only four weeks to go and we hope less, so we can get to Melissa’s wedding.

Just thought I would let you all see Caleb in all his glory, he is getting into everything, including the vaseline (petroleum jelly).  Cant keep him off the stuff!

It may take some time getting this stuff out of his hair, so don’t expect another entry in a while!

As promised here is another update, check out this guy!

Check him out at youtube [here]

Well we had fun with mum and dad and Granny, I took a few weeks off work and we all went to Moose Jaw Saskatchewan home of the fantastic tunnels!

It was really nice to see four generations of Allen Family all living and having fun together.

What else have we been up to?  When the folks were over we bought a Nintendo Wii man, that thing is a lot of fun - soon we will have video uploaded of Mum playing with Melissa.  Also if any readers have a mac and a wii and are struggling to network the two I have added a tutorial I found elsewhere, its on the pages to your right (my left).
I have been doing a lot of stuff with oschurch and even secured the domain name oschurch.net (as yet there is nothing there!).  When the beta version is out, dont worry you will all know.  Speaking of which, the link has moved into its new building, it took forever but the new church looks great - I think.  Check it out for yourself.
Caleb is doing really well and fast surpassing all the things he should be able to do by his age.  For Example, the books say Caleb should be able to put up 2 blocks and speak about 4 words.  He can put up a 5 block tower and speaks 30+ words (cookie and soother being his favourite)!

Stacey’s pregnancy is going well, but mobility is starting to be a big problem with the big bump!!  Pictures of the ultrasound are coming soon!

Hope all is well with the readers.  Please leave comments, it encourages me to write more often, knowing people read it!

We have been up to a lot of stuff, Caleb has been sick and cranky and I think he has passed that on to Stacey (the sick bit!). Stacey is enjoying pregnancy again, but really suffering from evening sickness - like morning sickness but without the vomiting and at a slightly different time of the day.

Work is good for me, and really busy outside of work with lots of websites. OS Church is awesome and just getting bigger and bigger, soon I will be calling on anyone with CSS skills to design a few templates.

I was performing some regular maintenance on the mac and decided to do a reinstall. Things went pretty good - apart from not really transferring over the email well. There is a better way to do it, but my way was free!

Well as I was doing a re-install I thought about the googlepack. This is only a windows thing (lets face it, its really focussed around viruses and spyware), but I got to thinking about a macpack, just a neat collection of applications any new mac owner should own. I downloaded a load and created a new pack, listed below are the contents, with individual links to them.

Please drop a comment if you can think of a program that should be in there and isn’t!

Google Earth - Funky earth mapping software
MediaFork - The new Handbrake, DVD ripping software
MenuMeters - If you don’t have this you aren’t geek
OnyX - Maintenance software for OS X
OpenOffice v2.Something - Microsoft Office without the price tag (requires X11 optional install from the OS X install discs
Skype - Internet Telephony at its finest
Stuffit Expander - Unzip and unbin and untar.gz everything
TextWrangler - BBEdit’s supreme text editor
VLC - Great multiplatform video viewer

Feel free to download these individually from the above vendors, all the software is entirely free - that’s what makes it so cool. If you want, you can download the entire package [here]. Please be thoughtful though, the entire package is 260MB - which will eat into my bandwidth and may cost me money. So please only download it all if you really have to.

Again, please drop a comment if you can think of a program that should be in there and isn’t!