After a very inconvenient 9 month waiting period, Jessie & I finally had the opportunity to meet our second daughter. Allison Zoe Lemire was born yesterday evening at 7:23 PM.

Allison weighed in at exactly 8 lbs and is 21 ½ inches tall. Impressed as we may be, we’re told she’ll get heavier and taller over the next several years.

Well, there you have it! Natalie celebrated her first birthday today! Her progress in the last six months have been incredible, I can only imagine the next six.

She has recently began to favor walking over crawling and can now dash quite speedily throughout the house. Her sense of curiosity and desire to explore are developing as rapidly as her personality.

Six months and nearly five hundred photos later, Natalie is still well, kicking and cuter then ever!

She still hasn’t learned to walk, talk or hack the Pentagon yet, but her development has still been nothing short of impressive.

I’m really not sure how the time flew by so quickly, though I’m sure the next half year will go by just as quick as Jessie and I master the ropes of this whole parenthood gig!

She’s here! Natalie Emily Lemire was born on September 6^th 10:20 PM at the Grey Nuns Community Hospital.

Natalie weighed in at a colossal 4.15 kg (9 pounds, 2 ounces) and measured an impressive 59 cm.

To those 60% of you who voted boy on the poll Natalie would like to stress the following: “ha!”

Never quit moving this whole weekend. Finally managed to dedicate the time, along with Jessie’s parents to get the baby’s rooms ready for the arrival.

Started at around 10:00 AM Saturday morning and did not stop until this evening…

The walls were pretty messed up, took several hours to patch and sand everything to get the wall smooth and consistent.

Once the walls were fixed up, the only logical thing to do was exterminate the brown trim. There just simply is no room for “brown” in the encyclopaedia of sane aesthetics. All the trim was repainted white to scratch that off the agenda.

Next up, the walls were all repainted a half and half two tone consisting of what I’m told is a subtle green on top, beige at the bottom and separated by a wall paper banner consisting of various characters from Disney’s Bambi. Took two full coats of primer to cover up the previous dark blue and gold colours on the wall.

To finish everything off, I decided to give the electrical in the room a healthy face-lift. First off, I picked up a good set of wire strippers to prevent certain injuries and then replaced all the electrical outlets with the decora variety and installed a dimmer light switch along with a new light fixture.

After a ton of work, the results look very good, with the exception of the light fixture. For some reason only two of the three bulbs light up. I’ve already tested the bulbs and all is fine. If the wiring wasn’t right, none of the bulbs would have worked. In addition to the one bulb not lighting, the light isn’t very bright. Think I’ll yank it back out, drag it back to IKEA and get something else.

Although we find opportunity to drive each through the occasional insanity, all in all we’re still holding things together as tightly as ever. I’m sure this is the first of uncountably many more.

Although I’m still not sure if the baby was waving at us or flipping us the bird, it was incredibly cool to see the baby and its movement for the first time.

Also quite cool was the option provided to have the image burnt onto a CD-R disc. This will certainly be an awesome keepsake to hold on to. The baby will certainly be born into a world more high-tech then the one I originally came into. How many of us have CD-R’s of our earliest moments kicking around?

My wife is in bed, she wasn’t feeling too well this evening so decided to call it quits early. Pregnancy will do that to a woman, I guess. That’s right. I said wife, and I said pregnant.

Since my last post, I’ve managed to get married. I’ve been married to Jessie since April 29th of last year. The wedding and honeymoon both took place without a hitch. To add more excitement. I found out shortly before Christmas that I somehow impregnated her, how cool is that?

I’m sure there will be plenty to write about in the coming months, perhaps I’ll even take the time to do so. Stay tuned for more!

As for my own shopping, I got Jessie a nice white gold diamond necklace. Picked out all sorts of other things for the rest of my family, including a dinner out at the Red Lobster for my Mom and Rene.

I would say overall everyone had a pretty awesome Christmas this year.