Scott and I are happy to annouce that we are expecting a baby December 29th 2006.

I am 14 weeks pregnant now and feeling mostly OK. I had a very hard 1st trimester. Glad to be through it.

We should be finding out the sex the first week or 2 of August. We are asking for a healthy baby. The sex is not so important. Another girl would be easier since we have all the girly stuff + it would be great for Claire to have a sister. Since we don't know if we will have more getting that boy in would also be nice. So what ever it will be it will be.

We are just very excited to be adding a new member to the family.

Pics of our 10 wk sonogram will follow.

Mel/Scott

Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah to our family and friends. 2005 has been a really fun year for the three of us - watching Claire learn and grow has simply been amazing. Our biggest surprise was our decision to remain in Kansas City when presented with opportunities to move elsewhere. We've really been enjoying it here, although I'll continue to tell our friends and family back east that it does not suck as much as we thought it would. We don't want more people moving and driving up the cost of living. :)

This is an outtake from our attempt to take some holiday pictures. In photographing it there were two key challenges. First, what instrument to give Claire that she might convincingly hold. Second, what instrument to give Melanie that she might convincingly hold. Claire was easy - anything that goes in the mouth would be an instant hit. A recorder worked. Melanie was a little harder. I handed her the banjo and asked her to hold it. We went through a few tries before it was facing forward with the fretboard to her left, but we eventually worked it out. Next year we improve on her left hand position so that it appears she may even be playing a chord. In the end our picture attempt worked out pretty gosh darn well.

This is my final week at Reuters, where I will have been employed for exactly four years tomorrow. Reuters is the third job in a single run of employment that I began in June of 1994 when I started working with Knight-Ridder Financial (KRF) in downtown New York. In 1997 KRF was sold to Bridge Information Systems, which then called Global Financial Information Corporation (GFIC) in an attempt to sound like an organization that Maxwell Smart would be up against. That changed to Bridge Information Systems when the company was served with an infringement lawsuit by General Foods International Corporation (GFIC).

..I am of course wondering what sort of special gift to get for Melanie. While I won't divulge any specifics here where she can read them, I have found the store where I'll be doing my shopping.

I was up at 4:30am today for what should have been an easy flight to New York. Because I need to leave out of an airport that is right near Melanie's parent's house, I didn't take a direct flight. Instead I had a connection through Washinton Regan.

A few moments before my alarm went off the phone rang. It was US Air. My flight out of KC was delayed by 30 minutes, which then forced me to make a later connection in Regan - catching the noon flight to LGA rather than the 11am one. No biggie.

I landed at Washinting Regan at 10:15am, got onto the 11am flight to LGA (my original flight) on the standby list. Full flight, I was packed into a middle seat - but no problem. It is a hour long flight, 31 minutes air time, 29 minutes runway time.

It's one of those magical moments with children - when they start to talk about you. I'm told it only goes downhill from here and bottoms out in the teenage years, but for now she is free to talk about me all she wants. Claire brought tears to my eyes this week by looking at me and saying "Da da da da da" for minutes at a time. Of course she looks at the cats and says this too, but that does not take away from the moment.

Once again the work of Graham Jones and sidekick Inge Vitale. Thanks guys. Really. It's so special. Couldn't you put more effort into making my facial hair look more like skin and less like an over-agressivly eaten butter pecan ice cream cone?

Some photographic evidence from friend Graham Jones shows that Claire has more than just my eyes. Thanks Graham.

We left Monday afternoon for Melbourne to visit Sarah, Damian, Dominic and Ivan. Our trip consisted of four flights, KC to Dallas, Dallas to LA, LA to Sydney, Sydney to Melbourne. We were unable to get an award (read: free) flight directly to Melbourne. Claire was simply amazing during the whole trip - nearly perfect. She was still awake by the time we were getting ready to board our 11:30pm flight from LA to Sydney, which was equivalent to 1:30am to Claire and was several hours beyond her 9pm bedtime. She just kept looking around, flirting with everbody with little smiles. We'd not had a single meltdown, although Melanie got close to having one during our five hour layover in LA.

Claire has hit a few little milestones in the past few days. She is starting to be able to sit up without toppling over, which I think is just so neat. Melanie and I have both been working with her daily, sitting her up, then catching her as she started to fall one way or the other.

She has also been talking quite a bit. She very clearly articulates "waah" and "heaumm" on a regular basis. As all parents must be, we are sure that she is saying something very deep and insightful.

Every two years the orchestra I play in joins up with local opera talent to put on a concert of opera music. It has been our single most popular concert in previous years.

If you are in the Kansas City area and want to come listen the concert is at 3pm on Sunday, February 13th at Grace United Methodist Church, 11485 South. Ridgeview Rd just a few blocks north of 119th Street.