The dust is starting to settle

Well, we've been home a week and a half now with Paisley, and things are now somewhat turning into a routine. She's a hungry little girl, always wanting to eat, and when she's not eating, she's pretty well always sleeping. She enjoys her daily afternoon (or sometimes morning with dad) walks, and her favorite place to sleep is mom and dad's chests. But we're beginning to get more sleep, learning how to get things done with her in the house, and really enjoying her as part of the family.

Her neck is even stronger now . She's been lifting her head pretty good from day one, but now she has more control, and holds up for longer periods of time. She's been anxious to build up her leg strength as well, and climbs from our laps up to our necks. We've been very impressed with her strength. As Josh said the other day: "My 4 day old daughter can hold her head up, and can roll onto her side, I think she just might be a superhero!"

Today was a momentous day. It's day one of cloth diapering. We just finished up the disposable pack of diapers we had, and I am feeling up to the task now. :) Got my diaper rating system all in place as well. So far so good, we've filled about 5 diapers already today, with no mishaps of any kind.

Josh has been home from work the last couple of weeks, which has been very helpful. I'm finally at the point today where I think I can manage the days all by myself. But he will be home tomorrow, as well as Monday Tuesday next week. WE look forward to Grandma and Grandpa Yeomans visiting next week (as well as Uncle Matt). So I won't be left on my own quite yet with her. Which is nice in many ways.



I'm proud to say Paisley is also sporting her first Pro-Environment shirt today. :) So proud of my little tree hugger. Fits her well and it's a 3-6 month size. On Monday she weighed in at 9 lbs 5 oz, after having dropped down to 8 lbs 5 oz the week before. So at this rate of growth, she's in the high 9lb range now. I told you, she loves to eat!

More cute photos

Go on, say it

"awwwwwww, she's so cute!"



And this one's my favourite so far. She looks like a prize fighter on her way into the ring for a big bout :-)

Visit from grandparents

Grandma and Grandpa Schroeder and Great Grandma Schroeder came by for their first visit with Paisley today.

Brag blog

It's our blog and we'll post as many pictures of our little girl as we feel like posting.

Today Paisley got to come home, and she's been pretty fussy all day. We don't anticipate getting much [if any] sleep tonight.

Why I don't post my photos on Facebook

From the Facebook terms of service (section on 'User Content Posted on the Site'):

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

That nice bit of legalese run-on basically says: if you post a photo to Facebook, you are giving them free reign to do what they like with it without ever having to ask for specific permission or to provide any compensation. Could this be the key to the elusive Facebook business model?

More pictures!

We had a few visitors and a few photo opportunities today.

Paisley Ruth

Born at 12:49AM on Fathers' Day, June 15, 2008, weighing in at 9lbs, 2oz and sporting long eyelashes:

Last.fm

I introduced Tamara to Last.fm this week, and she suggested that I do a blog post explaining it and some of the reasons that we think it's an intriguing service.

What is Last.fm

I'm going to take the easy way out and let Last.fm describe itself:

Last.fm is a service that keeps track of what music you listen to, and then produces a large number of features personalised to you.

You can use Last.fm to listen to music, find out about artists you may like, other people with similar music taste, gigs in your local area, charts and quilts for your personal site, as well as much more.

So what does that mean?

Think of Last.fm as a sort of "Facebook for Music". As a matter of fact, Last.fm actually pre-dates Facebook by a couple of years, so maybe Facebook is the Last.fm of personal relationships. Whatever. The point is that Last.fm adds a social aspect to your music.

Scrobbling? (or: how it works)

I think the Last.fm folks made up this word, so I'd better let them describe it again.

Scrobbling a song means that when you listen to it, the name of the song is sent to Last.fm and added to your music profile.

Once you've signed up and downloaded Last.fm, you can scrobble songs you listen to on your computer or iPod automatically. Start scrobbling yourself, and see what artists you really listen to the most. Songs you listen to will also appear on your Last.fm profile page for others to see.

Millions of songs are scrobbled every day. This data helps Last.fm to organise and recommend music to people; we use it to create personalised radio stations, and a lot more besides.

Put it all together for me

So, you download the "audio scrobbler" software from Last.fm and start listening to your music in iTunes as you always do (also supports Windows Media Player and Winamp, but that just begs the question: why aren't you using iTunes?). Last.fm has all this information about what you are listening to, so now what can you do with it?

Here's the summary as I see it:

• Track trends of what you listen to (sounds boring, but to a stats nerd like myself, it's actually fascinating)
• Find friends on Last.fm and see what they're listening to; see your musical compatibility based on commonly played artists (Tamara and I, unsurprisingly, have a high musical compatibility).
• Share your musical trends and tastes. For example, here's my chart for last week:
  

  
  

• Share music. One way to do this is to embed a music player in a web page or blog post:
  Matty Schroeder – Choke
• Discover new music. This is probably the best part about Last.fm. Through the Last.fm software, you can listen to radio stations that are customized for you based on artists that are similar to the ones you already have in your playlist. Also, just viewing your dashboard page will show artists you may be interested in (this just revealed to me that Tyler Burkum has released his first solo album)
• You can join groups. Yay. It's a feature I largely ignore on Facebook, and entirely ignore on Last.fm, so it doesn't fit well into my sales pitch.


• Events and concert listings are associated with artists, so you can easily follow the acts that are coming to your neighbourhood. Can't say that I've really used this feature much yet either, but I can see the utility in it.

If you're not already using Last.fm, give it a try. If you are using Last.fm, add us as friends:
Josh is jdschroeder and Tamara is Tamschro.

A Day in the Garden

The weekend that my parents visited (for graduation, and my birthday), the Saturday we took them to the Japanese Gardens here in town. SO I thought I'd share a few of those pics. We went to the garden in the morning, had a picnic lunch at Henderson Lake, then walked around the lake. Lots of walking that day (well to me at this stage anyway). So these photos are from June 1st, so about 2 weeks ago.

This first picture is a bit blurry, but it shows how large my belly was at the time:



I love this picture, they're totally doing the sasquatch pose:


A couple pictures of my parents enjoying the day:



Me and Dad:


A couple pictures of the garden:



A picture of one of our many rests in the garden:


Oh yeah, and Josh was there too, but I had to steal the camera to capture that:

It was a good, fun day. I enjoyed my parents visit, they don't get to come visit often enough. :)

Extreme Weather

Southern Alberta is always full of ever changing weather, but today has been a doozey!

This morning there was a nice thick layer of fog outside the window, and was just slightly drizzly. But the sun began to shine and burned through it, and it was quite a nice day around noon. By about 2, it started to rain, by 2:30 it began to pour, which turned into hail (which sits about 1 inch thick on the deck, even with all the rain afterwards). It's been pouring since, with continuous snaps of thunder and lightning (usually simultaneously). The streets are just flowing. By 3:00 they had issued a Tornado watch in the area, as there had been funnel clouds spotted nearby. Such an exciting weather day here in southern Alberta. I don't know what weather we missed today... but sure makes for an exciting day.

In other news.... nothing is happening. She's not in a rush to come out. Maybe it's the weather?

Convocation

Well after 7 years, well only about 5 years of actually attending classes, I (Tamara), finally graduated from University. I am now the proud degree owner of a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Science, with a Concentration in Geographical Information Science. It took a long time, and many detours, but it is complete!



Convocation was Thursday, May 29th, and my parents, brother, and his girlfriend Anh, all came out for it. We had a good visit, and had a couple days of celebration (also being my 25th birthday on the 30th). I think my parents were hoping for Paisley's arrival that weekend as well.

Here are a few pictures of grad:

My good friend Jen (Geography) and myself- she photographs very well... so lots of photos:




With other good friends Rachelle and Marissa (both Environmental Science)


Just with Rachelle:


On stage - look at the awkwardness. Convocation Regalia is not flattering on a 9 month pregnant woman:





Feeling hot and exhausted.....


Glad it's over.....