I just noticed that this would be my 300th blog post so I decided to do something a bit different. Firstly, I'd get my wife to write this post. Secondly anyone who comments on this post within the next week will win a prize - the better the comment, the better the prize ;)

My blog started back on June 2003 with this insightful post. Since then I have explored life living in a foreign land, have pondered upon new advances in technological masterpieces such as Firefox and revealed my thoughts on life as a daddykins.

So please comment so that I feel that all this has not been in vain.

My humble thanks

Ps the prizes will be really really good

Abi's now been on solids for over a month, and it's been great fun feeding her them. Now that she's 6 months, she can have pretty much anything, although we're still being careful and introducing things individually. She's so far had lots of purees - both vegetables - butternut squash, carrot, parsnip, potato, sweet potato, broccoli and courgette - mixed in various interesting combinations and also lots of fruit - she particularly seems to like banana and apple (not together - don't think we've tried that yet!). This week she tried natural yoghurt for the first time - which she loved - really odd as we thought it would be a bit too sour for her. It's been messy though - particularly with her raspberries and self-feeding!

We've also tried some more solid foods, some with more success than others - she likes broccoli florets, if she gets them the right way round, and gums them into smitherines.

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Today we were trying to catch Abigail's cute noises on video, and didn't manage as when we pointed the camera at her, the noises changed from happy to sad. However I decided to try and record her playing on her tummy with her butterfly, and she decided to roll!!

2006 has been quite a year for us - lots and lots has happened and changed. Laura has done a great summary of her highs and lows for the year, and here's my year...

New Baby

In February, whilst away for the weekend we found out that Laura was pregnant. This was great news, as we'd been praying for a baby. On my birthday, we felt Abi kick for the first time which was incredible, as was seeing her moving about on the scan pictures (no wonder she's so active now!). In October after <a href="http://samespirit.net/ricky/news/242/"quite a long early labour at 9pm on the 8th, Abigail was born and it's been an amazing journey ever since. It's just incredible watching her grow and develop!

New House

For a while, we'd been hoping to move to somewhere with a bit more space, but with the imminent arrival, this became more urgent. After having the flat up for sale for a long time we thought we had found a buyer, so we set things moving on buying our new house. Unfortunately they pulled out part way into the process so we were left in an awkward position for a while - but thankfully my parents bought the flat from us to enable us to get moving quicker ready for the baby. So in May we moved to our new house. Since then there's been all sorts of bits we've done with it - decorating, changing the toilet and preparing the nursery.

New Church

Also this year we've starting going to Paulsgrove Baptist Church - which has been brilliant for us. We've joined a life group and feel really at home there.

New Job

Back in June, I moved jobs within the same department at work. Previously I had been working in the DB2 team, and I moved to a role as an Application Developer. This is much more of the sort of work I enjoy and had wanted to do, working on LAMP based Web Applications. *[LAMP ]: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl

Today we took Abi to the doctors for her second set of jabs. The waiting was awful - we were both dreading it, and Abi was being her usual sweet and gorgeous self. When we finally got in to see the nurse, Abi burst out in giggles - it was lovely, but we didn't think it would last.

So then it came to the injection and she was quiet, and then a few seconds afterwards had another little giggle! Unfortunatley the second injection didn't have the same effect - she wasn't happy after that one, but it didn't last and she'd soon cheered up and was smiling and giggling again

What a bizarre baby :) She's lovely!

To Santa or not to Santa - that is the question!

This year, Abi isn't old enough to understand much of whats going on at Christmas, but we're soon going to have to make a decision about what we're going to do about Santa. I just don't like the idea of lying (directly or indirectly) to her about it. I guess I'm slightly worried that if she sees us making up something like this and then her finding out later whether she'll doubt other things that we've told her. On the other hand - Santa would bring a lot of enjoyment and excitement for her (and us), and stimulate her imagination. What does anyone else think about this? Am I just being silly?

This week I spent the first night away from Laura and Abi, since Abi was born. I went up to London for the Carson Workshops In Depth CSS XHTML Techniques by Eric Meyer. I was quite nervous beforehand - as well as being away, the first day of the course was also when Abi had her first set of immunisations.

I'm glad I went as the workshop was brilliant. It was run in a very interactive way with Eric encouraging questions throughout. He only used slides for setting the scene for the 2 days, and the rest of the time was spent looking at source code and how it appeared in a web browser. We covered quite a few things that I'd already seen before, but there were lots of bits and pieces that were different or I hadn't done before. The main thing that got me thinking was to first think about the document source order and the best markup to describe the content, without thinking about the design. I've done a bit of this before, but always wanted to get onto adding the design, so probably rushed this stage more than I possibly should have - and resulted in a lot more divs and classes in my document source than was necessary!

The other thing that was good about the course for me was the opportunity to meet people

Firstly I'll set the scene, earlier in the evening we'd given Abigail a bath, and Laura had fed her, and since then she'd been sleeping. After we'd finished watching TV Laura was ready to feed her again before we went up to bed. Well when I say ready I mean dripping milk! Abi was still sleeping, and I noticed that she was a bit smelly, so I decided to change her to wake her up a bit so she was ready to catch the milk.

Ok, so I'd took Abigail's nappy off and got ready to clean her up, when she decided to wee all over the changing mat. Fortunately I'm used to this now and managed to catch it with kitchen roll before it got onto her clothes. However just as I was cleaning up the wee, something new happened that I'd not had before ... explosive poo. The poo just squirted from Abi's bottom across the changing mat, off the changing mat, onto my trousers and also onto the bag of cotton wool sitting on Laura's nursing chair (good job the bag was there!).