Just like the last four years, the beginning of a new year on Vacant Nebula is marked by a look back at the posts of the previous year. I’m not sure if anyone else gets anything out of these posts, but I enjoy making them because there are so many things that I forget about. So let’s see what all we have been posting about.

Early in the year I made several small changes to this site. Then we got some snow. On Valentine’s Day I left Stephanie at home and went to Mexico. While I was gone Emma walked for the first time. Emma continued to get older, eventually celebrating her first birthday.

Two days before Emma’s birthday, though, I was laid off from my job at Dassault Systemés. Which meant I had to do some job hunting, and I had to figure out what to do with my old business cards. Fortunately I found a new job and started after only five weeks of unemployment.

During those five weeks, I started tweeting and went to the beach. I am very thankful that things worked out so well, especially as the unemployment rate continued to rise all year.

As spring turned to summer, I commented on pickup-truck-bed meat dealers and wrote a program to resize desktop wallpapers. I posted a conversation I had with someone at Sprint, who may or may not be a terminator. I also read the best book I’ve ever read.

As autumn arrived, I poked fun at a lady I heard on the radio. (She actually e-mailed me to defend herself, but what she said really reinforced my point.) I told you where to hide your cash, but I guess I should have come up with a place to hide ideas because Coca-Cola stole my idea.

The last few months of the year have been very busy at work, and as a result this blog wasn’t very busy. I did manage to post about Emma’s first Halloween outing, as well as my own aging. To finish out the year I posted some good bad writing and a high-quality video from my new digital camera.

Throughout the year, I reviewed a few things: Prince of Persia, Shadow of the Colossus, Netflix/Blockbuster (part 2), Anathem, and a SumoLounge bean bag chair.  I also gave out some free code: PHP code to create a gradient PNG, Java code to handle arbitrarily large fractions, and (if you don’t mind extracting it from a JAR file) Java code to resize images.

I hope everyone has had a great year and looks forward to twenty-ten!

So, I’ve now had two visits to the doctor since I learned that I was expecting again.  I’m coming to the end of the first trimester, and I was just curious if anyone who reads out blog knows any old wives tales as to how to figure out the gender of the baby before the ultra sound.  I want to go ahead and state that I put no faith in these hypotheses, I just enjoy hearing them, and seeing how they apply to my current situation.  I will go ahead and give you a couple of statistics from the first 13 weeks.  I have had some morning sickness, but have thus far, not thrown up.  The heart beat at the ultra sound was 168 beats/minute.  Then at the second visit when you get to hear it, the heart beat was at 160 beats/minute.  (I would like to interject here that Emma’s heart beat went from 181 beats/minute to ~165 beats/minute between the first and second doctors visits respectively.)

I have heard a few crazy theories so far:

1. Since I haven’t thrown up, it must be a boy.  (This I have a hard time believing since Elysabeth had a boy when I had Emma, and she was sick the whole way through her pregnancy.  And Anna never threw up when she was pregnant with Abigail.)

2. The heart beat started low so it must be a boy.  (I had hear that heart beats between 160 and 180 beats/minute are girls, and heart beats between 140 and 160 beats/minute are boys. Again, the baby’s heart beat falls very close to the middle range that makes it hard to tell.)

3. I have heard a tale that holding the mother’s-to-be wedding ring over her belly, and seeing which way it swings will tell you what it will be, but I don’t remember all the specifics of this wives tale.

Please feel free to share the crazy and not so crazy theories and tales, I look forward to reading them all!!!

I’ve never thought deeply about this topic before I had a child in the process of acquiring this mangled mess of words we call The English Language... but pronouns are hard you guys!

We sometimes ask Emma who different people in pictures are, so that she can remember the names of those family members she doesn’t see every day. When we get to a picture of Emma, we’ll say “Emma, who’s that?”

“Baby,” she’ll reply.

Then we will say “Emma, that’s you!”

At least, that’s what used to happen. After doing that for some time, if we ask Emma who is in a picture of Emma, she’ll now respond “you!!” And really, that’s our own fault. We told her that it was a picture of You, and so she learned who You was. Apparently You is a baby who looks suspiciously like Emma.

We could try to correct her by telling her it’s “me,” but won’t that get confusing when she actually does learn pronouns? She’ll wonder, “Why did mommy and daddy say that picture of me was a picture of them?” So I guess for now we’ll have to teach her “that’s Emma.” We’re also working on the whole you/me thing with finger pointing, but I’m not sure if it’s too advanced for a twenty-two month old.

Or maybe I could just try explaining that my “you” is your “me” and your “you” is my “me.” There’s nothing confusing about that, right?

For those of you who don’t follow us on Facebook, I have added two new photo albums. First are pictures from Christmas/New Year’s in Newton.

And second, we have pictures of me pushing Emma around in a sled in the three inches of snow that we got here in Concord last night.  I also have a short video of me pushing Emma around in her sled. Enjoy!