Yesterday morning Grayson Matthew Robinson—the handsome little boy shown below—came into our lives:

The last time I managed to write about Emma’s birth within a few hours, but this time around I guess I’m a little late. Mark my words, someday when Grayson gets rebellious and I ask him, “Son, why did you drop out of school and get all those tattoos and start a Metallica cover band? I mean come on, no one liked Metallica songs even when Metallica performed them, and even before Lars Ulrich had that gender-reassignment surgery. The only people who ever liked Metallica are in their eighties now. It’s just a poor decision.” And he’ll reply “I did it because I wanted to be first. I always got second best, Dad! Look at the day I was born, you couldn’t even be bothered to write a blog post about it! Emma got a blog post. Emma got to pierce her nose. Emma got to go to Harvard.” Then I’ll tell him, “Son, the only reason you didn’t get a blog post that day was because I was so busy falling in love with you.” Then he’ll say “eww gay.” That’s just how teenagers talk.1

All kidding aside, I actually was somewhat concerned that I would never be able to love him as much as I love Emma. But I quickly learned that your love for your children isn’t meted out in discrete quantities from a finite supply. I already feel like I have just as much love for Grayson as I do for Emma. It is very surreal. It seems to be multiplied somehow when I see how much Emma loves her brother too. The video below shows just that, with Emma holding Grayson for the first time.

It has surprised me just how much I can already tell that Grayson has a different personality than Emma. For one thing, he loves being held much more than Emma did. Even as a baby, being held didn’t do much to console Emma. She’s never been much of a snuggler (except when she’s sick). Grayson, on the other hand, is very content to be held. He’s also generally quieter than Emma was at this point, though it remains to be seen if that trend will continue. Emma I’m sure was a little extra fussy because (as you may recall) she was born with a black eye.

In any case, I hope you’ll join me in welcoming Grayson into the world. You can find pictures from his first two hours of life on this very website. I’m sure more will be coming later, but probably not until after we are back home from the hospital.

In the six years since college, I have put on about forty pounds and added about 2-4 inches to my waistline (depending on the brand of pants). I keep thinking eventually I’ll do something about it, but I keep putting it off. So I’ve decided I need to stop this infinite loop.  I’m going to start off with the goal of completely eliminating the following from my diet:

• Soft drinks and sweet tea (pretty much any drink besides water and milk)

• French fries

• Ice cream

• Cake and cake-like substances (this includes brownies and doughnuts)

Assuming I manage to keep to this, I will re-evaluate the list in a few months and maybe add other things I really shouldn’t be eating. I realize that regular exercise would probably be an ideal approach in a perfect world. But I’m pretty sure the odds of me continuing to exercise regularly for a long period of time are pretty close to zero. Maybe if I worked at a company that had a gym on-site there would be a 25% chance I would actually spend some time there, and a 7%1 chance that I would go regularly for more than a year. So I’m hoping that attacking the most unhealthy parts of my diet will pay off.

Now I must apologize for boring you with aspects of my life that no one but me could possibly care about. I’m hoping that I will be more likely to stick to it after making a public announcement.

Many of you already know this from Facebook but I thought that I would make a post about it anyway because it is pretty big news in our family: we will be having a boy!

We went to the doctor on Thursday with Emma, Grammy, and Mimi in tow, to find out what the next little Robinson would be.  Grammy and Mimi were both fully expecting a girl, and Emma, when asked what the baby was, she responded “Gurl!”

After all the checking and measuring of the important baby stats, the technician had Kip call in the rest of the family to have the gender of the baby finally announced.  Once everyone was in the room, the Tech announced, “Well, it’s a boy.”  Her inflection showed no excitement or interest.  It sounded like she was telling us that “Well, it’s going to rain today.”  The reactions that followed though were more interesting.  Kip, according to my mother, beamed with a big goofy grin.  Mimi was so excited she teared up and exclaimed, “I know what to do with a boy!”  Grammy was all smiles, and asked me if I was ok.  (You have to understand that Kip and I really wanted another little girl, much like my sister Emily really wanted a little boy.)  I was in a state of shock and surprise for a few seconds, and then I just thought, “God is giving us a little boy, and he is healthy, moving, and going to be very precious when he gets here in less than 20 weeks.”  I was a little disappointed at first, and terrified because I figured out what to do with a baby girl with Emma, but I have no experience with little boys on an extended basis.  There are little boys in the nursery at church, but I usually let them be on their own and when they need a diaper change, I let the other worker handle that.  I am happy that we are going to have a little boy, and I am looking forward to buying him his own new wardrobe now that I know I need to have clothes for a little boy.

For those of you that have been living under a rock or don’t keep up with our lives like a stalker or super-fan, the plan as of now is to have the baby on July 19, via c-section, and name him Grayson Matthew Robinson.  No, the name isn’t a family name, it is just a name that Kip and I picked out when I was pregnant with Emma (in the event that she turned out to be a boy) and we still like it, so it will be the name of this baby.  And if you’re wondering, we are not naming him “Kip Robinson, III” because Kip says having the same name as your dad makes things too confusing. He figures maybe someday he might have a grandson named Kip. And I’m OK with that.

I’m now tweeting.  You can follow kipthegreat on Twitter if you want to see what I’m up to.  So far I haven’t done much tweeting.  It just seems weird to use Twitter when I don’t have a Blackberry or iPhone.  Or maybe I just don’t get it yet.  I mainly signed up because my screen name was still available. :)

FYI:  We got some new games for Christmas, and here are the friend codes for those games:

Animal Crossing City Folk:  5112-7902-0335
Guitar Hero World Tour:  0302-3894-4530

Also, lots of Christmas pictures are coming soon.  Stay tuned.

I’d like to start this post out by wishing all you mommies out there a belated Happy Mother’s Day!  I just celebrated my very first Mother’s Day two days ago, and I’d have to say it went really well.  It has been a real blessing having Emma in our lives, and we both love her very much.  She made me a very special Mother’s Day gift (with Kip’s and my help of course).  She made a really good hand print, and had her daddy frame it so we could keep it forever.  And then Kip gave me a new Honda CR-V to replace the Ford that I had been driving since college.  True, we bought it a couple of weeks ago, but it was for Mother’s Day.  Kip also got up early and brought back breakfast from Bojangles’ this morning.

At church on Mother’s Day they always have three really pretty flower bouquets to honor the moms that regularly attend the church.  They draw three names from a bowl, and each lady got to pick her bouquet.  Each year they leave out the names of the moms who were picked the year before.  I think that is a very fair way to make sure the same ladies don’t get flowers each year.  Well, it was exciting because my name got pulled second, and you can see the pretty floral bouquet in the picture below.  So, all in all, I’ve had a really good first Mother’s Day!

PS: You can see just how much Emma has grown in the picture.  She is getting so big, and beautiful!

I created a Facebook profile.  I sent friend requests to a few people.  If you’re not one of those people, feel free to send me one.  I’m not promising that I’ll use or update it any more than my MySpace; however, the fact that Facebook doesn’t look like the internet threw up on it makes me more likely to log in some as opposed to none.  Plus I think it’ll repost my blog posts from my feed, so that those of you who use Facebook all the time but don’t want to have to check this website (ahem) should be able to keep up with, let’s say, photos of Emma.

This is a quick note to let everyone know that Stephanie has successfully given birth.  Emma Leigh and her mommy are healthy and resting right now.  She seems to have gotten in a fight on her way out, so she has a black eye.  But the doctors say this is superficial and she will be okay soon.

Whenever someone at my office has a baby, usually they will send a photo around of the newborn.  And everytime I think “wow, that is gross, why would you share such a gross picture.”  I had always wondered if I would feel differently when it was my own child.  I can now tell you with confidence that I do.  So I hope you’ll forgive me for sharing a picture of our beautiful bruised 93-minute-old baby girl.  More pictures will be up later.

I’d be surprised if anyone cares, but my site now supports the hAtom microformat.  At least, I think it does.  I couldn’t find an hAtom validator so I’m not 100% sure I’m conforming to the standard.  But it’s pretty simple so I’m gonna say yes.  As far as I know hAtom is only slightly more supported than RFC 1149.  But I think that’s only because of the recent avian flu concerns.

You won’t notice any difference in the site1 (which is how microformats are supposed to work, after all).  Except for what they call the Datetime Design Pattern.  This is where you stick an abbr tag around a human-readable date, and set the abbreviation’s title attribute to a machine-parsable ISO 8601 timestamp (i.e. “2007-11-26T19:57:00-05:00”).  The problem with this is that now if a user hovers over my timestamp, he sees this very unfriendly tooltip.  This is exactly the opposite of what the abbr tag is supposed to be used for!  (And, more generally, what the title attribute is supposed to be used for.)  There is no reason to display this information to the user.  Surely there must have been a better way.  I’m tempted to make a non-displaying abbr tag for the hAtom “published” date.  An XML parser would still read it regardless of its style, but users wouldn’t have to see this ugly timestamp.

We’re having a baby GIRL!

Kip and I went to the doctor’s office on Tuesday and we learned that our baby is a girl.  It was exciting until they got started and we found out that Emma (that will be her name by the way) had decided to be camera shy.  It took about thirty minutes to get a decent shot of her face in the “4D” view.  I actually thought that the 2D view looked better than the 4D view.  (You can judge for yourself, but we think it looks weird.  In fact, Kip thinks the fourth dimension they are referring to must be creepiness.  Sorry, he made me put that in here.)  The technician kept shaking and poking my belly to try to get her to roll over, but somehow it gave her the hiccups.  It was actually really cute to see her with the hiccups because her whole body would spasm, but I still can’t feel it.  It is amazing just how much I love her already, just from seeing her on the monitor.  We think she is going to have my nose, chin, and (sadly) my feet.  You can see for yourself in the picture of her feet.  I had fun today getting out all of the baby girl’s clothes that we already have (from numerous yard sales over the last few months) and washing them so they will be ready for Emma’s auspicious arrival next March.

Other exciting news on the baby front
I actually felt the baby move Friday night.  She decided to finally let me know she was down there.  It feels a lot like somebody is thumping you, but from the inside out.  She is especially active in the last hour or so before I go to bed in the evenings.  She also will roll around if I wake up in the middle of the night.

And in case you haven’t noticed, the pictures link to larger versions of the sonograms.