It’s been a while since I’ve posted here. What can I say, I’ve been busy. If you’re interested, I’ve put up several new photo albums: Easter, May-July 2011, Beach Trip 2011, Grayson’s first birthday party, and some old photos that I never took off my old digital camera from Thanksgiving 2009.

And I’ve also got lots of videos to share. First up is my role as Cat In The Hat at Emma’s third birthday party:

Here’s a random video of the kids playing in the backyard:

Here’s a video of Grayson eating cake at his first birthday party:

Here’s Grayson opening a present at his party:

And last but not least, here’s Grayson playing in the pool during his pool party:

I apologize for the videos from Grayson’s birthday being so dim. For whatever reason, when recording video, my camera uses the exposure compensation setting from the last time you were in manual settings mode. And usually when I’m in manual settings mode it’s because I want to try a long exposure, which always turn out too bright, so I turn the exposure compensation all the way down to -2.

Hard to believe it, but tomorrow marks three years since Emma was born. She had a Cat in the Hat themed birthday party. A few pictures have been posted!

Also, she got a functional digital camera. Except, whenever I see the camera, it makes me a little uneasy. I think it is going to hop at me sideways. I have the urge to fire a missile at it. What is he talking about, you ask yourself? The camera bears an uncanny resemblance to a Dessgeega!

See what I’m talking about?

I just posted a ton of pictures from our recent trip to Disney World. There are also some miscellaneous pictures from January and February that I posted a while back but never mentioned on this blog.

Hey for those of you interested, there’s a new set of photos covering July through (early) October, 2010. They are on Facebook too, but they are in higher resolution here.

That is all.

I have uploaded eighty-nine new photos from the first three weeks of Grayson’s life, in addition to the twenty-one I already told you about. All 110 photos can be found in the Grayson is born album.

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.

I just put up a new photo album covering our 2010 beach trip. I tried my hand at a panoramic photo again, now that I know what I’m doing a little better. I got much better results than I did with my Hawai’i panoramics five years ago. The main thing I had to learn was to take one picture in auto mode, then put the camera in fully-manual mode (duplicating the settings from auto mode) before taking the pictures you intend to stitch. This keeps the camera from being darker when you’re looking at the sun and lighter when you’re looking away, so that everything can be stitched seamlessly. It seems obvious once you know it, but it didn’t occur to me for a while. On the software side, I used the completely free Microsoft Research Image Composite Editor to stitch the panoramic together, and it worked quite well (thanks for the tip, Jonah). Like magic, really.

It’s hard to believe it, but it has already been two years since Emma was born. I just posted a bunch of photos from her second birthday party, which we held on Saturday. Enjoy!

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!

Tonight Emma went trick-or-treating for the first time. (Technically this is her second Halloween, but last year she couldn’t even walk yet, so we didn’t dress her up.)  She had a blast!  You can see her duck costume here.  She didn’t have any problem with wearing it, and even got lots of extra candy from everyone who thought she was so cute.  She walked quite a long ways too, all the way down our street and back!  And she was good about knocking on the door, saying “trick or treat!”, and saying “thank you” after they gave her candy.

Of course, these things don’t come naturally.  We had to practice saying “trick or treat” first!  The video below shows a little bit of that process.  (We were practicing with toys instead of candy.)