Ella has a tooth!
Grace just informed me yesterday that Ella’s first tooth just came in, with the second on the way.
Being in Wyoming at present, I haven’t had the chance to see this for myself, but it’s exciting news all the same. We’ll be able to start her on solid foods soon!
Baby pictures!
Plus many, many more in the gallery!
It’s a girl!
Grace and I would like to announce the birth of our daughter, Ella Rose. She was born this morning (Sunday, October 26th) at 12:39 AM, at a weight of 7 pounds, 7 ounces. Grace and Ella are still at the hospital, where Grace is recuperating from the delivery, catching up on her sleep, and regaining her strength. She did…she did excellently, I have to say.
She’s doing very well, but please do offer your prayers for her healing, that it may be expedient and complete.
Also, please feel free to use the contact form to send congratulatory or encouraging notes to Grace, who — next to God — deserves all the credit and recognition for this event. She has approached this whole experience with courage, determination, and boundless love.
I’ve got a few pictures of both Mom and baby, and I’ll be posting them soon-ish. For now, though, we’re just going to take some time to welcome Ella into the world, and will get around to pictures, and introductions to friends and family, in due time. So if you’ve called, emailed, or otherwise sent in a word to see how things are going…thank you for your care, and we will get back to you in a bit. But please just give us some time to ourselves, that we might rest and that Grace might heal.
Oh, yeah: for those family members who registered a guess in the baby pool, we would just like to say that nobody won, in that nobody actually guessed the correct date. Guesses ranged from about the 17th to the 31st, and covered almost every day in between…but nobody picked the 26th. A couple people did guess the exact birth weight, however.
Thank you, Grandma and Grandpa!
My grandparents just dropped me an email letting me know that they had taken the liberty of registering Grace and me with the Happy Nappy Diaper Service for a three-month term of diaper coverage.
Thank you so much, you two!
Prayer Request
Please pray for the repose of the soul of Father Stan Lasko, who passed away last week at the age of 46.
Father Stan presided over our marriage, and was a faithful, earnest priest who brought God’s word to his parish in Vermilion, Alberta with a reverent love for Christ. He was also a gentle person, a giant teddy bear of a man. His funeral will be on August 15th in Edmonton, at St. Joseph’s Basilica, and his ashes will be sent back to Poland following that for interment there.
Wedding season is here!
Oh, it’s going to be a busy summer!
We’ve no less than six weddings to attend (well, five now — one was last weekend) between now and the middle of August, and Grace is a bridesmaid at one of them. On top of that, and on top of our normal working lives, we’ve got to get the apartment ready for our little one, which means boxing up some things and moving some furniture out into storage.
It doesn’t sound like much, but believe me — it’ll keep us busy!
The ultrasound went very well
Grace went for her ultrasound appointment recently, which went very well indeed. By all appearances, we have a healthy little baby on the way. And active! So active…our little one barely stopped moving long enough for the ultrasound technician to grab this picture and a couple others.
Two legs, two arms, four chambers in a little heart…and a lot of attitude, apparently. Proof positive that this really is our kid. 
And this would be why DVD camcorders are inferior
Posted by Kenneth in Ken, Photos, Wedding News on November 26th, 2007
So I asked my friend — and fellow Rover — to record the wedding on his camcorder, a Samsung SC-DC164 DVD camcorder. And he did exactly that, and also recorded quite a lot of the reception as well. I’m thankful that he did, because its nice to see those memories played out on the screen again.
There’s just one problem.
Something happened to the first disc, and as a result it wasn’t finalized. What finalization does, in DVD camcorder parlance, is “closes off” the disc and readies it for playback in a home DVD player or computer DVD-ROM drive. It’s a common step to omit when one is filming something like a wedding — you should theoretically just be able to swap a disc out after it fills up and finish recording the event, and then go back later and finalize all the discs you used and be done with it.
That’s not what happened with the wedding video, unfortunately — something went wrong, and the unfinalized disc, while quite obviously full of data, doesn’t recognize more than the first 10 minutes of footage as being present when played back in the DVD camcorder used for the recording.
That’s bad.
What’s worse, of course, is that the disc isn’t finalized — that makes it unreadable in most DVD-ROM drives, which means that even manually extracting the data isn’t feasible.
Or is it?
Enter ISO Buster.
This handy utility is saving my butt. Not only does it enable my work PC to read the contents of the DVD, but it has actually found and extracted most of the lost video segments. There’s about…well, I would guess there’s another 10 minutes of footage that I have to recover, some of which could theoretically be left if it had to be. Some of it absolutely needs to be pulled off the disc if at all possible…although at least I was able to recover the exchange of the rings (the vows will hopefully be recovered in the last two files I have to pull off the disc).
I’m not out of the woods just yet as far as getting this video back is concerned, but I just wanted to stop and mention, in brief, a handy utility for salvaging data off of corrupted and damaged DVDs. Not exactly the sort of thing everyone has a pressing need for…but hey, if it helps someone out of dire straits, it’s worth mentioning on that possibility alone.
Still, this is going to be a lesson for me. Next time I need to tape anything, I’ll go and buy one of these.
One month
Posted by Kenneth in Ken, Wedding News on November 20th, 2007
And it has been a lot of fun. Being married to Grace feels really…natural. It feels like something that was meant to be, like it’s part of some purpose that transcends even the attraction and love shared between two people. That ought not to come as a surprise, as the Sacrament of Marriage is a part of the ongoing revelation of God’s purpose for men and women, and as our lives continue on this now joined path that revelation will play itself out all the more fully.
So my hope is that Grace and I continue to grow together ever closer in love, and in the love of Christ. If there’s any higher calling in this life, I can’t think what it would be.
Back from Greece
Posted by Kenneth in Ken, Travel, Wedding News on November 5th, 2007
Grace and I landed safely at Edmonton International Airport later in the evening last Friday (the 2nd of November), ending off our ten-day honeymoon in Greece tired and more than a little glad to be back in North America, but still in awe of what was, for the most part, an enjoyable adventure abroad. Although it started out feeling more like a trip than a honeymoon, we slowed our pace down a bit and just enjoyed each others’ company for a few days…and it was great. I am truly blessed to have such a wonderful wife as she.
It was nice to just get away from all the hectic tedium of the wedding and post-wedding frenzy, and to be equally sure it was nice to just get away from the apartment for a day or ten. I had only moved my things over to Grace’s a couple of days prior to the wedding itself, and hadn’t had time to unpack much. Add that to a considerable load of gifts* and it makes for one very messy, box-filled apartment indeed.
And really, I don’t think we could have picked a better place to escape to than the town on Crete that we ended up in. Hania is not exactly a “small town”, with a population somewhere between 57,000 and 70,000 depending on which source you consult, but the architecture has strong Venetian influences, and in the “off season” it has a slow, relaxed pace to it that we just drank in for all the days we were there.
I’ll have more detailed write-ups of the wedding and the honeymoon to post in…well, maybe a few days, maybe a bit longer than that, complete with pictures. For the time being, let me just say that it’s great to finally be married to a girl whom I have loved so much for so many years now. I’m grateful that we had a blast in Greece and that we were able to travel in safety…but that gratitude cannot compare to the joy and praise that I feel in my heart at finally being able to see here there on the next pillow when I wake up in the morning.
* the generosity of our friends and families has been more than overwhelming, and we find ourselves so grateful for all of it. Thank you, everyone.
