Yeah, it was to confirm a few details…namely, that Grace is pregnant and that the baby is healthy. And since he or she is, in fact, healthy, with a strong little heartbeat, we can make it known: we’re expecting our second child!

If all goes well and we’re correct in our estimate of the conception date, we should be welcoming a brother or sister for Ella into the air-breathing world some time in November.

Pretty cool, eh?

The cake was also a hit, though it took her a few minutes to warm up to it as well. We think the icing was throwing her off, but by the end of the day she was more than happy to devour even the slightest crumb of cake. Here she is diving into it — or, rather, sharing a piece with someone just off-camera. Ella is a very good sharer, you see.

Chocolate cake, anyone?

Tonight, for her actual birthday, we’re serving her spaghetti. I’ll be sure to post a picture of the ensuing mess, which I am sure will be epic.

Update: No picture of the ensuing mess will be posted. We opted to let Ella have at the “pasketti” wearing just her diaper, and we’ve got a standing policy against posting “bare baby” pictures to the Intertubes.

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!

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.

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.

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.

We’ll see you all in November!

And about time, too. Seriously, this has been an event almost six years in the making. And the more I think about it, the more I begin to suspect that this is what was meant to be, even if at times I’ve railed and raged against it with most of the faculties I apparently possess.

If there was ever a sign that this was meant to go somewhere, it’s that Grace a) actually humoured me enough on our first date to let me ask someone to take a picture of us, and that b) she kept the picture. Who does that, seriously? Who so invests himself into a first date that they flag down a total stranger in the mall, hand her a camera, and ask her to take a picture of himself and the girl that he asked out not a week prior?

Well, me, evidently.

But that’s how things work with the Lord — revelation is gradual, and things that don’t always seem to make sense in the moment will suddenly become completely sensible after some indeterminate length of time. This one picture, so off the cuff and random at the time it was taken, now has incredible meaning…and, in a way, always did. What couple who makes it to the altar can actually say they have a picture of their very first date ever…of their very first foray into the world as a couple, even if only in a nominal capacity?

There’s an incredible meaningfulness there, and yet it’s not something that was instantly apparent. But as I put the finishing touches on the slideshow for the wedding, and as I inserted a scan of that exact picture as the first picture of the “us as a couple” section of the presentation, suddenly it made perfect sense why I was suddenly inspired to ask a passerby to take that picture. That flash of inspiration, that split-second decision…and six years later, all the reasons behind it become plain.

This is meant to be. It always was. And what a fool I was in those times where I tried to make it into something that wasn’t meant to be.

It’s more than about time that Grace and I were married, and after almost six years we are about to become a promise fulfilled. How amazing is that, that men and women can be united in that way? And how amazing is the author of that unity, for the way He quietly but consistently hints at his plan, and inspires action in the hearts and minds of those same men and women?