Once again, another 3 months have flown by.

Honestly, it's been a total blur. What on earth has happened since February?

Well, heaps more travel of course.

There was the trip to New Orleans, which I already wrote about.

The other big trip we did was to Washington D.C. for a week, which I'm yet to write up. We stayed with friends in Alexandria for the week. Unfortunately, Zoe came down with conjunctivitis before Sarah's very eyes on the flight over (I'd been in North Carolina for work the week before, so they flew without me and I flew up to D.C. to meet them). She also developed an ear infection and a general cough/cold.

Fortunately, we caught it all pretty much as soon as it happened, and spent Easter Sunday at an Urgent Care in Virginia getting antibiotics for her, but her sleep was not so great the whole time we were in D.C.

Other than that, we've just been doing the normal stuff. Swimming classes have continued (she's very confident in the water now). Her speech continues developing well. Toilet training is continuing to go very well. There haven't been very many accidents at all. She's really loving the "new" day care. It was definitely the right thing to do to move her.

Physically, she's in the 80th percentile for height and the 50th percentile for weight, so I guess she's currently tracking to be on the tall and thin side of things.

We had another birthday party in the park behind our home, and this year the weather was much nicer, so we had people hanging around until about 7pm, and a good time was had by all. Zoe even successfully blew out her candle on the first attempt.

Her two-year molars still haven't come through. They seem to go through various stages of giving her a lot of grief, and then they stop messing with her sleep. I was beginning to think we'd never get back to an uninterrupted night's sleep ever again. It's still a bit hit and miss, but she usually settles down again fairly quickly if she does wake up, and doesn't always require intervention from us.

I've arrived at the theory that the "terrible twos" are largely the fault of trying to cut these two year molars. Her tantrums are so much worse when her teeth are actively giving her trouble. If she's had a good night's sleep and her teeth aren't driving her crazy, she's still pretty well behaved. If she's been awake half the night and her teeth are hurting during the day, she can be quite difficult. We seem to be currently at a point where they're not causing too much trouble at night, but she'll chew on her fingers like crazy if given the chance during the day.

I think seasonal allergies are also messing with her a bit. After she got over the cold she came down with in Washington D.C., she's still had a runny nose and a bit of a cough, but I don't think she's actually "sick" I think it's more related to allergies. She passed on whatever she had to me, and since I've recovered from it I'm also not feeling quite right.

I read somewhere that pollen counts are off the charts this year due to the weird weather, and Sarah's having a bit of a hard time as well, so I think we're all going to just have to ride it out with the judicious use of antihistamines.

Speaking of allergies, it's about time to re-test her for her egg allergy. We'll have to try that at a point when she's not regularly taking antihistamines for seasonal allergies, so it might be a while yet before we can do that.

I guess the next big development will be graduating from the crib to a toddler bed. I'm not in any hurry to do that though, so as long as she's not escaping the crib, her sleeping arrangements can stay the way they are. It'd be nice if she can cut her teeth first and then once she's sleeping properly, we can try converting the crib into a toddler bed.

Sarah's Mum had accrued too much annual leave and had to take some time off work, so Sarah did some (very mild) arm twisting and convinced her to come over for 3 weeks, and do a 5 day cruise to Mexico out of New Orleans.

Unfortunately, my annual leave situation wasn't quite so abundant, and I had a lot going on at work, so regretfully I didn't join them on the cruise, and instead went to New Orleans for a four day weekend when they returned.

From all reports, the cruise was very good. Zoe handled it well, although she did say "home" a lot. One of the two stops in Mexico was to check out some Mayan ruins, which looked awesome from the photos. The other stop involved a dolphin encounter. I was incredibly envious of all that they got to do, and would have loved to have gone with them, as I've never been on a cruise ship either.

I can also report that no cats were lost during this bachelor stint.

I had a night flight on the Wednesday evening to get there, which was scheduled to get in at around midnight, and I'd booked a motel room near the airport for that night, and we'd booked a vacation rental home for Thursday to Sunday nights. Unfortunately, my flight ended being delayed something like 2.5 hours, so I didn't get into New Orleans until around 2am.

The house we rented did the trick nicely. It was a small "shotgun" duplex in what looked like a nice neighbourhood. It was advertised as being close to the street car line, but they were doing some work on the tracks, so the street car didn't seem to be running as far down the line as it usually did, so it ended up being a bit more of a trek to get to it. It was also extremely slow, and there was a marathon on the Sunday, which closed everything down for a long time, making it a generally pretty unreliable form the transport.

We ended up renting a car for Saturday and Sunday, which was something of a saga in itself, as Enterprise didn't have any cars at the location we'd booked one, so after a couple of hours cooling our heels there (Zoe was incredibly well-behaved, all things considered), they shuttled us over to another location and we ended up with a minivan instead of a compact, which for the same price, allayed our concerns about being able to transport all of our luggage to the airport on Monday morning.

We had a very early morning flight on Monday morning to come back, which got into SFO at around 9am, and I went directly to work from there.

Thursday

We all arrived at the house, separately. It ended up taking them 2 hours to disembark the ship when it came back into port, with Customs taking an eternity to process everyone. I think we went exploring the local area that afternoon, and took a street car into the city to check out Bourbon Street, having a Cajun dinner at Remoulade.

Friday

In the morning, we went to check out Lafayette Cemetery Number 2. Sarah took Zoe back to the house for a nap, and Sarah's Mum and I continued back to explore the French Quarter some more, walking down the length of Royal Street (which was vastly different from Bourbon Street, just one block over). We had lunch at the French Market. The cemetery was interesting, as pretty much all of the graves were these huge above ground tombs, that seemed to have multiple family members interred in them. Apparently the cemetery filled up quite quickly courtesy of a Yellow Fever outbreak.

After lunch, Sarah's Mum and I continued wandering around the French Quarter. We went and took a look at the Mississippi River, and I had an encounter with a grifter who was so good at his job I couldn't bring myself to argue with him over the $20 he diddled me out of.

We tried to get to the Civil War Museum, but it closed at 4pm. We looked at the Robert E. Lee Monument, which seemed to be draped in drunks, and then I think we rendezvoused with Sarah and Zoe back on Canal Street for dinner at The Court of Two Sisters (which apparently we were under-dressed for, as Sarah and her Mum said we were getting a lot of dirty looks from other patrons).

Saturday

On Saturday morning, we had the aforementioned car rental experience from hell, and by the time we had the car it was lunchtime, so Zoe napped in the car after lunch on the way out to Oak Alley Plantation, where we were introduced to the delightful beverage known as the mint julep, and took a tour of the house and wandered the grounds.

Sunday

On Sunday, Sarah and her Mum did a swamp tour, and Zoe and I went to the zoo. As I said earlier, there was a marathon that completely closed down Saint Charles Avenue, which is where the street cars run, so after walking down to where the street cars started operating (which ended up being most of the way down South Carrollton Avenue), the driver informed me that the street cars were queuing up at the corner of South Carrollton and Saint Charles, and I should get off her street car and get on the one at the front of the queue. I did this, but the driver of the front street car informed me that she wouldn't be leaving for an hour and half. At this point, I started considering a bus instead.

Zoe and I went to check out the Mississippi River, which was quite close to where we were, and then I went back, and despite a street car having left (without any passengers) the driver of the current street car couldn't tell me when she'd be leaving, so I started walking down Saint Charles Avenue.

Unfortunately, Zoe's going through a phase where she wants to be carried everywhere, so I was lugging her all over the place on my hip. Sarah didn't take a stroller with her, and instantly regretted it. Lesson learned.

Eventually we managed to get onto a bus, which dropped us off at Audubon Park, which had Audubon Zoo at the other end of it. There was a playground near the Saint Charles Avenue end of the park, so Zoe had a bit of a play on that, and then we continued through the park to the zoo.

Mercifully, the zoo had dodgy strollers for rent, and there was no way in the world I wasn't going to rent one of them, so that made getting around with Zoe a lot easier on my back. We had a really good time at the zoo. There was some sort of a music festival on in the parklands within the zoo grounds, and that included a jumping castle, which Zoe expressed a desire to have a go on. She had a fabulous time on it. I think she probably spent about 15 minutes in there, without any tears. I was very impressed. I took a brief video of some of her antics.

It was getting close to Zoe's nap time, and she was getting tired, but fortunately Sarah and her Mum were able to pick us up from the zoo after their swamp tour and Zoe got to nap back at the house.

Monday

We had a very early start. Unfortunately, our flight (with United) was a couple of days after United and Continental officially merged, and despite having checked in online, we had to queue up with everyone else (for an extended period of time) to drop off our checked luggage. Then there was a 45 minute line for security screening. We pulled the "toddler going to melt down" card and jumped to the head of the line, but Sarah's Mum had to wait. The flight ended up being delayed because people were stuck in the security line.

Overall impressions of New Orleans

Fabulous architecture. There were so many gorgeous houses on Saint Charles Avenue and the surrounding area. I'd have loved to do an architecture tour.

Crap (but cheap) public transport. $3 gets you a day pass. The street cars are cute, but slow and unpredictable. The drivers were remarkably unhelpful. The buses were okay.

Great food. Zoe seemed to have a liking for the spicy stuff. I gave her some fresh alligator jerky, and after some initial coughing and spluttering at the spiciness of it, she came back for more.

Post-Katrina recovery. We really only saw a very small part of the city, but there were still some houses with boarded up windows, and some vacant blocks where buildings had been demolished, but largely you'd not have been able to tell that large parts of the city had been underwater, from casual inspection.

I really enjoyed the trip, even though it was brief, I feel like I got a good feel for the place. We were there just after Mardi Gras, and there were still beads everywhere. Draped all over fences. Over power lines. Trees on the parade route were absolutely covered in beads. I'd have loved to have been there for Mardi Gras. My friend Brandon, who is an excellent street photographer, took some great photos that capture some of it.

Photos from Sarah's cruise and our time in New Orleans are here.

I first learned that David Hicks had written an autobiography when I saw some press coverage of there being an attempt by the Australian Government to ban the sale of it, so I asked my sister if she could get me a copy for my birthday before any ban happened. The book doesn't appear to be available on Amazon.

I sat down and tried to read it almost immediately, but at the time found his writing style to be rather inarticulate, so I put the book down for a month or so. When I next had a platelet donation to make, I took it along with me, and forced myself to read it for duration of the donation.

On the second reading, I managed to engage with the book, and from that point on, once I made it through his early years in that initial forced reading session, it ended up being quite enthralling. I plugged my way through the 456 pages in a bit over a month I guess.

We'll never truly know the full story of David Hicks, because I'm sure that unless there's some sort of inquiry (and even then, there's multiple country's governments involved), the full story won't come out.

I was always sympathetic to Hicks' plight, since I don't believe that anyone should be held without due process let alone for anywhere near as long as he was.

Certainly, the way the book reads, Hicks comes across as a very young, naive, but principled individual. Like many Australians, he got the travel bug, and by way of it, got to interact with some different cultures, which awakened a hunger for social justice in him (at least that's my interpretation of his portrayal).

I guess I have a different mental image of torture than Hicks did, because I didn't really find any incidences of what I'd consider torture in his story. There was plenty of despicable, inhumane treatment though, so I can see how the line might get blurry, particularly if you're the one experiencing it.

Specifically on the (mis)treatment of the detainees: it was pretty bad, based on the book. I'm surprised there haven't been more whistle blowers that have come out. I can't believe that the many soldiers who were stationed there could treat detainees the way Hicks says they were treated and then can look themselves in the mirror. The ICRC seemed well apprised of the detainees conditions (since they seemed to have the most access to them of any non-military people). I don't know what confidentiality is imposed on them in return for that access, though.

The fact that he's able to string a sentence together at all after the treatment he describes for the length of time he received it, I think is pretty amazing. I couldn't imagine having to endure what he says he went through.

I did feel quite appalled by my own country's complete disregard for his plight, and similarly in the way the US Government treated these detainees for as long as they did. Given there are still 171 detainees in Guantanamo today, it makes me wonder what the conditions and treatment are like there now. It certainly seems to have fallen out of the mainstream press.

Overall, not the most well written book, but a fascinating and shocking account of what happened to one person. I think Hicks should be congratulated for the courage to relive his experiences to get them down on paper, and Random House should also be congratulated for publishing his work, which I'm sure put them under some political pressure.

I have no idea how well the book has sold, or how widely it has been read, but I certainly recommend it.

Paul Wayper writes about the merits of using toll transponders to pay for parking.

I can report that I'm able to use my FasTrak tag to pay for parking at San Francisco International Airport, and it does indeed rock.

I'm unaware of anywhere else accepting it as a form of payment though.

Wow, a lot happens in 3 months. I'm sure I've missed something...

I think the biggest achievement would be toilet training. Zoe's been using the toilet for some time now, but still wearing diapers, and just after Christmas (when she was sick and vomited on the carpet) we figured we had nothing to lose, so we ditched the diapers. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of accidents she's had since then. I'm really happy to have this out of the way so early. Using a toilet away from home is still more of a challenge, but she seems to have very good bladder control, and fairly predictable bowel movements.

Speaking of sick, she was the sickest she's ever been around Christmas time. It coincided with her top canines finally coming through. She had a cold, which progressed into an ear infection, and she had this dreadful persistent dry cough, which then progressed into a dreadful productive wet cough. You knew she was really sick because she was extremely cuddly and lethargic.

Since around that time, her sleep has gone completely to hell. We've had some really bad nights where she'll wake up after a couple of hours of going down for bed, or for a while, she was reliably waking up at 4am and taking a good couple of hours to settle back down. Lately she's been sleeping through again, but waking up at 6am instead of the usual 7-7:30am. We bought a clock that changes colour at programmable times, so we're trying to train her that if she wakes up and the clock isn't green yet, she should try and go back to sleep. Not a huge amount of success there yet.

Christmas itself was good, but fairly quiet because Zoe was sick. Sarah managed to get a fabulous photo with Santa, which just fills me joy every time I look at it. We had some friends around for Christmas dinner, and Zoe vomited all over her new Cabbage Patch Kid doll and I think she threw up a couple more times between that day and the day after, so that wasn't much fun.

She's becoming more and more independent. "Zoe do it" is the most frequent thing out of her mouth, but fortunately she still accepts help as well.

We've also been getting plenty of sneak previews of the Terrible Twos. Fortunately they're pretty short-lived, but it's definitely going to be a challenge to my patience.

We'd been intending to keep Zoe rear-facing in the car until she was 2, which is the current recommendation over here, but I caved in recently when she was getting in the car and refusing the sit down (she'd stand up facing forwards and it was next to impossible to rectify the situation). After she did this to me a few times when I took her out in the car, I had enough and turned the car seat around. It's improved things a bit, but she still has her moments.

We also changed her day care, from the one day a week at a home day care, to two days a week at a commercial place. We were becoming more and more unhappy with the existing day care, and so decided to move her. It's a lot more money, but after just a week, we were seeing a noticeable change (for the better) in Zoe's response to going to day care, and she seemed to have picked up a bunch of new skills as well (sitting crossing her legs, holding a crayon like a pencil). The place she's in now is pretty new and very shiny. There's a couple of kids in her class that she knows from the local park, so overall it's looking like money well spent and definitely a change for the better.

Zoe had her first hair cut last weekend, and it was fairly uneventful. We went to this cute place in Palo Alto called Snipits, which was ludicrously expensive and I'd only ever take Zoe there for her first haircut. There was another kid there who was screaming bloody murder, and I think that unsettled Zoe more than anything else, so she was a bit uncomfortable to start with, but once the hairdresser put an Elmo DVD on, it was all good.

Sarah's Mum is coming over to visit for a couple of weeks in a couple of weeks time, so Zoe will be very happy to see her Nana. They're going to go on a cruise out of New Orleans down to Mexico and part of the Caribbean. Unfortunately I'm too busy at work at the moment to burn a week, so I'll just take a four-day weekend and check out New Orleans with them when they get back from the cruise.

I had a bit of an adventure yesterday, which would have taken some explaining if the police had gotten involved. It went a little something like this...

My friend and former co-worker Sara was in the US Virgin Islands for the holidays. Her boyfriend, Karl, flew there separately for the tail end of her time there.

Yesterday, I received a phone call from Sara, saying that Karl had managed to fly out to the Virgin Islands without his passport. Apparently you can get there without one, but to get back into the mainland US, you need one. She wanted to know if I could get one of my lock-picking co-workers to break into their apartment and retrieve Karl's passport and mail it them. Karl was supposed to fly out the next day. Attempts by Sara to contact her landlord had failed, so they didn't have many other options (apart from mailing me a key, which would have cost them another day).

I asked one of my co-workers, Jason, who I knew was into lock picking, if he was up for it, and he offered to put me in touch with another guy who had dominated the recent lock picking night that he'd run.

So now I'm talking to David, who's on board with the mission, but doesn't have his lock picking gear on him. No problem, Jason says he'll lend me his, which was at work with him. So we have a plan.

Our friends Ian and Melinda are currently in Australia. They've lent us their car because it's leased, and they have some minimum mileage they're supposed to do and they're under it, so I've been driving to work in their car some days. As it happens, I drove to work in it yesterday.

So now David and I set out in a car that neither of us own, with a lock picking set that belongs to another person, to break into an apartment of someone who's in the Virgin Islands. What could possibly go wrong?

I'm told that it's not illegal to own a lock picking set, but if you're caught with one on your person and you're not a locksmith, you can get into all sorts of trouble. On top of that I'd have a hard time explaining the car I'm driving.

We get to Sara and Karl's condo complex. It has a common gate that visitors would normal get buzzed through. Turns out it's not that hard to climb over. It's got some benign-looking spiky things on top, but I could get a leg over from the left hand side of the gate and jump over without impaling myself. Then I let David in and we proceeded upstairs to Sara and Karl's apartment door, where David set to work.

Sara said that just the dead bolt was locked. David started at it with Jason's tools, trying to be as discreet as possible. It was about 3:30pm and there was no one around, but we could hear some noises from the neighbouring apartment (the two front doors were right next to each other).

After what felt like about half an hour without success (the last pin of the lock was particularly tricky apparently) David was having to resort to more noisy techniques with the lock, so I decided to take the up-front approach and just inform the next door neighbour what we were doing in case he/she (I think it was a she) decided to call the cops on us. I told her through the door why we were there and what we were doing. She didn't seem to care too much.

David then proceeded to start "raking" the lock, essentially brute forcing the pins with a lot of jiggling, and finally managed to pick it and we were in. I quickly found Karl's passport where it was suspected to be, and then we pondered how we were going to lock the door again.

We could have just locked the door knob instead of the deadbolt and closed the door behind us, but we weren't sure if Sara and Karl had a key to the doorknob (Sara said they always just locked the deadbolt). Sara was fine with leaving the door unlocked until they got home, but weren't so keen on leaving our fingerprints all over the place and then leaving the door unlocked.

David tried to re-pick the deadbolt so that he could lock it via the same means as opened it, and I scouted around for a key. I managed to find a key that locked both the deadbolt and the doorknob, so I took that with us and locked up their apartment. In David's defense, the deadbolt was a bit stiff to lock even with the key.

I dropped David back at work, collected my stuff (it was now about 4:30pm) and headed to the UPS Store to ship Karl's passport to him as fast as humanly possible. I just made the 5pm pick up.

Today I received an SMS from Sara informing me that they had received the passport. I was very impressed with how fast it got to them.

So that was all a bit of an adventure. I'm not sure how much longer Karl is going to have to stay in the Virgin Islands as a result. I'm going to suggest that Sara and Karl leave a spare key with someone in future.

Late last month our six year anniversary of moving to the US quietly came and went. This also makes it six years with Google.

I think if you had have told me at the start of 2005, that I'd be ending the year off by starting a six year (and counting) stint in Silicon Valley, I wouldn't have believed you.

Six years is comfortably the longest I've spent in any one place since I moved out of home (the four years living at the Central Park Apartments was the longest I've spent in any one home, also).

Six years is also far and away the longest time I've stayed with one employer.

I wonder what life will be like in another six years' time?

Wow, a lot (of travel) has happened in the last three months.

Zoe has been to Chicago, Langkawi, Brisbane, and is now back in Mountain View. I'm actually feeling really guilty about our carbon footprint for this year.

She spent the last about 3.5 weeks in Brisbane with Sarah after the wedding in Langkawi, until I flew there last weekend for my sister's wedding. Losing and finding Smudge helped pass the time, as did having Liam stay with me while he was visiting from Zurich. I could have done without the former, but really appreciated the timing of the latter.

There was quite a noticeable vocabulary difference when I finally saw Zoe again. I can't keep up with all the words she can say now, and she's starting to grasp concepts as well. For example, she opened a small cardboard box, and declared it "empty". Apparently we say "uh oh" a lot, as this is one of her favourite things to blurt out whenever anything happens, ranging from my sister's bridal train dragging on the ground at her wedding, to vomiting all over herself in the back of the car.

She's definitely not going to be a girly girl. When the flight from Brisbane landed in Los Angeles she yelled out a big "WHOA!" and then "Again!" while furiously doing the baby sign language for "more". Fortunately we were able to oblige for the flight from LAX to San Jose, and she again enjoyed the landing (she got to sit in her own seat for this one) and did a loud "Wow!" and "Again!" I'm looking forward to taking her on her first roller coaster ride.

Her canine teeth still haven't come through yet, but I think they've just started to make an appearance. We're still trying to de-jetlag her at the moment, so it's unclear if the wake-ups throughout the night are because of jetlag or teeth issues (or a combination of both).

She handled all of the travel fairly well, although she's now too long for a aeroplane bassinet. She didn't get a lot of sleep on the 12.5 hour flight from Brisbane to Los Angeles (which meant we got none), but she was pretty well behaved for the bulk of it. She's good enough on her legs now that she can just tear up and down the aisles without incident, so we made countless laps of the plane to keep her occupied. The return flight was on Halloween, and the cabin crew had gotten into the spirit with temporary face tattoos, some cabin decorations and some "costumes". The trip back home was actually epic in that it was littered with minor annoyances, but I'll save that for a separate blog post.

This Christmas should be a fun one, as she'll be old enough to be a bit more interactive about the whole thing. She may also freak out sitting on Santa's knee, so we may not get quite as nice a photo as we got last year.

A few months after Zoe was born, it hit me that we didn't just have to raise a baby to grow up happy and healthy, we were raising a girl, and had to worry about making sure she had a healthy self-image and mind as well, and having to worry about how the world she was coming into was going to have an impact on that.

I think it might have been around the time that I became aware of the book Cinderella Ate My Daughter that I had this realisation.

I started taking more of an interest in, what I guess I'd call feminist issues. I became a seed funder for the Ada Initiative, and I tend to prick my ears up when I hear about feminist issues.

So when an email went by on the parents list at work about a screening of an independent documentary film called Miss Representation, I watched the trailer, and since I'm currently swanning around sans wife and child, ponied up the $10 to go and see a screening of it in Palo Alto, which was followed by a Q&A session with the writer/director/producer.

I basically went along on the strength of the trailer, and being a father of a daughter, and didn't do much more reading into the who the writer/director/producer was. It turns out that Jennifer Siebel is Gavin Newsom's wife. I didn't figure that out until I got home and did my homework, so some of the references she made in the conversation after the screening didn't make a lot of sense to me at the time.

The documentary itself was very poignant, but I found that after about 40 or 50 minutes, I felt that the point was made, and I would have preferred to see more about what to do about it. But I guess what to do about it is to be aware of the problem. I had some trouble accepting the statistic quoted at the beginning of the film that the average teenager spends more than 10 hours each day consuming media. If they sleep for 8 hours, and go to school for 6 hours, that means they're spending every other waking minute consuming media, and I just don't buy that.

Apparently Jennifer is working on a couple of related follow-up documentaries, so it'll be interesting to see what they're about and what they're like, and how they're presented to the viewing public.

One of the things that disappointed me a bit was this film doesn't look like it's going to do any sort of mainstream theatre run. I'm not sure why, but it seems like the way they're going is for more of a grassroots, small screening thing, possibly as a way of trying to get it added to (I presume private) school curricula. It is getting a couple of showings on Oprah Winfrey's cable channel OWN, but that doesn't seem like enough to me. I think it'd really cause people to sit up and take notice if it got half-decent box office numbers and a bit more press coverage as a result. It's the kind of thing I could see going viral if it gets more exposure.

The other thing that really disappointed me was the lack of men in the audience. I think I could have counted on both hands the number of men there. But I have to say that I wouldn't have heard about it (yet, anyway) if it weren't for that email that went by on the mailing list at work, so maybe it just doesn't have much of a profile yet.

I view this documentary in the same calibre as Super Size Me, or anything that Michael Moore has put out. It's a documentary trying to highlight an issue with American culture. It should get as widespread a viewing as possible to get the conversation going. Instead, as best I can tell, there's two DVDs billed as "educational material", with what I consider prohibitive pricetags.

I want to purchase a copy of the film for posterity (if nothing more, it'll be interesting to show Zoe a snapshot of American culture from around when she was born), but I'd also like to get my hands on the age-appropriate educational stuff so that I can use it with Zoe. The likelihood of Zoe going to a school that incorporates the material into its curriculum is slim (she'll be educated in Australia), so I'd really like to be able to use it at home.

I'll end with this thought provoking article that also did the rounds of the parents list at work a few months ago.

I've been wanting to sponsor a child in Africa for many, many years. I remember seeing a photo of a sponsored child on a couple of sets of friends' mantelpieces in Canberra, and saying to myself how I should really do that too.

Of course, for no really good reason, fast-forwarding to 6+ years later, I still hadn't gotten around to it. Until last month. I was walking out of the Apple Store in Palo Alto. I was accosted by one of those people on the street, with the clipboard and all that.

I usually manage to brush these sorts of people off. I really hate solicited donations. I'd rather consciously make a donation to a charity, than do it because someone on the street was paid to ask me to, or knocked on my door, or whatever. But I was distracted, or in a good mood, or something, and so I missed the initial opportunity to deflect her.

I'm really glad I did, because as I said, this is something that I've wanted to do for years, so I barely hesitated, and signed up on the spot.

I received the welcome kit in the mail a couple of days ago. I've been allocated a 6 year old boy named Armando, from Mozambique. I'm looking forward to corresponding with him.

Our friends, and former neighbours, the Harvetts have moved back to South Africa, and I hope one day to be able to visit them. Since we'll be in the vicinity, I hope one day to be able to visit Armando as well.

I'm pleased to see that Save the Children gets a good rap in Charity Navigator. I was worried that I'd get home and find out I'd signed up with one of those charities that blows half their money on overhead, but that's not the case.

I'm indescribably happy to be able to say that I found Smudge alive and well this morning.

I was getting ready to head out the door to work, and I opened the shutters in the kitchen and saw that the trap that I had outside by the front door was closed. The trap itself was wrapped in a sheet, so I couldn't immediately see what I'd caught.

I quickly went outside, half-expecting to find a raccoon in there, and I was pleasantly surprised to find Smudge in there!

I brought the trap inside and got Smudge out and raced her over to the food and water, where she had a long drink of water and something to eat.

She's definitely lost some weight, but otherwise doesn't seem any worse for wear. She's currently sitting in my lap as I write this, so I don't think she's too traumatised by her ordeal. Lily was a bit standoffish this morning, hissing and growling at her, but I suspect that's because she didn't smell right. If she keeps that up, I'll put a drop of vanilla essence on both of them so they smell the same.

Yesterday, I'd received a report of a possible sighting three streets over (houses on one side of the street back onto the Hetch Hetchy trail, where there were also reported sightings), so last night I placed the other trap in the backyard of one of the houses where there'd been a sighting.

A couple of hours after that, I got another report of a possible sighting from someone else on the same street, further down. So I was pretty keen to substantiate all of these sightings on this particular street. Unfortunately, after two trips up there, I didn't see any black cats, so we'll never know if it was her or not.

The night before last, I'd upgraded the food in the traps to some sardines, tuna and some fresh wet cat food, to try and lure her in. I have no idea if that helped or not, or she just finally found her way home, but it was such a relief to find her in the trap this morning.

It turns out I caught an opossum in the other trap. Those are the funniest animals. They have a totally broken fight or flight reflex. This one would not leave the trap when I opened it. I ended up having to upend the trap and shake it out, and even then it just lay there playing dead - even when I shoved a bowl of food in its mouth.

I've just done the rounds of the neighbourhood and taken down all the posters I'd put up. It had been suggested that I might want to update the posters and say that I'd found her, but I honestly don't want to do the extra trip to then take them all down again after that.

It'll be a week today since I assume Smudge disappeared. Still no sign of her.

I got one call from my posters around the neighbourhood, but I'm now pretty confident that it was another black cat. I really got my hopes up on that one.

I don't know what else to do. I could be out beating bushes every spare minute, but I feel like I'm chasing a potentially moving target around an unbounded space. I've had no bites in the cat traps out by the front door. Not even a skunk.

The waiting game sucks. I have no idea if she's dead or alive.

Poor Sarah. Cat dramas always seem to befall us when she's in Australia.

It looks as if Smudge has managed to escape the house. Being at work all day, it took me 24 hours to notice.

Our friend Helen came over on Sunday night. Smudge was definitely around then, because she was climbing all over Liam. Helen used the downstairs bathroom before she went home, and I remember her having to shoo Smudge out because she was in there. I'm pretty sure she went home after that. If my memory serves, she saw herself out and I was in the kitchen cleaning up, so my current theory is that she escaped when Helen left.

On Monday night, I had a lengthy video call with Sarah, who was at my parent's place setting up their new Mac Mini. I didn't realise until after that, when I was about to go to bed, that I hadn't been harassed by Smudge all evening. So I searched the house that night, and couldn't find her.

Liam had already gone to bed for the night, so I hoped she was stuck in his room, and went to bed too.

This morning, Liam and I both searched the house, and the immediate surrounds, without any luck. I called the Palo Alto Animal Services (I got the dispatch because the shelter hadn't opened yet), emailed the local neighbourhood association, and went to work.

I called Palo Alto Animal Services again later in the day to report her missing to the shelter itself, and Betty-Ann there recognised my accent and name and asked me if I was Sarah's husband (Sarah used to volunteer there a lot, and we adopted Smudge from there), so they're now keeping a look out.

Smudge is micro chipped, but wasn't wearing a collar. She's allowed in the back yard, because it's totally enclosed and can't escape, so she shouldn't be totally freaked out by being outdoors. Whenever she does escape out the front door, she usually makes a beeline to the right, which is mostly enclosed, but she can certainly get out of the complex. Unfortunately she often doesn't come when called, so for all I know she's in some obscure location 10 metres from the front door and I can't see her.

My main concerns are that we're only two blocks from Highway 101, so if she does stray too far, she could get into serious trouble, and I'm also a bit worried about raccoons giving her grief.

I spent some time tonight putting up posters in the immediate area and poking around bushes. I've left the two humane cat traps that we have out by the front door with some cat food in them, in the hope that she's roaming around and will walk into one of them.

Oh and the other big concern I have is that Halloween is coming up. Shelters tend not to adopt out black cats around Halloween because bad things can happen to them.

So now we wait. I'm really hoping she turns up safe and sound, soon.

Our friends Andrew and Janice finally tied the knot last Sunday, in Langkawi, Malaysia.

They're Aussies currently living in New York, and Janice is of Malaysian descent, so I think part of the reason was to accommodate some Malaysian relatives that wouldn't be able to travel, and the other reason was that it was going to mean a bunch of people had to travel anyway, so why not travel somewhere a bit exotic?

As my sister is getting married later this month in Brisbane, we decided to spare Zoe two massive international flights in close succession, and Sarah and Zoe flew out a few days ahead of me, and went to Brisbane, and then Zoe, Sarah and her mum flew to Langkawi from there, and I flew there from San Francisco, with the plan being for Sarah and Zoe to hang out in Brisbane for the 4 weeks in between weddings.

It was the longest amount of travel I think I've ever done. I hadn't sat down and calculated what the travel time was beforehand, and when I got on the flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong, and they said it was going to be nearly 14 hours just to Hong Kong, I nearly wept. The only good thing about it was I didn't have to wrangle a toddler as well.

From there, I had to get to Singapore, with a several hour layover, and then another flight from Singapore to Langkawi. I left SFO at 1:20am on Monday morning, and finally arrived at about 7am (San Francisco time) the following day.

I didn't even bother getting off the plane in Hong Kong, it was only an hour and a half layover. I think the layover in Singapore was 5 hours, and it was a separate flight. Singapore airport at least was pretty good to kill time in.

It was funny, I was reading Wired while I was killing time in Singapore, and they had an article, which included a side bar on 10 Best Airports to Get Stuck In, and I observed that getting to Langkawi and back involved using 4 of them.

The flight into Langkawi was more eventful than usual. I was dozing a bit as we were coming in to land, and I woke up to the sensation of taking off again. I wondered if we'd had an aborted landing? Sure enough, soon after, the captain got on the public address and said that they'd had to abort the landing due to bad weather in Langkawi. He had pretty bad Engrish, thanking us for our frustration and saying something about fuel, so I didn't get a lot of the details. We proceeded to circle for a while before finally landing. I think the flight ended up landing something like an hour or more later than scheduled. So that was mildly exciting. Langkawi airport was one of those little "walk across the tarmac" places. I think I stood the closest to an operating jet engine that I ever have, as another aeroplane taxied in to a stop between my plane and the terminal while I was walking to it. Loud.

Anyway, that was all just me getting there. Sarah had a bit of fun getting to Brisbane on her own with Zoe. She's now too long to sleep in an in-flight bassinet, and doesn't seem to like sleeping vertically in the Ergo Baby Carrier (possibly she was too hot in it). I think she got a bit of sleep lying across Sarah's lap, but Sarah didn't get much sleep. I think there was similar fun for the Brisbane to Kuala Lumpur flight, but at least she had two laps to lie across for that one. Sarah, Zoe and Sarah's mum arrived in Langkawi earlier in the day on Tuesday, and I made it to the resort at about 10pm (local time) and pretty much immediately crashed for the night.

The Westin Langkawi was just fabulous. I don't think we've stayed at a resort since our honeymoon, and this resort was a whole other level compared to Heron Island.

The rooms were very comfortable, and the resort was very accommodating of a toddler. Their Kids Club menu was excellent. The breakfast buffet (included in our room rate) was the most comprehensive breakfast buffet I have ever seen in a hotel. The only thing missing was bacon, being a Muslim country, but I can live without that. It was pretty easy to just fill up on breakfast, skip lunch and just have a light dinner. The on-resort dining prices were also very reasonable. The off-resort prices were even cheaper. The resort facilities in general were very comprehensive. Three pools. A children's play room. A well equipped gym and recreational area including squash courts. An extremely nice day spa.

The thing I liked best about the whole destination wedding thing was all of the activities leading up to the actual wedding. The wedding was on the Sunday, and we had the Hen's and Buck's parties on Friday. Apparently Australia is the only place that calls it a Buck's party. The rest of the world calls it a Stag party, how about that? There was some last-minute changes to the Buck's party, and we ended up chartering this huge $2 million yacht for 4 hours and going for a cruise and doing some jetskiing and water sports. The captain was Aussie, so we all had a good chat with him. Apparently it's a corporate vessel, with an exclusive chartering arrangement with the Westin.

On Friday night, we all went out to a seafood buffet dinner at the Yellow Cafe over at Cenang Beach. Most of the guys and girls already knew each other courtesy of the day's activities, so dinner involved a lot of meeting the other halves.

What I really liked about all of the pre-wedding stuff was that by the time the wedding rolled around, you really felt like you knew a bunch of Andrew and Janice's family and friends, which I think made the whole thing feel a lot more intimate.

Saturday was a recovery day. Sarah's aunties Glenda (who was in Singapore on business) and Vicki (who lives in Thailand) had joined us at the resort by this stage, so we were all knocking around together checking out the island. We took the cable car to the top, but unfortunately the sky bridge was closed due to the inclement weather.

There was a lot of touristy stuff at the bottom of where the cable car was, and Zoe got to have an encounter with a very large python. She even tried to give it a kiss.

One of the things that was surprising was how popular Zoe was with all of the locals and other Asian tourists. We could probably have charged for photographs. There was a little girl, who I thought was possibly a similar age to Zoe (turned out she was two and a half) and I asked her parents if I could take a photo of the two girls together, and no sooner had they sat down together and a virtual paparazzi materialised out of nowhere taking photographs. Similarly, all of the staff at the Westin were totally taken by Zoe, and wanted to touch her. To her credit, Zoe handled all of the extra attention pretty well.

The wedding wasn't until 6pm on Sunday, so we did a 4 hour island hopping boat tour in the morning. That was a bit of an experience. It was nothing short of sheer bedlam trying to board the right boat at the wharf (I use the term lightly) and then the boat's captain had to arrange the passengers appropriately so as to keep the boat on an even keel. It was a narrow motor boat with a canopy cover over the back two thirds of it.

First stop was Dayang Bunting Island, home of Pregnant Maiden Lake, where we stopped for 45 minutes. More bedlam ensued getting off the boat at the wharf there (there was veritable flotilla of tour boats all trying to load and unload at the same time). Monkeys abounded. They seemed incredibly tame. We were practically tripping over them. Zoe didn't seem to be as taken by the monkeys as I thought she would. It was a short walk up a reasonable flight of stairs to get to the lake, though some incredibly humid jungle, and once we got there, there wasn't a huge amount to do in the time we had available. So we dunked Zoe's feet in the lake a few times and then made our way back to the chaos at the wharf and got back on our boat.

We stopped for a similar amount of time at another island with a pretty nice beach, and Zoe had enough time to a quick swim in the ocean with Sarah, and then we made our way back to the boat again to another spot where we watched sea eagle feeding. Heaps of eagles circling overhead would take turns to swoop down and grab fish and fly off again. It was impressive. I think I managed to snap some good action shots with the long lens.

Then we had the wedding itself. It was on the beach out the front of the Heavenly Spa on the resort. Let me say, the Westin knows how to put a wedding together. The ceremony was as lovely as the location.

For the reception, the one 5 bedroom villa on the resort was booked for the night. Dinner was a buffet on the lawn out the front (briefly delayed thanks to a rain shower) and then speeches and general partying happened around the terrace out the back of the villa. There were some beautiful speeches. Janice's brought a tear to my eye. Part of the whole package included something like a 10 person video crew that were running around capturing everything. It felt a bit surreal. It was definitely the most high-end wedding I've ever been to (sorry Scott and Julie, your "Wedding of the Century" has been eclipsed by the "Wedding of the Millennium").

Monday was a wind down day. Zoe mercifully gave us a sleep in until 8am.

Our flights didn't leave until the evening on Tuesday, so after we checked out we went for a drive around the island to try and get Zoe to take a nap in the car. We ended up at the fruit farm, which to the best of my understanding is run by the government. Zoe had fallen asleep by this stage, and Sarah said she'd stay behind in the car and have a nap too. So her mum and I went on the tour. It was a fun little tour. There were only four of us on it. They drive you around the farm on the back of a truck and show you the various crops they have. They stop at a few places and give you a bunch of fruit samples, attempt to answer your questions, and take funny pictures of you. The favourite seemed to be to dangle a fruit on a knife up close in front of the camera while having the subject(s) in the background look like they're carrying an enormous fruit.

We got back to the car to an upset Sarah and small group of locals milling around. Sarah had managed to lock Zoe in the car for about 30 minutes when she got out to make her a sandwich after Zoe had woken up from her nap. Fortunately the engine was running and the air conditioning was on, so there was no risk of Zoe overheating (on the contrary, she was a bit on the cool side). Some kind locals had somehow figured out which car rental company to call (it's possible there's only one) and someone came out with a spare key, so the crisis was averted just before we got back to the car. It's the first time Zoe's been locked in the car (it's pretty much impossible in the Prius) and it was just our luck that it'd happen in a foreign country!

One of the saddest things about Langkawi was the amount of garbage floating around in the ocean, and washing up on the beaches. I was swimming in the ocean off the yacht while we were out on the Buck's party, and it was disgusting. The jetski was temporarily disabled due to sucking in something. We visited Black Sand Beach, which was supposed to be something of a tourist attraction. Covered in trash. Ian Kiernan would be sad. The captain of the yacht we were on for the Buck's party said it was all from Thailand and got flushed out of all the rivers and streams by the recent rain. Just goes to show how connected everything is.

The house is very quiet without Sarah and Zoe, but my friend Liam is visiting from Zurich for a couple of weeks, so that's helping break the silence. I'm using the time to get a heap of things done that I don't otherwise get time to get done.

Unfortunately the photos from the trip are only available on Facebook at the moment, but they'll eventually get uploaded here.

Our friend Susan was going to be in Chicago for a conference, and as we hadn't seen Chicago yet, and it was on the list of cities we wanted to visit, we made the semi-spur of the moment decision to have a three day weekend there last weekend.

We got the Virgin America red-eye flight from SFO, which left on Friday at around 5pm, and got into Chicago at around 11:30pm, local time. Zoe didn't do as well as she has previously, and didn't sleep very well on the flight over, despite us getting lucky and scoring an empty seat between us on an otherwise fairly full flight. I think she's getting too big to comfortably sleep in the Ergo baby carrier (or isn't keen on sleeping vertically any more).

We stayed at the Swissotel, because that was where Susan was staying (and was where her conference was) and nearby hotels seemed to be around the same price range. When we checked in, we let them talk us into an upgrade to a larger room, which had fantastic views of Lake Michigan and the Chicago River. Lake Michigan is just mind-bogglingly big. It's an inland sea.

What can I say? I was totally in love with Chicago. The weather while we were there was unbelievable. Clear skies. High 20's (Celsius). It was more humid than the Bay Area, but less humid than Brisbane.

The first thing we did on Saturday was go visit a friend of Sarah's who lived in Bryn Mawr. We took the "L" there. The elevated train was an interesting affair, and turned out to be less accessible than we'd been led to believe from some light research in advance. In fact, I found Chicago in general to be fairly wheelchair (and by extension, stroller) unfriendly. We had to lug Zoe's stroller up and down stairs quite a bit to get from the river level to where the hotel was. Zoe seemed to find it amusing, at least. Aside from that problem, the city seemed pretty flat.

I'm really glad that we got out of the city and into Bryn Mawr, because it was really great to see that aspect of Chicago life as well. Lovely, quiet, tree-lined streets with wide sidewalks. Beautiful buildings. Sarah's friend was fostering 8 kittens, so Zoe got to have a play with all of them, which she thought was pretty cool.

After we returned to the city, Sarah and I kicked back in Millennium Park while Zoe napped in the stroller. Saturday, being 9/10/11 in US date format, seemed to be particularly popular for weddings, and there were a lot of couples getting wedding photos taken in the park.

That night, we tried to have some deep dish pizza at Uno, the home of deep dish pizza, but the line was ridiculous. We subsequently learned about Due, and went there the following night. The pizza was good, and I found the crust to be slightly different from what we'd get at Patxi's.

We checked out the Navy Pier on both Sunday and Monday, taking Zoe to the Chicago Children's Museum both days (we got free entry thanks to our membership at the Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose). We had grand plans of checking out the Shedd Aquarium, but it turned out that Monday was a "free for all Illinois residents" day, and the line at 11am was ridiculous, so we gave it a miss and took at water taxi back to Navy Pier. It was Zoe's first boat ride, and she enjoyed it. I got some unbelievably good photos of the city skyline from the boat.

Our flight out was at 7pm, so we took the train to Midway. I was very impressed that we could get all the way to the airport by train for the standard price. I love flat-rate fares.

I really love a city with good mass public transit. The only thing that detracted from this in Chicago was the accessibility issues. We explicitly went to the Orange Line Clarke/Lake station to go to Midway because it was listed as being wheelchair accessible, and we had a stroller and a suitcase. We ended up going up to the wrong platform, and getting across to the other side was a bit of a mission. We'd entered the station from the street level, took the elevator up, and then realised we were on the wrong side. We had to go back down the elevator to the level below the street, cross the street from underneath it, and then go back up the elevator on the other side. Aside from these sorts of shenanigans, the whole elevated train thing was pretty cool (but I wouldn't have wanted to have an apartment with the train line right outside my window). If only the cars had glass roofs, the Loop would have been a lot more scenic.

Overall, it'd be hard to say whether I liked Chicago or New York City better. I liked the clean, flat nature of Chicago, the architecture and the lower density of buildings, but I also really love New York just because it's New York, and has an awesome (probably equally stroller-unfriendly) subway system.

Photos from the trip are here.

I'm not very good with dates. For the last two years now, Joshua's anniversary has snuck up on me and caught me by surprise.

I don't think that I'd really appreciated until this year that we lost him on the Labor Day long weekend. I'll have to remember that for next year so I don't forget.

I don't know what my problem was this year. I just didn't realise that it was this early in September that we lost him. Last year I was just too exhausted from dealing with a new baby to realise when his anniversary was, and I felt terrible for missing it.

This year, I just felt terrible for not realising when it was, but at least Sarah pointed it out before the fact.

For added irony, the 4th of September this year is Father's Day in Australia.

Yesterday, I was looking at photos of Joshua to remember him, and Gallery gave me a random photo of Zoe in the corner. That was something. I'm not sure what.

I feel like Zoe being a wonderful child is some sort of consolation prize from the universe for taking Joshua, but I often wonder what Joshua would be like today if he were almost four.

I got a call from Mum today to inform me that my grandmother had passed away last night, Brisbane time, at 94 years of age.

If you want to get all genealogically correct, she's technically my step-maternal grandmother, but she's the grandmother I spent the most time with, growing up, so I'm not going to split hairs.

It's come as a bit of a shock, because despite having had progressively worse dementia for probably over a decade, she's been in incredibly good physical condition. I think it was in her 70's that she had a heart valve replaced, and I for one had been expecting that to be the thing to wear out and take her down slowly. I last saw her in the flesh in January, when the above photo was taken, and more recently a few weeks ago on Skype.

She was recently moved from an aged-care hostel in Toowoomba to a nursing home in Brisbane, as her dementia had progressed beyond the point that she could be cared for in the previous facility.

Mum had visited her earlier in the day yesterday, and she was fine, but apparently the staff found her unconscious at around 5pm when they went to get her for dinner. She was taken to the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital where it was determined she had suffered from a stroke, and she passed away later that evening at around 11:30pm.

So all in all, she had a very good innings, and of all the ways to leave this world, this was one of the quicker and more painless ways to do it. That's the problem with a quick exit - it's usually completely unexpected.

It's looking like the funeral will be on Friday, and I've got a flight tentatively booked to leave on Wednesday and get in on Friday morning and return again on Monday. At the time I arranged this, I'd completely forgotten that I was flying to Calgary on Monday night to babysit the son of friends, while they go to the US Consulate for a visa appointment. Fortunately this travel doesn't conflict with that travel, it just means I'll be away from work for longer, and spending a lot of time inside pressurized tubes. I'm fairly confident with all of the short international trips, I'm going to look like a drug mule or something, and someone's going to thoroughly cavity search me.

Boy, the last three months have been very eventful, developmentally.

First off, about 2 weeks after she turned 1, Zoe started walking in earnest. Within about 2 weeks of that there was no stopping her. It's funny to think she's only been walking for under 3 months and yet she's very stable on her feet.

Secondly, she developed a mild egg allergy. Sarah was giving her some scrambled eggs (one egg's worth) for lunch one day, and she mixed in some cream cheese, and Zoe absolutely scoffed it all down, so she scrambled another egg and she scoffed that down too. She then broke out in some hives around her mouth and Sarah noticed that she was coughing a bit and a little wheezy when she put her down for her afternoon nap.

Upon subsequent consultation with her paediatrician and a blood test, the allergy was confirmed and we now have to avoid eggs and Zoe was prescribed an Epi Pen Jr.

We went and saw an allergist as a followup, and he did some skin tests that showed eggs were the only thing she's allergic to. He said her allergy was very mild in the grand scheme of things, and we're going to do another skin test when she's 2 to see if she's grown out of it. Eggs in baked goods are generally okay, as the offending protein is denatured at high temperatures. She's more allergic to the egg whites (1.56, which is in the "moderate" range) than the egg yolks (0.55, which is in the "low" range). Egg allergies are apparently something that one does eventually out grow, so that's a good thing.

We'd also been keeping her off gluten and dairy because of a strong correlation between them and rather disgusting bowel motions. We've successfully reintroduced gluten with no adverse effects, and we've just started her back on cow's milk.

We of course had our epic trip to the Grand Canyon, which Zoe handled absolutely marvelously. That was closely followed by a weekend down in LA, which was a bit more of a disaster as Sarah and I both came down with a 24 hour stomach bug that Zoe had had during the week. There's nothing quite like languishing in a non-childproofed hotel room, feeling like death, with a full of beans toddler busy running around jamming her fingers in drawers. Fortunately we were able to use a babysitter for a few hours respite, but it did rather completely mess up our plans for the weekend. Zoe did handle the drive to and from LA very well though.

Zoe's been doing Saturday morning swim classes at the YMCA, which I've taken her to. I don't think she's enjoyed them as much as the indoor ones she did at the Sutton Swim School, where she went with Sarah previously, and I definitely don't feel like the classes are as structured. Unfortunately we just finished an 8 week session, and the next one filled up before we got a chance to book, so we're hoping to get back into something at the Sutton Swim School once an opening comes up. I might do something ad hoc with her on Saturdays at the Rinconada Pool in Palo Alto in the meantime.

Zoe has also started going to regular daycare on Thursdays, so Sarah gets a day to focus on her University study. It's a home daycare that isn't too far away, and our friend's daughter goes there too, so there's someone she knows. The first few times Zoe got pretty upset when she was dropped off, but she barely makes a whimper now when Sarah drops her off. She's also usually down to one nap a day now.

She has four teeth, top and bottom, with one molar definitely through and another three starting to make an appearance.

I just bought an iBert safe-T-seat for my bike, because I've been itching to get out on the bike with Zoe on the weekends when I'm looking after her so Sarah can get some more study done. The weather is currently nice, and I've just learned about a bike trail that cuts across the bay in front of Moffett Field, so I'm keen to check that out. Apparently there's geese out there. I did my first decent ride with her last Sunday to the Mountain View Farmer's Markets and back. Zoe seemed to be okay with it. The helmet we got her drew a lot of comments from people at the markets.

She's very much in the "point and grunt" stage at the moment. What's really cool is she'll nod or shake her head in response to yes/no questions. It's so cool when you can ask her a question and she solemnly nods her head in response.

Often in the morning Sarah takes her to the park around the back of our home, and so now Zoe's gotten into that habit, so she'll scratch around at the front door and they head over there. The other day, Sarah opened the front door and she took off in the direction of the park, so Sarah just followed her to see where she went. Sure enough, she made her way over to the park. Tonight, Zoe fetched me my shoes and then dragged me over by the hand to the front door to demand that I take her out for a walk.

She's also really getting into books now. She actively seeks out books, and has a bit of a flick through them, or brings one over and climbs into our laps, or backs up and sits in our laps if we're sitting on the floor, to have us read them to her. She's now strong enough to hold her bottle herself at bedtime, so I sit with her in my lap in the glider and read a story to her while she has her bedtime bottle. It's indescribably wonderful.

She seems to understand quite a large array of words. We can go "Where's your <insert object here> and she'll look around the living room and generally find the item we're talking about. She also seems to understand questions about breakfast, lunch, going to the park, going to the bathroom, having a bath, etc as she seems to respond appropriately. In the speech department, I haven't really counted the words, but she's not saying a huge number of words. This morning, apparently she yelled "MAMA! MAMA! PARK!". "Park" being a new word for her.

We bought an annual membership to the Children's Discovery Museum in San Jose, and we've probably taken her there half a dozen times or so since getting the membership. She particularly loves the water area.

We finally got around to getting our back yard landscaped and made generally fit for a small child to run around in. Sarah's planted a butterfly garden in one corner, so hopefully once that's established we'll have some fun things for Zoe to watch from the window. I'm looking forward to planting some bulbs in the autumn.

I expect the next 3 months will be more of the same. We've got some more overseas travel coming up, but a lot of relatives will be around, so hopefully we'll get a bit of downtime to ourselves.

Our adventurous friends Eric and Katie had invited us to join them on a hike in the Grand Canyon over the 4th of July weekend. As this struck us as something we'd never have considered doing otherwise, we thought we'd accept their kind offer. We're so glad we did.

It was quite a bit of traveling just to get there. We flew out of San Jose on Thursday night, got into Las Vegas, rented a car, and then drove to Peach Springs, Arizona, where we stayed the night. We didn't get in at the Grand Canyon Caverns Inn until around midnight, and we had to get up again for a 5:00am departure (I think we actually got away by more like 5:30am), to drive to the Hualapai Hilltop, where the trail head was. Zoe handled all of this very well. She didn't end up falling asleep in the car until about 10:30pm I think, and dealt with the transfer out of the car at midnight very well and went back to sleep.

The drive to the Hualapai Hilltop, along Indian Road 18, took about an hour. We had to dodge a bit of livestock on the road. The road itself was sealed and of good quality. We remarked on the way back out that as soon as you left the Havasupai Reservation and entered the Hualapai Reservation that there was a distinct degradation in the quality of the road.

We parked at the Hilltop, and got ourselves organised, and commenced our descent by about 7:10am.

The first 1.5 miles was very steep. There were a bunch of switchbacks and there was a fair few people coming up the other way already. There were also a few mule trains coming in the opposite direction that we had to dodge. The mule trains have right of way, so we had to stop and get out of the way to let them pass. Zoe thought they were pretty cool because they invariably had a few dogs with them as well, and she thinks dogs are awesome.

The remaining 6.5 miles (it was an 8 mile/13 kilometre hike in total) were fairly easy. There was a lot of variety in terrain. Rocks, sand, dirt. It wasn't all in the sun, which was made it more comfortable. Heat wise, I think it was in the high 30's Celsius, with pretty much no humidity, so it didn't feel too uncomfortable.

Towards the end, as we got near the water, there was a distinct change in the canyon. There was more greenery, and we started hearing insects and seeing bird life. When we first saw the water, it was hard not to just jump in, it looked so inviting.

The total hiking time was about 4 hours 45 minutes, which included a reasonable stop to give Zoe some breakfast. We arrived in the village at around midday. Unfortunately the lodge wasn't ready for check ins until 1pm, so we had to twiddle our thumbs for a little bit.

Zoe handled the hike incredibly well. We used a Macpac Possum child carrier that Nigel had passed down to us, and she didn't complain the whole time. She even took a nap in it. We were very relieved that it wasn't a problem for her. Sarah carried her, and I carried everything else. (I'm so glad I didn't see the photo of how I looked until well afterwards). In hindsight we probably brought too much stuff, but we didn't really know what to expect down there, so we'd rather have too much than too little.

The village completely exceeded my expectations. I had this (silly) mental picture of it being just the lodge and not much else, but somewhere between 450 and 700 people live in the village. It had two general-type stores, a cafe that was pretty much like a fast food/takeaway place, an elementary school, and some sort of basic medical clinic. There was also a small general purpose community centre of some sort. The main store had pretty much everything you'd need in the food department. The cafe frequently ran out of various different things, but you weren't going to go hungry.

For the remainder of Friday, we just stayed put in the village and let Zoe stretch her legs. Eric and Katie and their kids explored the first set of falls down from the village, unofficially named Rock Falls.

On Saturday, we all hiked down to Havasu Falls. We met a couple of other families (amusingly both from the Bay Area) along the way, so we had some interesting conversations. I have no idea how long the hike was.

Havasu Falls was impressive. Quite tall and narrow at the top, and quite loud. Zoe was impressed. We took her for a bit of a swim in the pools in the bottom. We had lunch there, and then Zoe and Sarah stayed there (Zoe took a nap in the KinderKot (also courtesy of Nigel) in the shade by the falls, and I took the Macpac with a water bladder in it to refill it at the spring in the campground, which was further down stream, and to check out Mooney Falls with Eric and Katie (and their kids), which was further downstream again from the campground.

Mooney Falls was pretty insane. A lot taller than Havasu Falls, and a lot more treacherous to get to the bottom of. Parts of it were vertical. Chains and rickety ladders were involved. Caves were involved. I'm so glad I didn't have Zoe in the Macpac, because on multiple occasions, the top of it got bashed into rocks, so without having Sarah with me also to act as a guide, there's no way I could have safely descended with Zoe in the backpack. My favourite photo illustrating how crazy this was is this one that I took of Eric and Katie. This photo highlights some of the craziness involved to get down.

I pretty much got to the bottom, had a quick look around and left Eric and Katie to it, because I figured Zoe would have woken up by now, and was probably bored. Turned out I had all of the sunscreen with me as well. So I climbed back up, and trekked back to the campground, refilled at the spring, and headed back up to Havasu Falls.

After we reunited, we then hiked back up to the village, which to be honest, was the hardest bit of hiking we did. I was carrying Zoe in the Macpac, and it was hot, and it was mostly loose sand all the way. We were very glad to get back to the village.

Zoe started showing signs of coming down with a cold and a cough, so we decided to cut short our stay in the village and leave on Sunday instead of Monday. We'd been tossing up between getting a helicopter or horses out. We ended up opting for the helicopter after learning that the horses still took about 3.5 hours, and you basically had no control over the animal. We were dubious as to how Zoe would go being bounced around on the back of a horse for that long. The helicopter ride also took all of about 5 minutes.

The tribal members get first dibs on the helicopter, and there had been a death in the village, and I think a lot of people had come to the village for the viewing (the casket itself was flown out earlier on Sunday morning for a burial out of the village), so I suspect there was a higher number of tribal passengers than usual. We didn't get out until 2pm. Again, Zoe was incredibly good. She just hung out with us while we waiting for a flight out. There were plenty of dogs for her to be entertained by, and some other kids. She also took a pretty decent nap.

So we finally got out, and got back to our car, and then the heavens opened. It absolutely poured down with rain. Sarah was keen to check out Hoover Dam, so we decided to stay near Boulder City in Nevada, and got a suite in the Hacienda Hotel and Casino for cheap.

The next day was the Monday public holiday for Independence Day, and we were tossing up whether or not to take Zoe to a doctor to get her checked to see if she had bronchitis (we've been a bit gun-shy about bronchitis since the time she came down with it when we were in Australia). She ended up falling asleep in the car while we were hunting around for an Urgent Care facility that was open, so we decided to let her sleep and drove to Las Vegas.

After she woke up, we took her to see the flamingos at Flamingo and the lions at MGM Grand. Zoe absolutely loved all the lights, sights and sounds of Las Vegas.

In the afternoon, we took her to a doctor, and got the "first child, huh?" from the doctor (she didn't have bronchitis).

After that, we went and briefly checked out Hoover Dam (just walked half way across the bridge in front of it and walked across the dam itself).

The following day, we packed up and spent the morning on the Las Vegas strip again. This time we went to the Venetian (Zoe thought the gondolas were pretty cool) and then we flew out in the afternoon.

So it was a lovely little family vacation. We ended up spending about as much time in Las Vegas as we did in the Grand Canyon, but that was okay. I'd really like to go back to Supai again, but I'm not sure if the stars will align themselves appropriately. If we did, knowing what I know now, I'd take a lot less food and put all of the luggage on a horse, and just hike in with the minimum of stuff. I'd probably be game to hike out as well if the bulk of the luggage was on a horse.

Photos from the trip are here.

It was very much a team effort. My friend Brandon, who is an excellent photographer, came over and took some photos.

Then my friend Sara, who is a bit of a Wikipedia contributor/editor/expert, showed me how to upload the photo to the Wikimedia Commons, and then it was just a case of gluing it all together by making the edit on the Wikipedia page.

Then it was almost immediately deleted.

It turns out that apparently the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license (better known as CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) is somehow incompatible with Wikipedia & friends (I haven't figured out the exact ins and outs of why yet). I had to get Brandon to re-license the photo I used as just CC BY-SA 2.0 (basically ditching the non-commercial restriction). Then it magically reappeared (after some help from Sara with the response).

Crikey, this Wikipedia contributing is tricky stuff. At least when Speck's owners get back to pick her up, I can tell them their gecko is famous.

A random co-worker was looking for someone to look after her son's pet gecko for 5 weeks while they went to Hawaii, and I thought it'd be something fun and non-permanent to do, so we now have a female 1 year old Afghan leopard gecko named Speck, and a large supply of crickets in our possession.

I note that the Wikipedia page is lacking a photograph. We might have to try and fix that...

Today was Bike to Work Day, and I biked to work, just like I do most other days.

I missed out on it last year because I was still out on paternity leave at the time. That means I've almost been back at work a year.

Since we only have one car, and when Zoe was little and sleeping a lot, it made most sense for me to start biking to work again. I'm really glad I did, because not only is it faster compared to the round trip time that Sarah would need to take to drop me off and pick me up, it's a lot easier on her and Zoe. It used to be a challenge for Sarah to get from home to work and back in the mornings without Zoe falling asleep in the car.

The only times I've needed a lift have been in wet weather during winter, and when I've been sick. Now that we're out of winter, we should have endless sunshine for months, and it's starting to warm up, which makes biking so much more pleasant.

It takes about 10-12 minutes door to door, which is short and sweet, and most of that is on the lovely Stevens Creek Trail.

I'm glad I've been able to stick at it for the whole year. I see no reason to stop any time soon.

I got in early this time and started working on this post a day early.

Well, we've made it. We've all managed to survive parenting to the 1 year mark. Zoe continues to do fabulously. Today she had her 12 month paediatrician appointment, and weighed in at 19 pounds and 8 ounces (8.8 kg), which has brought her up from the 25th percentile for weight to around the 50th percentile. She's also up from the 25th to the 50th percentile for height. She got four shots today, which she was singularly unimpressed about even before she was jabbed.

Somewhat surprisingly (to us) Zoe still isn't walking. She'll stand on her own if you distract her with something, but otherwise she'll fall down and prefers to crawl everywhere. She'll cruise around with the help of furniture, and she'll happily walk while pushing something. Go figure. I really thought she'd be walking into her 12 month appointment at the paediatrician.

Developmentally, she's waving and pointing now. I'll usually get a wave goodbye out of her when I head out the door to work in the mornings. She seems to be picking up things pretty quickly now. One of her traits has been she'd always toss her sippy cup on the floor when she was done taking a drink from it. She's been doing this for months. In one sitting, I taught her to hold it out to me and say "ta!" instead, which is great, because now at mealtimes, I'm not picking up the sippy cup off the floor a dozen times.

We had another trip back to Australia last month, and this one was purely vacation, so we had a nice couple of weeks of pottering around with family. Zoe again handled the flights very well, although the jet lag upon returning to the US seemed a lot worse than I remembered after our first trip. The pilot was pretty punchy with the seat belt sign on the way to Australia, so we had to keep taking Zoe out of the bassinet while she was asleep. Incredibly we were able to do this about four times before she woke up.

She had a bit of a cold before we left for Australia, and that turned into a nasty cough, which was diagnosed as bronchitis the first week we were there. We got some antibiotics for her, and that cleared the cough up. She also had a couple of spontaneous vomiting incidents, which were out of character for her (but Sarah contracted some kind of tummy bug herself, so it wasn't entirely surprising). Despite these health issues, she was still in excellent spirits the whole time, and I think she thoroughly enjoyed herself.

We went to Surfers Paradise for a couple of nights in the first week, and rented an apartment on the 23rd floor of the Chevron Renaissance, and pottered around the Gold Coast a little bit. We went down to Palm Beach, where we used to holiday every year when I was a kid, and caught up with my cousin who lives there, and Zoe had fun on the beach.

That weekend, we held an early first birthday party for family and friends in a park and had a barbecue lunch.

The following week we spent a few days on the Sunshine Coast, with some of Sarah's extended family, and pottered around on the beaches up there.

Our flight back ended up being delayed 9 hours, but fortunately we found out before we got to the airport, so we had a nice, unexpected extra day in Brisbane. It also meant that we flew back for Zoe's night time sleeping time, which made for a pretty good flight (but made the jet lag worse for her once we got back).

I wonder what the next year will bring us? At a guess, more teeth, talking and walking.

(The requisite "I have no time any more, it's 10 days late")

It certainly feels like 3 months has passed since I last reflected on her development. It feels like forever. As usual, we've managed to do a fair bit in 3 months.

She's doing very well. Growing nicely. Still around the 25th percentile for weight, but now up to the 50th percentile for height. We just had to upgrade her from an infant car seat to a "big kid" car seat, because she was maxing it out on height, not weight. She seems to have handled the transition okay, but we haven't done any long car trips since making the change.

She's now sitting really well, and pulling herself up into a standing position. She's cruising around on furniture a bit (and sporting various bruises to show for it). She started crawling at six and a half months, and now there's no stopping her. She's into everything. No more teeth have appeared yet. Her top teeth have been looking like they want to do something for ages. I think, given a recent uptick in fussiness, their appearance may be imminent.

On the food front, she's eating all sorts of things. We've got a few infant/toddler cookbooks, so we still are predominantly feeding her either a combination of pureed fruits and vegetables, or a few pureed dishes that I've prepared (mainly vegetable stews or risotto). She also enjoys bread, toast and has taken to Vegemite on toast, like a good little Aussie. The other night we ate out at our local Italian restaurant, and she had some garlic bread and some penne pasta with marinara sauce. She's definitely enjoying finger food.

We went back to Australia for a couple of weeks recently, and she handled the flights extremely well, and had an absolute ball back in Australia. She'd just started sleeping through the night a few times before we left for the trip, and didn't sleep as well while we were in Australia, but got back into the swing of things in under a week of getting back to the US.

She's so much fun at this age. She laughs, she plays. She gets so excited when I get home from work in the evenings. I love her and being a Dad so much.

We had a small celebration with friends at our local Italian restaurant, Mario's Italiano today, to mark Sarah's 30th birthday.

The reason this milestone is a big deal is because, to put it simply, two of her direct ancestors didn't make it to it. The undetermined genetic connective tissue disorder that Sarah has, claimed the lives of her father and paternal aunt when they were both in their twenties, suddenly and two weeks apart from each other. The case made the journal of the American College of Chest Physicians at the time.

We're just very fortunate that with advances in medical diagnostic and surgical technology, Sarah was able to be diagnosed and have her aortic aneurysm repaired before it dissected.

So there's the heart thing. That's a big deal.

Then there's all the other crap that she's had to go through in only thirty years of life. She's had to endure more tragedies and medical challenges than some people have to go through in a lifetime. The fact that she's still such a happy, positive person is a testament to just what an amazing person she is, and it is an honour to be able to call her my wife.

So happy birthday Sarah, here's to the next thirty years being a whole lot less eventful than the first thirty, and the last three in particular.

Today, Zoe is six months old. The last three months certainly feel like they've taken their time, but a lot has happened.

Developmentally, she's doing great. She's now in the 70th percentile for height (up from around the 25th percentile), and 31st percentile for weight (up from the 25th percentile). She cut her bottom front teeth a few days ago. Crawling is imminent, I'd say. She can already scoot around in reverse, and by a combination of shuffling and rolling, doesn't seem to be having problems moving around the floor.

We started her on solids at five months, and she's taken like a duck to water to pureed pumpkin, sweet potato, beans, zucchini, apple, pear, banana and avocado. Speaking of water, she's also decided she likes to drink water from our glasses whenever she sees us doing it. Hilarity usually ensues, closely followed by a change of outfit.

She's sleeping well, only waking up once a night under normal circumstances, and that wake-up is getting later and later. She loves her baths. She usually lets out a series of loud sighs as soon as we put her in the bath.

She got her first cold a couple of weeks ago. It coincided with her first day in ad hoc daycare, but Sarah and I were both sick as well, so I think it's more likely that she caught the cold from us than from daycare. She's still battling it, but it hasn't really bothered her all that much. She's just a bit snotty. The NoseFrida has been very handy for dealing with this.

She had her six month shots today, and seems to be tolerating them fairly well. Sarah says she hardly even cried when she got them.

She continues to be a remarkably happy baby. She always wakes up with a smile, she really only fusses if we keep here away for more than a couple of hours, or haven't fed her on time. Even with this current cold she has, she's still stayed very happy. We feel incredibly lucky to have such a wonderful baby.

The next big adventure is to try a babysitter.

I was fortunate to get to take a ride on the airship that has in recent times taken up residence in our back yard.

It was a 90 minute flight around the South Bay Area (south over CA-85, then north to Stanford over I-280), over the bay itself to Fremont, over the salt evaporation ponds, and then back to Moffett Field.

Visibility was fairly good, but there was a bit of smog around.

The airship itself was really cool. It only seats 12 people, and it wasn't quite full. I didn't count the passengers, but there were about 3 or 4 empty seats. Once the airship stopped its initial climb, we were free to leave our seats and roam the gondola.

There was an openable window at the front and rear of the gondola, and it was big enough to stick your head out, which made for some good photos. At the back, was a bench seat, and an inclined window, so you could lean right out the back. Even the lavatory had a window.

The cockpit was literally just at the end of the gondola, so you could inspect all the controls and instruments, and have a chat with the pilot.

Disembarking was a delicate counter-balancing affair. Two people off, two people on. We were the first load of passengers for the day, so they jettisoned a heap of water once we were all on board.

Overall, it was a lot of fun, and a very smooth ride. I'm not sure that it's worth $495, though.

Photos from the flight are here

I'm totally gobsmacked by how fast this happened, but Zoe's certificate of Australian Citizenship arrived today. I only sent off the application on Saturday, and it would have arrived in Washington DC at the Australian Embassy on Monday morning. For us to get it back on Wednesday means they processed it either the same or next day and got it back into the mail on Tuesday. Pretty amazing, given that the form itself sets the expectation of up to 12 weeks, and Embassy-specific web page sets the expectation of 3-4 weeks.

Next step, get an Australian passport.

Again, there's been this surreal time warp effect. 3 months has passed, and it feels like both a long time and a blink of an eye. It more feels like a long time though. I've mostly forgotten what it was like before Zoe came along.

Zoe is growing well. She weighs around 11 lbs 11 oz (5.3 kg), and I swear she's getting very long. When I'm holding her in my arms, there's legs everywhere. She started being able to roll from her stomach onto her back at 2 months, and her neck strength is pretty good now. I guess her next significant milestone will be being able to sit up properly. When she's on her tummy, she can prop herself up on her elbows and look around. She smiles all the time.

We had a few nights of 8 hours of sleep, then everything went completely out the window, and we had about a week of very disrupted sleep at night. I think she's starting to settle into a routine now though, with a few 5 hour stints the last few nights.

Her US passport arrived yesterday. We still need to get everything together to lodge her Australian citizenship application, which is the first step towards getting her an Australian passport.

Sarah's back studying now (two subjects this semester), which is proving to be a bit of a juggling act.

Father's Day in the US has always been a weird one for me. I've been pottering through the day oblivious, when a friend who is a father will tell me that they've been thinking of me especially today because of our loss. Then I'm reminded that Father's Day is in June and not September. I wonder what the deal is with that? It seems very few countries observe it on the first Sunday in September. Weird.

Zoe hits the 7 week mark tomorrow, and I return to work. Boy is that going to be a shock to the system for all of us.

The 7 weeks of paternity leave has been absolutely wonderful. Google's Paternity Leave benefit is now firmly my number one favourite employee benefit. Co-workers had complained that taking it all at birth was a bit of a waste, because all the baby does is sleep, but it's definitely been worthwhile taking it all now.

Because we've been predominantly bottle feeding with pumped breast milk, I've been able to be very involved with the feeding, and I've been able to do a lot of the running around helping Sarah, so I wouldn't have done it any other way. It's also been great to watch Zoe grow and develop. She's interactive enough at this age, and it's just great to cuddle with her, or share a nap with her.

On the sleeping front, things are a bit all over the place. She definitely gets fussy in the evenings, at around 5pm to 7pm. Often we have trouble getting her to go back to sleep after a feeding around this time. Sometimes the trouble can extend past the 10pm to midnight feeding. She sleeps magnificently during the day, and travels fairly well. She sleeps quite well in her car seat, and stays asleep in it when we're at a cafe or restaurant.

We had our first overnight trip while Sarah's Mum was visiting. We went down to San Simeon to take her to Hearst Castle. It was fun having Zoe in a hotel room with us. Whenever she fussed during the night, we'd just grab her and bring her into bed with us. She spent quite a lot of time in our bed asleep on our chests. It was very sweet. It was like a little baby vacation.

Zoe also had her first outing to the California Academy of Sciences, and we managed to spend about 5 hours there without any major meltdowns from anybody.

It was absolutely fantastic having Sarah's Mum here for 4 weeks too. She's great to have around. She was a big help in cleaning up the back yard significantly, and generally helping out around the house. It was great having her take care of the 7am feeding when Sarah and I were both zonked out from overnight interruptions. It was also nice not to have to think so much about how dinner was going to materialise.

My parents have decided they will come and visit in September, which is excellent, as they won't have to wait until February to meet Zoe. One of the other nice things about the Google Paternity Leave is that you keep accruing vacation time while you're on it, so I should have enough vacation time to take a couple of weeks off while they're here, as well as in February when we go back to Australia for Sarah's residential school at the University.

The next big event will be Zoe's vaccinations at 8 weeks. Hopefully that will be as uneventful as possible.

The fact that it's only two weeks feels totally surreal. I think it's the feeding approximately every 3 hours. That's approximately 100 interactions that we've had with her in only 2 weeks.

We had her two week weight check at the paediatrician's today. She's now weighing 6 lbs 12 oz (3061 grams), so she's made back her birth weight and then some.

We're still largely bottle feeding her with pumped breast milk. The paediatrician said that once she's 7 pounds she should have enough strength to breastfeed exclusively, so we'll get a lactation consultant involved if that isn't the case in another week or so.

Other than that, everything's going swimmingly. She eats, sleeps and poops. She sleeps amazingly well. I keep telling myself it won't last, but we're making the most of not needing to tip-toe around the house. In the last week, we had a new stove installed, which involved the contractor using a hammer drill to install the anti-tip brackets. He also used a drop-saw to modify one of the drawers. Didn't bother her. We had some shutters installed in the kitchen, which involved a lot of cordless drilling. Also didn't bother her. The gardeners for the complex were mowing the lawn and using a leaf blower right outside her window. Not a peep.

Today, after the paediatrician's appointment, we dropped in to Palo Alto Animal Services, the animal shelter where Sarah has volunteered for the last 4.5 years, to show them Zoe. They threw a bit of a surprise baby shower, and gave us a ton of baby clothes, which was very nice and totally unexpected. Zoe slept in her car seat on the table in the lunch room while a good dozen people or so made a lot of noise around her, and she was oblivious to it all.

Sarah's Mum arrives on Wednesday. Tomorrow will be a busy day of final cleaning up in preparation.

Zoe's a week old today. As such things tend to do, this feels like both an eternity and no time at all.

We've been back to the paediatrician twice since I last blogged. Zoe's weight is now on the increase again. Today she weighed in at 6 lbs 3 oz (2806 grams) (I think. My brain has gone a bit fuzzy)

We're largely sticking with bottle feeding pumped breast milk for now. Apparently 7 lbs is the magic size where they've got enough strength to feed exclusively at the breast.

Sleep-wise, I think we're all doing reasonably well. Zoe just eats, sleeps and poops. Sometimes we need to wake her up to have a feed. I think the longest we've let her got is 4.5 hours. She's taking a lot of milk at each feeding session - up to 90 mL, so I expect that she'll have blasted past her birth weight by the time she's two weeks old.

It'll be good when she's exclusively breastfeeding. The current regime is a little bit tiring. Zoe wakes up (or gets woken up). I change her diaper and give her a bottle. Sarah tries a little bit of breastfeeding. I put Zoe back in her crib. Sarah pumps some milk for the next feeding session, and I go and wash and sterilise bottles and pumping paraphernalia.

If Zoe's feeding every three hours, this only really gives us two hours to get anything else done.

Not that I'm complaining, mind you. At the paediatrician's this morning, there was another father with the same LPCH diaper bag that we'd received while we were in the hospital. Turned out he had a two-week old boy. I asked how the sleep levels were going, and he exclaimed about how they were only getting 2.5 hours at a time, and his son would raise the roof. I mentioned the 4.5 hour stint that we'd managed to have, and he was totally gobsmacked.

In other news, it seems like Sarah has a bit of UTI, which has totally wiped her out this afternoon. She got a 3 day course of antibiotics this afternoon, so hopefully that'll fix her up.

It took longer than expected, but we were finally discharged from the hospital early this afternoon.

There was some concern about jaundice in Zoe, so the hospital paediatrician ordered a bilirubin blood test, which we had to wait for the results from. It came back fine though.

The other concern was weight loss. She's still hovering around the 5 lbs 13 oz mark, which is at some magical 10% of birth weight lost, which seems to cause some concern for the doctors.

So for the next week or so, we're going to bottle feed her breast milk, as she seems very sleepy when she tries to nurse, and we want to make sure she's getting enough. It's nice to be able to more actively participate in the feeding routine.

Since we've been home, Zoe's not been sleeping terribly well on her own, so right now her and Sarah are having a nap together.

We've got our first appointment with Zoe's ongoing paediatrician tomorrow. She was the recommendation of a friend, and seems to be highly regarded by all of the hospital paediatricians we saw.

I'm feeling very disorganised in the nursery, because I didn't really participate in any of the set up of it. I knew where everything was in the hospital, so for a diaper change, everything was under control. I'm going to have to get a couple of totes tomorrow, so everything is on hand. I may also go berserk with a label maker.

Looking forward to a hot shower and some shut-eye after this next feeding.

The OB resident dropped by on her rounds this morning and asked if Sarah wanted to go home today or tomorrow. There was some brief indecision regarding stairs, but Sarah has decided to go home today. We only stayed 3 nights in hospital after Joshua's C-section as well.

So the staples have been removed, and we're getting discharged at about 11am.

Here's why:

Zoe Dianne Pollock was born at 12:30pm PDT, at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, via Caesarean-section.

Her birth weight was 2920 grams (6 lbs, 7 oz) and she's 49.5 centimetres (19.5 inches) long.

As for why she was born 11 days early than her previously scheduled early arrival...

Monday morning started off like any other normal Monday morning. I got up at 6am to go to the gym with Dan. I got home at around 8am. I asked Sarah if she'd felt any baby movement, and she said she hadn't. Even after some jiggling and a cold glass of orange juice, there was nothing.

Not wanting a repeat performance of what happened last time, we wasted no time in heading to Labour and Delivery to get things checked out. When we were nearly at the hospital, Sarah felt some small movement, so that was a relief.

When we got to the hospital, they performed a non-stress test as they have previously. They spent a good couple of hours with Sarah hooked up to the monitor, and then the on-call obstetrician asked us how we'd feel about just having the baby today.

I asked if there was anything particularly concerning about the NST, and the OB said that she (the baby) was doing marvelously now, but was "less than marvelous" when we first came in. I haven't had a chance since to ask her if there was anything untoward observed during the delivery.

Anyway, she (the on call OB) said that rather than have Sarah get stressed out for the following 11 days, she'd talked with our regular OB, and they felt that since she was at 37 weeks (and considered "full term") that it was okay to deliver at that point. At the end of the conversation, it was upgraded to a recommendation, rather than an option.

So so much for an attempt at VBAC. We got to the hospital at around 9am, and I think they/we made the decision to deliver at about 10:30am. I had enough time to race home and grab the camera and race back again, and the next thing I knew we were all in the operating room, and Zoe was being delivered.

It was amazing getting to see the "extraction". They dropped down the sheet that was blocking our view of the action right at the end, and I got to see (and photograph) Zoe's head and whole body being pulled out. She gave out a little cry, and Sarah and I totally lost it with relief.

Things were a bit of a blur after that. I got to come over and meet Zoe while they were weighing her and measuring her, and then they bundled her up and let me take her back to Sarah's head-end on the operating table, so Sarah could get a look at her.

Sarah handled this C-section better than last time. She didn't get any nausea, but she still got the itching and involuntary shivering, courtesy of the morphine.

While they were still putting Sarah's insides back in, Zoe and I went to the nursery, where they put her under a heater for a little while to warm her up a bit. Then it was back to the recovery room to have a proper meeting with Sarah.

Once Sarah was ready to move to the maternity ward, Zoe and I again returned to the nursery, where she got her first bath, had her umbilical cord trimmed some more, and her anti-theft device fitted to her umbilical cord clamp. Then it was off to the maternity ward. I think we were all in the maternity ward by 3pm.

After a little while, we managed to get bumped to a private room, which was a lot better than the shared room (the other bed was vacant, but just having more space made a big difference), and that's where we've been ever since.

I've stayed each night on the roll away bed, helping out with diaper (sorry Aussies, I've been here too long, and dealt with too many babies, I never think of them as "nappies" any more) changes, and burping and other miscellaneous tasks.

Monday night was okay. Tuesday was a bit rough. Sarah didn't get any sleep on Monday night, and the anaesthesia totally wore off and she was in a fair bit of pain. She slept better on Tuesday night, and today, the breastfeeding has been going well, and the post-operative pain is well and truly under control.

She's lost a bit of weight since delivery (as is to be expected). She was down to 5 lbs 14 oz (2664 grams) at last night's weigh-in, and at tonight's weigh-in she came in at 5 lbs 13 oz (2636 grams). So the weight loss is starting to plateau. We're already supplementing the breastfeeding with syringes of colostrum/milk that Sarah's pumped previously, so I hope the weight loss will have turned around by tomorrow night's weigh-in. The breastfeeding in general is going pretty well as of today. Mum and bub have both mastered the latch. I think it's just a matter of Sarah's milk coming in now.

I've brought forward my 7 weeks paternity leave (an excellent benefit Google offers) to start as of Zoe's delivery. Sarah's Mum arrives on the 19th for 4 weeks, which will be great. We expect to be discharged from hospital on Friday.

Luckily we were pretty much all ready for this happening a little bit earlier. We had our last baby classes on the weekend. The nursery is ready enough to bring a baby home to, so aside from Sarah's Mum being disappointed that Zoe's going to be a bit older when she first gets to see her, we're all good.

The WiFi in the hospital is great. We've already Skyped with both grandmothers and they've had a chance to see Zoe. We've had a steady trickle of visitors, and the whole baby routine is making the time go pretty quickly.

Getting close now.

Sarah had another ultrasound yesterday, just to check things. Unfortunately I couldn't be there due to a self-inflicted scheduling screw up. Apparently you could see hair on the ultrasound, so I'm a bit bummed to have missed it.

The baby has "dropped", so that's good. Her head's still down, and she's swallowing, so that's all good too. Weight-wise she's now in the 38th percentile.

We're booked in for a C-section on the 14th, unless she comes of her own free will between now and then (which is what we'd prefer), in which case our OB will allow an attempt at a VBAC. Our OB is reluctant to allow the pregnancy to go past 39 weeks, given prior history and Sarah's heart, and they don't induce for VBACs, so it's going to require some planetary alignment to avoid a C-section.

The whole heart thing still being an issue was only a fairly recent discovery for us. Sarah's cardiac surgeon had told us we could go forth and have as many kids as we wanted, but it turns out the fine print in that statement is that while the previous aneurysm has been repaired, she has an undiagnosed connective tissue disorder, so there's no telling what might happen with the rest of her aorta in the future. So her OB is just doing what a good high-risk OB should do, and being extra paranoid, on two fronts.

So we've got a couple of weeks to try and convince our daughter to come more than a week and 2 days early. I don't think we have statistics on our side, unfortunately (although I had a surprisingly hard time finding concrete statistics on delivery dates relative to due dates for first-time deliveries versus subsequent deliveries).

No sooner do I discover it, and TransLink up and renames itself to Clipper.

I wonder how much that exercise is going to cost? I'm also curious as to what they're going to do in terms of a new domain name.

Ah, marketing:

Why is the name being changed?

Now that the system is fully operational on five transit agencies - Muni, BART, AC Transit, Caltrain and Golden Gate Transit and Ferry - it is available to the majority of Bay Area transit riders. Giving the system a new name and logo helps make it more appealing to potential customers and also takes away any confusion with other local programs such as FasTrak, Fast Pass, as well as several other transportation programs around the world that are also named TransLink.

With Bay Area public transportation being woefully inadequate, I have to wonder if much of any adoption problems (which is what I presume they're trying to solve with this rebranding) are more a function of overall patronage?

We went to "Slings and Things: The Art of Babywearing" at Blossom Birth this morning.

It was really good. We were the only expectant parents there, everyone else brought their babies with them. Seeing the little 3.5 week-old newborn made me wish we had our baby already!

The instructor talked and demoed us through pouches, ring slings and wraps. I think we're pretty sold on the Moby Wrap. She'd borrow various babies to show how they could be carried with each type of product. It was amazing seeing how content the babies became when they were positioned appropriately.

Blossom Birth seemed pretty good. It was like Day One, without all of the high-priced retail stuff.

Monday saw us at the 34 week mark. Yesterday was the point in Sarah's first pregnancy that we lost Joshua. So we're in scary uncharted territory now.

Sarah's OB has said that he doesn't want her to go past 39 weeks, given prior history, and he won't induce because of her heart (and they don't induce for a VBAC anyway), so if we want a VBAC, then the baby has to come of her own accord between now and the 17th.

That means that in a month from tomorrow, we should be parents!

So far our future daughter is keeping her presence felt, which is very reassuring. We've only had two unplanned trips to Labor & Delivery so far. One for decreased fetal movements at around 30 weeks (the baby had flipped head down it turned out) and the other for an unexplained blood pressure spike on Sunday (it sorted itself out).

Sarah's doing a non-stress test twice a week (up from weekly) starting this week.

The nursery is pretty much all ready to go. Just add baby.

A while ago now, Sarah commented that one night when she's woken up in the middle of the night, that she'd observed me stop breathing for a while in my sleep. She wanted me to go see the sleep doctors that she'd seen (she was diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea a couple of years ago).

So I eventually packed myself off to the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic, which is at Stanford's shiny new outpatient centre in Redwood City.

They took a look at me, and declared I had a crowded mouth, and a narrow airway, and asked me to do a sleep study.

I did the sleep study in the middle of January. That was "interesting". I had a ton of wires glued to me, and needless to say, I didn't sleep particularly well, but apparently I slept enough for them to be able to diagnose me.

A couple of weeks later, I got a letter with the results. I had a Respiratory Disturbance Index of 16.6. The letter from the clinic defined RDI as including "events of 10 seconds or more with cessation of airflow or discernable reduction in airflow associated with arousal or oxygen desaturation of 3% or more".

I had one obstructive sleep apnea event, and 119 obstructive hypopnea events during the sleep study. At one point my O₂ saturation dropped to 89%, but it was very briefly. The overall average was 96%.

A month ago I did another sleep study, this time while I was hooked up to a CPAP machine, and they fiddled with the pressure. I was fairly exhausted that night, and slept like a log.

Based on the results of the second sleep study, I've been prescribed an auto PAP machine with a pressure ranging between 13 to 15 cm of water pressure (whatever that means).

I got the machine, a ResMed S8 AutoSet II a week ago last Friday. It's slightly more advanced than the CPAP machine that Sarah uses, in that it'll adjust its pressure within the range it is set to, as it deems necessary throughout the night. It also backs off the pressure when you exhale, like Sarah's does.

I'm not particularly thrilled to be sleeping with this thing on my face. The first night I used it, I slept fine. Something like from 10:30pm until 6am. Subsequently, I keep waking up at precisely 3:30am for some reason, and it's hard to get back to sleep with it on, so I take it off. A few nights, some sort of mask leakage alarm has gone off at some random point in the night. I haven't been in any state to try and diagnose what's going on when that happens, so I just take off the mask and turn the whole thing off.

I was curious as to whether I'd notice some sort of life-changing difference between using it and not using it, like Sarah does, but so far, I can't say I've noticed any discernable difference. I also haven't gone a night without using it yet.

Getting a properly fitting mask was a bit of a challenge. I spent ages at the durable medical equipment supplier trying on different sorts of masks. The one I've currently got still leaves a bit of a red mark across the bridge of my nose. I can take it back in the first 30 days, and get refitted, so I might still be doing that.