The Mallorys Online

We received an envelope addressed by hand from the White House last week. I was immediately suspicious and started having thoughts of white powder as I brought it in the house (thanks, evening news!). My fears were completely unfounded and Jennifer and I were surprised when we opened it and found this letter from the President welcoming Jacob into the “American story.” I think it’s great the office of the President takes the time to welcome new Americans into the world and this will go into his baby book as a memory forever.

After some searching I learned Google’s Picasa photo service allows up to 1gb of photo storage and there are also great tools to share the photos through our family blog.  After transferring all of the photos from Flickr to Picasa using a fantastic piece of software called Migratr, the 1,200 or so photos used up about 50% of the storage so there is plenty of room to expand!  Picasa also offers face recognition and photo tagging.  This is really cool because Picasa will scan the photos for identical faces and tag people in multiple photos that it recognizes as the same person.  This worked flawlessly and in about an hour I had all 1,200 photos tagged.

Yesterday I switched the photo gallery on this site over to Picasa using the kPicasa Wordpress plugin.  I think it looks better than the Flickr plugin I was using before.  As the saying goes, things happen for a reason.  I wouldn’t have taken the time to transfer all of my photos, but the crappy downgrade from the U-verse – Flickr arrangement forced the issue and in the end I have a much better place for my photos!  Since all of the previous posts use Flickr to display my photos I’m scared to see if they disappear once the Flickr downgrade happens in February.  I’m really not looking forward to re-linking all of those photos.

Jennifer and I have been going back and forth on where to put a play area for Jacob. Our house doesn’t have any spare square footage, but we wanted somewhere we can put him down and keep an eye on him while he entertains himself. We finally decided to give our breakfast room a makeover. We took the table out, put down foam alphabet floor tiles and gated the area off. Jacob loves crawling around and playing with all his toys in one spot and it’s right in the center of the house so we can watch him while we make dinner or clean up.

He DOES NOT like us to poke around his mouth, but after weeks of feeling his top two teeth we decided it was time to pry his mouth open and take a look at these new chompers.  They’re huge!  We are used to seeing his bottom two little teeth so it shocked us to see his big boy upper teeth.  Here is a pic of the nubs.  Please excuse the snotty nose, he’s getting over a cold.

Jacob's Front Teeth