He is here!

Valentine Charles Beaudrowen was born at 4:34 pm on August 18, 2013. He weighed 8 lbs 1.5 oz, measured 19.5" tall, and has blue eyes and a full head of hair.

We are home from the hospital with this little fella. He is quite the charmer.

Our Friends Are Ridiculous

We finally got around to writing the baby shower name generator, head on over and check it out!

Baby Shower Photos

34 weeks, 2 days

A few weeks ago we had a fantastic baby shower! Here are some photos of the festivities.

It's great to see so many people in our lives who are willing to help out!

I Guess This Is Really Happening!

click for full-sized photo

Baby Boy Beaudrowen is growing quite nicely. We got some nice 3D ultrasounds from our last research measurement trip. In the top one he's resting his head on his hands. In the bottom one ... well, the ultrasound isn't always perfect.

We also bought our crib, a DaVinci Rivington 4-in-1 that converts into a toddler bed and then eventually a full-sized bed. Almost all baby furniture is made of pine, unless you're willing to spend a ton of money. We don't expect it to last forever. Still, the idea of buying something that might last into Master Beaudrowen's tweener years was pretty appealing.

It's Like the Pregnant Husband is Reading My Mind

When it's three days past the due date, the Pregnant
Husband and his wife, when talking to the baby,
are like this.

There's no shortage of parenting- & baby-centric memes out there on the Internet, but here at the Beaudrowen household we're particularly partial to The Pregnant Husband and his post-partum followup, Daddy Newbie. Be careful, you may find yourself clicking through & reading the entire backlog of both GIF-filled sites.

It's a Boy!

Well, I guess we should make everything official here, too.

The Beaudrowen family will increase in size by approximately 50% this coming August, or, possibly, late September. To the right is a nice photo of Baby Boy Beaudrowen practicing his yoga one morning. This is either plow pose, or happy baby pose, or somewhere in between. Mom- and dad- to be are very excited about these developments. We've already reached the phase in which Master Beaudrowen's daily routine includes frequent kicking & rolling around.

Beaudrowen product reviews will probably expand to include not just home products but baby home products, possibly including reviews of many of the one hojillion available self-help books for parents.

Beaudrowen Product Reviews : Roomba

Since we've got this super-awesome domain name, we might as well use it, right? I've been trying to figure out what to put here for quite some time. For a while I couldn't come up with anything at all. Now that we're homeowners, though, I think we might turn it into a site for reviews of home-ownership-esque products we've used. It turns out that you end up getting a lot of "stuff" when you move into a new house. Some of it's useful, some of it's nice to have, some of it you could do without.

So let's get started with one of the first things we bought upon moving in: The Roomba 770. Nick figured that having a Roomba would be a good way to make sure the new house stayed clean.

 

The Good

The floors are regularly clean. Cleean! Not spic-and-span clean, but way cleaner than they were at our old place. Nick won a second Roomba in a raffle at work, and now the upstairs is cleaner too! With regular Roomba-ing, you can cut down on professional carpet cleaning bills.

Roomba supposedly has great customer service, but we've never had to call them.

 

The Bad

The Roomba requires daily emptying of its rubbish bin, and almost daily brush cleaning. It takes a few minutes out of each day. It's a small price to pay for clean floors, but it's worth mentioning.

Roomba likes to get stuck on things. Rug fringes are probably the worst. But cat toys, wires, and the like can easily get wrapped around Roomba's brushes. If Roomba senses, it will just stop vaccuming rather than damage your stuff any further; however, several cat toys and headphone wires have been sacrificed to the Roomba gods. You have to keep your house "Roomba-proof" for the sake of both the Roomba and your belongings.

Roomba can very easly shut itself into a room, which can be very unnerving if it's bumping around in the night. Use doorstops to keep interior doors open so that Roomba can roam freely. Of course, if you do this, now you have doorstops on your bathroom doors, which you have to pull out every time nature calls.

 

What They Don't Tell You

You should make sure there are no obstructions between Roomba's dock and the opposite wall. If there are obstacles in the way -- trash cans, fridges, -- the Roomba is more likely to fail to dock. It will line itself up so that it can make a bee line to the dock, but it can't "see" obstacles in the way. Now that we've got this set up right things are working much more smoothly, but it took us a while to figure out what was going on.

 

Should you buy it?

Probably. If your house/apartment is small, you might not see much benefit, though a friend of mine with a 1-bedroom likes having it. Also, if you're already vacuuming consistently, Roomba just won't have much work to do. You might start feeling like the daily Roomba maintenance isn't worth it.

But if you have a two bedroom house/apartment or larger, and you're not vacuuming your carpets once a week, you will probably enjoy having the Roomba. It's not perfect, but it does a pretty good job of keeping the house clean.