Lara and I have long been unsure how to best share photos with loved ones. We did not want to turn our blog into a never-ending series of baby pictures and stories (for a good many reasons, including some technical and philosophical), nor did we want to flood social network streams with loads of photo albums some people simply weren't interested in, nor did we want to have the photos hidden away in some scrapbook or RSS stream that interested parties couldn't find or would forget to check. We tried out Tumblr and considered Flickr. We played around with shared Picasa albums and Pogoplug cloud drives. All services had pros and cons, and a wide range of prices, but nothing quite hit the sweet spot.

I am always open to more suggestions, but I think I have our solution: a Google Plus page.

We have been users of Google+ since its inception, posting and sharing privately with a few close friends and family members. Google has made it incredibly easy to upload and share photos, and to explicitly designate what gets shared with whom. However, I don't want to just designate who sees what, I also want my followers to be able to filter my posts based on their own interests without me having to guess what they like and manage a pretty complicated set of circles. Google+ Pages fill that need.

So, if you'd like to subject yourself to loads of cutesy pictures and endless Seriously So Blessed anecdotes, visit or follow our "Claire" page. Eventually it will be re-named "Claire and X" or "Our crazy family" as it will be the home of all future family photos, but for now, Claire is the main attraction. This blog will resume its erratic postings of musings and travelogues, and our individual Google+ streams will continue to have occasional Claire pictures/stories but mostly links to articles we find interesting.

For Google users:

Addendum: Note that you must "follow" the page for us to be able to add you into the circle of allowed viewers. We originally thought we could just keep it public, but have since decided to keep it private for now.

Lara and Claire are up in Alaska for a week to visit the grandparents, and Claire got to meet her cousin for the first time! Elsa was born three weeks before Claire (little sneaker, we'd hoped they'd have twinner birthdays) and together they are the first grandkids for my in-laws. Elsa and her mom Emeline were visiting from Chicago.

Continue reading...

Claire and I ran a couple of errands together this afternoon--a kid's clothes store, Costco, and the grocery store.

Continue reading...

We get this fancy schmancy camera yet the majority of my pictures of Claire are from my smartphone....but as they say, the best camera is the one you have on you. Here is a random sampling of Claire in low res.

Continue reading...

First, some close-ups of Claire:

Continue reading...

Claire Emeline was born at 10:27pm last night. She weighed 8 lbs 3 oz and measured 20 inches. Both mother and baby are doing well. Claire is a little angel. Lara is running on just a couple hours of sleep since Tuesday, but she looks radiant.

Continue reading...

Sorry...it had been so long between blog postings that I didn't realize our comment notifications weren't being properly forwarded to our email accounts. Thanks for all the comments on our two prior posts!

We just passed our official due date, as our little girl has decided to ride out the cold front hitting Houston. We don't blame her, but we're getting very impatient!

Thank you, our sweet unborn lovechild, for providing the justification for blowing a ton of money on a fancy DSLR camera. We've long lamented the fact that we never take enough pictures, a trend we wanted to reverse before Baby Girl comes.

The Houston Arboretum, inside Memorial Park, has long been a favorite place of ours to go for walks, and after the hottest summer on record in Houston, the weather this weekend was absolutely amazing--a little crisp in the mornings and turning warm during the day--so that's where we spent some time Saturday afternoon. Sadly, the trees in the park, like many of the trees in Houston, haven't survived the drought. It was sad to see so many Xs painted on the trees that need to be removed.

Continue reading...