We went to our first birthing class last night to, you know, figure out how to have a baby. It was hosted over at “realbirth”:http://realbirth.com, and taught by a good friend of ours at The Village Church.

While I’ve talked to Hallie quite a bit, it was _amazing_ to watch her teach a class on childbirth. She spoke with passion and a frankness that visibly relieved the worries of many of the parents-to-be in the room. Better, it was high-bandwidth communication: we sat there and absorbed every word, every gesture, and every silence she dealt out with the hope of getting a better handle on this wild and messy process.

Better still, I got the special privilege of seeing my work benefit countless couples in the city. A number of times throughout the class, Hallie pointed us back to “her site”:http://halliegreider.com for reference material and resources for expectant parents. Just tonight, I went back to flip through halliegreider.com and remember how “Scott”:http://greiders.blogspot.com/ and I put it together: the design was Scott’s, the Movable Type templates, PHP magic, markup and stylesheets were my responsibility. We shot for the moon when it came to extensibility — everything from the color schemes to the content to the photographs are changeable without writing a single line of code or modifying a stylesheet.

There have been a few times since we finished where Hallie mentioned how great the site has been for her, and it’s always a wonderful feeling to hear from a client two years after the fact that your work is _still valuable_ to them. But, being in that room full of young, scared, and hopeful New Yorkers and together dutifully jotting down her site address for future reference, it was apparent that all the effort from those nights and weekends had come full circle.

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Sarah’s been feeling really good with the pregnancy, and we’ve been having fun getting together to talk about baby stuff: baby names, baby food, baby strollers, baby toys, “babies everywhere”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbjDj3G14YI. We’ve got mad, mad plans for the apt (which we’re staying in for now). The “office” will become half office, half nursery with crib, changing table, wardrobe, uh, desk and, er, filing cabinet. I’m hoping to introduce the geekdom early into our child’s education.

We never cease to be amused at the world of baby: the clever marketing tactic that Babies R Us uses to “highlight items”:http://www.toysrus.com/registry/truParentsCheckList.jsp you maybe “forgot” to register for, or the “$700 designer strollers”:http://www.bugaboostrollers.com/ you can buy, or the “endless”:http://money.cnn.com/2007/01/04/autos/car_seats/index.htm?postversion=2007010418, “fearful”:http://www.nichd.nih.gov/sids/ reminders to enforce Baby Rule #1: do not kill the baby.

Thankfully, Sarah’s been doing a ton of research and we’ve been reading some very level-headed books, so we feel as though we can transcend some of the baby madness. Russ & Sarah, Irene, Marla (our midwife — whose name I can’t help think of without adding “you _tourist_”), Hallie, and a dozen couples at the Village Church have all been really helpful with advice and insight so we can maybe move on to Baby Rule #2: do not screw up the baby’s life.

One day my son or daughter will look at me and say, “your blog was so boring before you were a dad.”

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Steve Jobs speaks next week (Tuesday! 12PM EST!) at Macworld. The world waits with baited breath. Well, okay, maybe that’s just me. But with good reason as we’re considering adding a new Mac to our household. You know. For the baby.

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The redesign of the site continues with Flickr photos up top. Jai’s right, the stylesheet needs some love so the site doesn’t look like an embarrassment for a 1997 web designer. I’ve still got to integrate some RSS feeds into the timeline to build out the “attention stream,” just as soon as I figure out how. I was considering using “Planet”:http://www.planetplanet.org/, but it’s kind of a kludgey solution given that I have no real love for the command-line. Why can’t someone just build this in PHP and slap a web-interface over top of it?