Last week I was floored to hear the news that the Tampa Bay Buccaneer's kicker Matt Bryant lost his 3 month old son to what is now being deemed Sids. This apparently hit the organization rather hard as many of the men that play on the team are fathers as well. Coach Gruden came out and said that they did not expect Matt to kick in Sunday's game and said that they were looking at some contingency plans - then the day of the game Matt came out to kick. It was a gut wrenching thing to hear about on the radio and then finally see in the video below:

http://www.nfl.com/videos?videoId=09000d5d80b31686

Talk about perspective.

Around the beginning of this month Piper began to blow our minds by moving across the floor, army style. We call it crawling for lack of a better term -  but the fact of the matter is that she is motoring. Here is a video of the movement (on a side note - if you look at the related videos - apparently we and Sarah Palin are NOT the only ones with a child named Piper):

It's good to be back. I'm sure that we lost some of our "faithful" - but have faith! The lack of blogging up until Em's recent post was simply a blip on our radar! We are now back in the saddle. We left the interwebs for two things - one was the trip to Detroit to celebrate Grandma's 90th - the other was my trip to Windy Gap with our school. This year, my fourth at the school, I went for the entire week rather than just a partial week. This was a wonderful time as I was able to hear two great speakers instead of one - our first speaker was Bruce Marcey - who is lead pastor of a church here in town called Warehouse 242 and Nathan Smith who is a youth evangelist. I missed my girls (all 3!) and am glad to be back.

Today we celebrate Em's birthday! We headed out to Salsa's which is a wonderful Mexican restaurant near our house. Afterwards we came home and partook of the Carvel Icecream Cake. Below are some pictures from tonight of the girls and as a special added bonus a video of the Birthday song...

Hello blog world! This is a tad late in the day - so I know that some of you won't get this until Monday morning at your place of employment. For the 16 or so people that read us daily - thanks for keeping up with us! As the title mentions today is indeed the Pipes 6 month anniversary of birth. I used new Picasa 3 (see below for rant on how great said Picasa is!) to create the following slide show. I hope that you enjoy! It was really fun to run back through the 6 months of pictures to see how Piper has progressed!

Em and I have been using Google's free picture sorting system Picasa for about 3-4 years now. If you have never checked it out you should - especially for all of our fellow parents out there. Not only does Picasa sort all of your pictures and make them really navigable - now with Picasa 3 you have more features than ever. I've only been playing with this program for about an hour and have already been blown away. I want to list a couple of them out below:

1. The ability to create a collage like the one above. There are SO many ways to change these up as well...different styles of collage, backgrounds, shifting the photos, etc.
2. This ability to retouch images and remove blemishes! 
3. Creating "movies" with your images and adding music to them.
4. Uploading your videos directly to youtube.
5. Searching and labeling your pictures.
6. Directly sync your pictures to a private web album that you can share with friends and family.
7. Order prints from a variety of outlets like Snapfish or Walgreens directly through Picasa.