Parental leave: it's time off from work. But it's no vacation.

This one is better.

Oh yeah, while you were out, I also was workin on a website. Using hypersites I built lolbabies.com about two weeks ago.

We had a couple people post things already, and obviously there's the test pix up there too. It's you know, just kinda something for fun. No big deal. If you like Disapproving Rabbits or I can has cheezburger (to name some of the 800# gorillas of captioning sites, imho) it's like that, except for people in the...uh... baby... culture.

shigella posted a cap of her baby on there (10 neeples. The word neeples iz funny lol!) and there's a couple I made as examples. We took a couple things further in terms of being very explicit asking users to think about licensing and made it relatively easy to contribute (and made it easy to apply cc licenses to postings).

Feel free to stop by, check it out, post some of your own (the posting system is pretty much self-contained, so new stuff will appear much more quickly than it did at first). Soon I hope to make it possible to contribute pix to "blank slate" galleries up there--pix to be used for making new caps and stuff, since not everyone with good ideas has access to pictures of kids or ultrasounds. Also I linked to kscakes.com's capping tool which was originally designed for the lolcats crowd. It's pretty useful too.

We'll be growing over time, you know how these internet things work. Check it out: lolbabies.com.

This is a poll of baby names. We have already made the decision, so you probably won't affect it one tiny little bit. The debates about names have been going on for literally 13 years (we started the debate in late January of 1994, 8 years 10 months before we had an actual child, 27 months before we were married, 11 months before we were even engaged!) Furthermore, the actual names we've picked are in the list below. The rest are all just red herrings, some made up whole cloth, some of them randomly assembled from the component names on "the Big List." I am, at great personal risk to my ego, inviting Teh Intarweb to consider, vote on, and even comment on the variations. So, know that if you choose to insult or inveigh against any of these, you could be attacking a real name that in six months will be on the birth certificate of a real person. I have left out Maraya, Twinkle, and Qbert. Sorry, Eleanor. Some folks in the know, already know. We'll let on soon enough.
[Poll #918550]

Dreamed last week that the new baby came and that it was African American. I was just glad that the baby delivered safely and was healthy but everybody in the room was freaking out. Doctors and nurses were asking "what are you going to do, can't you see this baby's not yours?" and i was like "shut up, we'll deal with that stuff later! don't say that in front of the baby! let's just take care of the baby, do your jobs! let's not talk like that in front of the sweet baby"

I guess in my dreams I'm very compassionate to babies and very sanguine about everything else, no matter how unexpected. Or very good at denial. Let's hope we can make the former a reality. Except for the paternity part. I mean, I firmly believe it's not discriminatory for me to expect, that my wife's baby isn't Black. In any case, if s/he is, let's just wait until after we get home to discuss it, okay?
"Mary Mary under your veil of stars/you changed the world you broke my heart..."

(raising herewith an ethical question: is it wrong to hope that my baby is white? I argue yes, such a thing is ethically and morally wrong. discuss.)