I’ve tried, with some success, to keep Leyla from totally saturating this blog, but I feel like today she warrants a mention here. As of today it’s been six months to the day since she was born. What a cutie! (But then, I’m biased). So, happy 6-month birthday Leyla!

We’re going to be making all further Leyla-related updates on our family site, amanda-n-brock.com, rather than on VirtuallyShocking. If you head over there you can follow the link on the right to the photo gallery, where we’ll be posting more photos and videos as we take them as well.

After a valiant attempt to keep up a regular posting schedule starting in January and lasting until about March, this blog has been on an unofficial hiatus for a while. I’m making it official today.

I am a new (as in recent) homeowner, I’m trying to graduate, I moved across the country, and I have a baby arriving in two months. This morning I had an epiphany — even though I try to keep anything that’s not immediately important in my Someday/Maybe category (in GTD), all kinds of things had crept in to my active system that were not pressing. A number of those things were blog post topics for VirtuallyShocking. After doing an aggressive move of many items to the Someday category, my active, actionable items dropped from about 80 to 35, and I can see now looking at the list that it will be much easier to retain my focus.

I’ve never been a terribly prolific blogger — this is mostly a diary blog, despite my best intentions to the contrary. In that vein, it will continue. I’ll probably keep up with the hearty Friday posts and occasional updates. Part of the reason for this is that most of the cardiac electrophysiology stuff that I’ve really wanted to blog about, I can’t, because the stuff I’m excited about is stuff I’m working on. That stuff generally needs to remain private until the related papers are published, at which point I’m generally already more excited about the next thing, and not interested in talking about the older stuff.

Hopefully once I graduate that will start to change, and I can build this blog the way I’ve really wanted to.

We will most certainly not be disassembling her. I believe Amanda knows some ways to make sure a baby is working correctly, though.

We have updated, more accurate ultrasound results: we’re going to have a girl! We’ve dodged the boy-naming problem… this time.