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Tonight, while relaxing at home after working our Valentines shift at El Gaucho, Jessica felt our new little one’s first kicks! I remember this happening the first time around with Ava and being so excited, and I can easily say that it’s just as exciting the second time. We’ve already heard Baby E’s heartbeat but it’s nice to know that he/she is getting active in there. I remember when Jessica was pregnant with Ava, she would be calm all day but then would start kicking and doing somersaults when Jessica was getting ready for bed. Looks like we may have the same type of thing going on here. We’re still holding strong with not finding out the sex of our growing baby, although Jessica has mentioned a few times that she’s reserving the right to change her mind. I’m fine with it either way. Can’t wait for you to be here little one!

Just wanted to post a few pics we took of Ava in her new Valentine’s Day dress from Grandma. Jessica and I will be working at El Gaucho tonight so we have Kelsey, a new babysitter coming over to watch Ava. Kelsey comes highly recommended by our good friends Randall and Brie so I’m sure she’ll be great. It’s too bad that Jess and I are both working tonight but at least we’ll be together. Love to all our friends and family out there!

In an effort to keep growing my web development skill set, I’ve been working on creating simple JavaScript–based web applications. They’re just fun little projects that I like to work on in my free time, and they always end up teaching me something new during the development process. Between last night and this morning I built something I’m calling ‘Pellegrini Weather’, which is a basic version of a weather app on a phone. You input your zip code and it gives you the city and state name, current weather conditions, and an icon that is appropriate for those conditions. It’s available at: http://pellegriniportfolio.com/weather/.

I also recently did something I’m calling jsAlarm, which is a simple alarm clock programmed in JavaScript. It has the basic necessary functions to set and stop the alarm, plus I added a snooze button. For presentation purposes the snooze only lasts 5 seconds but I could easily set it to any time I wanted. That one is available at: http://pellegriniportfolio.com/jsAlarm/. I may eventually showcase these on my portfolio but for now its just a nerdy little hobby.

Last night Jessica and I took our nephew Kallan out to dinner at El Gaucho to celebrate his 18th birthday, then we saw Soundgarden at the Paramount Theater, which was his Christmas present from us. It was a great night that we’ve all been looking forward to for a while now. Kallan and I have a history of going to great concerts over the years, including Metallica and Alice in Chains, so it was only fitting that we go see Soundgarden when they came to town. Although this was my third time seeing them live, neither Kallan or Jessica had ever seen them, so that made it extra special. Thankfully Dana and Brad were available to watch our sweet little Ava while we were out.

As usual they took royal care of us at El Gaucho. After starting with a soup/salad course, Kallan had the 8oz filet mignon while Jessica and I shared the Chateaubriand for two. The fruit and cheese course is always great but we had to finish off with Bananas Foster, which is easily one of my favorite deserts, and something that Kallan had never had.

It’s hard to believe that he is already 18 years old. I vividly remember watching my Dad holding him and marveling over his first Grandchild. He’s always been a great kid but now he’s grown into a great young man that Jessica and I are so proud of. Every time we spend time with family we are quickly reminded about how happy we are to back home in Seattle.

Today we were finally able to get together with Uncle Jim, Aunt Brenda, Kristy and Madi. We’ve been trying to coordinate schedules since early January but this morning was the first time we were all available. The last time we got together I was only 10 weeks pregnant with Ava so this is the first time everyone is meeting.

We headed south to Des Moines to Jim and Brenda’s house and Kristy and Madi traveled from Olympia to meet us for lunch. It took Ava a little while to warm up to the new environment, but as soon as she did she was wondering all over the house and getting into everything. Luckily Jim and Brenda’s house is very kid friendly and there are lots of things to play with. Ava spent most of the day following big cousin Madi (almost 7) around eating and playing. It was so fun to sit back and watch the two interact. Madi is very motherly and was really enjoying showing Ava all of her dolls and toys and trying to teach her new things like how to play nicely and pick up after herself. I was of course enjoying the “help” from Madi since Ava has yet to master the art of picking up her toys at home. The adults all got lots of laughs out of the two.

A big thank you to Brenda who went all out and had a big spread of food for us all and a delicious chocolate cake for Jim’s birthday. They even added Ava’s name to the cake and had presents for her to celebrate her past birthday. It’s so nice to be able to get together with family and we are so thankful to be close to everyone again. I hope to continue to get the cousins together more frequently.

I’ve been slacking lately on adding more photo galleries to our website, but tonight I decided it was about time that I added one for Ava. I knew this would be an ordeal because we have so many pictures of her, but it’s well worth the time. I went through and picked out my favorite photos of her and tried to keep them as close to chronological order as possible. The order isn’t perfect, but from here on out it should be. Here’s a couple pics that were taken by my good friend Leon when he and his wife babysat Ava last weekend. There are plenty more in the gallery. Enjoy!

Today I joined the Gracie Barra (pronounced ‘BaHa’) school in Bellevue, Wa. It’s a super famous school that was started by Carlos Gracie Jr. in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. They have nearly 400 schools worldwide, including 6 within 30 minutes of my house. Although its a Gracie school, it’s from a different part of the family than the school I went to in San Diego and the two are not affiliated. While the school that I previously attended is known for self defense, this school is the most famous tournament jiu–jitsu school in the world so I’m excited about the idea of competing some day. For now, however, I need to focus on getting back in shape and getting up to speed with this curriculum.

Getting back on the mat tonight was great, but it was also very humbling. The Gracie Combatives program that I completed as a white belt in San Diego was all about self defense on the street, and was meant to defeat an ‘unskilled’ opponent. Unskilled just means that they don’t know jiu–jitsu. After competing that program you move onto the Master Cycle, which is much more advanced and teaches you how to deal with skilled opponents. Since we moved right after I received my blue belt, I never really got the chance to grapple with advanced opponents, which puts me at a disadvantage at my new school. I have no doubt that I’ll catch up quickly, but for now I need to be comfortable with the fact that I’m going to get tapped out a lot. It doesn’t really matter though, I’m just happy to be taking classes, meeting people, getting exercise, and learning lots of new techniques.

All else is going well. Looks like we won’t be able to visit with Jim, Brenda, Kristy and Madi this weekend but hopefully we’ll be able to get together with them soon. Still looking forward to the party at Butch and Carol’s on Sunday night. Here’s a picture of Ava sporting her fauxhawk today in the tub.

Yesterday Jessica and I took our niece Anna downtown to see ‘Rise of the Guardians’, followed by lunch at Il Fornio. We’ve been wanting to do this for a while in order to celebrate her belated birthday but haven’t been able to schedule anything sooner due to everyone’s busy schedule. It turned out to be a lot of fun for everyone. Dana and Brad watched Ava while we were gone, then we watched the Seahawks game once we got home. It was an incredible comeback followed by a last second loss from a long field goal. Tough way to end the season but they definitely overachieved this year and I’m glad we got back to Seattle in time to feel the excitement about them all around town.

Next weekend will be a busy one; I’m working a private party Saturday night at El Gaucho, then on Sunday we finally get to visit with Jim, Brenda, Kristy and Madi, which we’ve been wanting to do since getting back to Seattle. After that we’re attending a birthday party for Butch, which is also a coming home party for us that Carol is throwing. It should be a great weekend.

I worked from home today so the three of us could take a visit to the Eastside Birthing Center. This was our first activity related to our new baby and it went really well. We’re referring to the new baby as “Baby E” because we’ve decided that we don’t want to find out what we’re having, but we know its name will begin with an E. If it’s a boy his name will be Enzo, and if it’s a girl her name will be Eleanor, although she will probably go by Ellie or Elle. Although we had initially planned on finding out the sex as soon as possible, we have since decided to leave it as a surprise. We wouldn’t have been able to do it the first time around because everything was all so new, but we’re much more at ease this time through and like the idea of keeping it a surprise. I can’t think of too many greater surprises life will have in store for us and we wanted to keep this pregnancy unique from the first.

In the spirit of keeping this pregnancy unique, we’re leaning away from delivering at a hospital and are more interested in a birthing center. We certainly didn’t have a bad experience at the hospital in San Diego, and we wouldn’t have been interested in doing things any other way at that time, but this being our second time through we’re more interested in being in a comfortable environment with people that we’ve dealt with throughout the pregnancy. When Ava was born we only saw our doctor for about an hour throughout the entire process. The rest of the time was spent with various nurses that we had never met. Everyone we dealt with was great, but it would have been better to have some familiar faces around. There was a lot of pressure by the hospital staff to have a C–section, which thankfully we did not do, and Jessica spent the entire time in bed, which wasn’t very ideal.

We really enjoyed our visit to the Eastside Birthing Center today, and although we haven’t completely made up our minds quite yet, we feel that this may be the best place for us. We met with the owner, who is one of the three midwives that work there, and really liked her. Ava immediately ran up to her and jumped in her arms, which was a good sign. Ultimately this is Jessica’s decision but I gave her my honest opinion, which was that its a nice place with very warm and caring people. If she decides to go there I will be completely on board. We’re going to give it a couple days before making a decision but we’re feeling good about everything for now.

I’ve been planning on designing and building a new family website for a while now, but haven’t been able to make time until recently. Now that we’re all settled into our new jobs and home, and I’ve had a break from school, I decided to finally step up and get it done. My goal was to have this new site completed before starting back up at school, and classes begin tomorrow, so I’m just in time. Jessica and I came up with the color scheme and general layout a couple months ago while we were still living in San Diego, but I’ve only been able to work on it sporadically until these past two weeks. I really love the site, both for its design and its functionality.

One of my favorite new features of this site is the ability for visitors to leave comments on our posts. I say ‘our’ posts because Jessica will now finally be able to write posts along with me, which is really cool. Previously she would have had to learn HTML to write posts but this new site has an admin panel for her to login to and write posts in. Users will have the option to register an account with PellegriniPage.com or login with their existing Facebook, Twitter, or Google account. Even if you don’t have one of those accounts, and you don’t want to register with our site, you’ll still be able to leave comments if you wish.

One of the things that bothered me most about the old version of the site was that the entire site was on one page, which made it very slow to load. We really wanted an archiving system for this new site, so now you have the ability to browse older posts by month. There is also a search bar in the header which makes it easy to find specific posts. The other main thing I didn’t like about the old site was its lack of mobile support. There was only one version of the codebase, which was meant specifically for computer screens. If you visited it on a phone or tablet there was just a shrunk down version of the same site being served and it didn’t look very good. For this new site I have developed 3 versions: one for desktop and laptop computers, one for tablets and high resolution phones, and one for low resolution phones. Although the mobile versions don’t include the animated photo slider in the header, they are much cleaner and easier to read without requiring any zooming or orientation changes. I will point out that not all of the advanced functionality works on the mobile versions but you will certainly be able to read posts, comment on posts, search, and login from any device.

The new site also includes a photo gallery section which is still in progress. We have so many photos and I didn’t want to delay the launching of the site just because I didn’t have all of them optimized and ready for the web quite yet. I haven’t even attempted to tackle all of our baby photos yet but should be doing so fairly soon. The site will most likely be seeing some upgrades in the near future but already I’m extremely happy with it and consider it the best work I’ve ever done. It will certainly make a nice portfolio piece for me, but more importantly it will be much more user friendly and interactive for our visitors. Hope you all enjoy it as much as we do.