That's great news!

Since we can turn this into your "Welcome Thread" now, I sure hope that this is the worst for your pregnancy. Don't go doing something idiotic like posting every dumb thing your partner says to Facebook and you should be fine.

We're heading back to town next weekend for my dad's retirement party. On the agenda is a swing to Rubino's in Bexley for the best pizza in the city. Then to The Anderson's in Dublin for beer. I need some stuff I can't find here for a study session for some new beer judges. And we'll certainly hit a Jeni's probably in Grandview so we can pick up a pound of House from Stauf's.

I'm wearing one of my Columbus Crew shirts today because I think it confuses people here (Columbus, IN) into thinking that we have a team of some sort.

Welcome, BuckeyeDad.

That's something I'd not heard of and I thought my wife had dug up EVERYTHING to worry about during her pregnancies. I'm guessing that your wife will get early bedrest and we'll be much better at helping you through that time.

I'll say now, that you need to get out to Jeni's and load up on flavors at home.

I'm a Columbus native (Marysville, actually). I went to Capital and worked in Dublin, Hilliard, Bexley, Marble Cliff (Grandview), Reynoldsburg, Westerville and in that gold cube on Brice north of 70 at different times until about 6 years ago.

Lots of great medical resources at your disposal.

I've done better this week. I made it out to the gym at both opportunities. I seem to have re-injured a rotator cuff on the elliptical, which really sucks. I think I may see what the insurance does for PT here.

Small steps.

Feb 23 3:43 pm.

Good idea, Nik!

Is a live show going to act as a virtual baby shower?

I was going to write what Nik did. Really. He may have robbed my mind from 100 miles away!

What I'll add is that when you have a "serious relationship" (meaning more than "just friends") you are more likely to be tuned into the mom's emotions and tendencies BEFORE being pregnant. Even though all this goes out the door with pregnancy, it helps deal with the emotional baggage that comes with it. You have both sides of this coin. You can get away from it, but you can also do more damage to your long-term co-parent relationship if you dodge too much. I'd suggest being as open and honest as you can be early. Talk about expectations (you probably have 10% of what she does) and use that as a baseline. They will change through the process. Communication is going to be key, just as usual.

Hurray! The first time in about a month that I have logged in and not gotten a certificate error or a page not found due to HTTPS not being set up.

I've been an early adopter of almost anything GPS since 2002. I was burned out on Geocaching long before it got popular. I played some geolocation games. I even wrote some.

The new combination of GPS and social media seems full of traps and hurdles. I've been using Waze for a couple weeks now. It is a crowdsourced navigation system. Map corrections, traffic delays, accidents, speed traps, and construction are all reportable through their app. That's nice. But there are some options that seem prime territory for cyberstalking hitting the real world. When you link with social media, you can have Waze report all of your actions in Waze to your friends. What sounds nice in some circumstances is posting your destination and ETA (with updates) to social media. Maybe you're on a long trip to meet a lot of people. they can check up on you without calling or texting you. On the other hand, anyone can see where you are headed and when you'll be there. They also let you be social within the app. You can allow others to "see" you when the app is active. The good side of this is that you can ask people on your regular commute route how traffic is or get their current speed. But do we really need another thing to cause people to fiddle with their phones on the highway? Another aspect is that if you make it known that you are somewhere else, you are letting other people that your home is vacant, even if other people are there. That makes activating too many parts of Waze potentially dangerous. But I think that's what we'll have to deal with with our little kids, Nik.

4Square and FB checkins aren't too accurate. I used to check into 4S locations half a mile away from me. FB doesn't seem too precise, either.

But take a game like Shadow Cities on iOS. It's a magic game that uses real geography/street maps to make a virtual world. You can "jump" to locations where friends have set up "beacons" but you always end at home, your mapped location. So you're playing this combative magic game with unknown adversaries in the same town. If you play in a park, it should be pretty easy for someone to figure out where you are, physically, just by looking for the geek on the park bench looking at his phone. Geeks and their games. Bad stuff "could" happen.

I can't imagine what it's like right now with emerging tools. It's only going to get worse as the technologies mature and get more funding.

Sounds like that's it exactly. $35 at Target, I think. Maybe $40. We caught it on a periodic sale, I know. Or we had the MiL get it on sale. We didn't use it as a booster. We got a normal booster for $5 at Once Upon a Child.

I sometimes search YouTube with the top I am looking for and Dadlabs. The Daddys really want you to watch the videos on their site, but YouTube still gives them some hit counts. I'm sure that if you post something you're looking for, one of us regulars will think of something that fits and post a link.

I like that model, Steven. A coffee shop we used to frequent in a small college town in Northern Indiana started that way after several others failed. It seemed to help them stay afloat and get established until they had their market set.

For this, my advisor seems to think that financing will be a slam dunk. The offer I made my mother-in-law would have returned her 40% on a 30% share of the company in one year. Pizza, especially Neapolitan-style, is just so cheap to make. By renting a space with the heavy equipment and being mobile, it has almost no overhead. So, I think that traditional financing may be my best bet. I need more than the group lending options would fund. And that's just the oven.

We actually have equity in the house, even though we bought it in July. We got that good a deal on it and the appraisal was evaluated as low by our neighbor, another appraiser. But we're going to keep it off the table. The bank that ran the town crashed in 2008 because of the secondary mortgage market. The trailer should work as collateral anyway. If we manage to get a loan for it, I'll be sure to go to them for a truck loan later this year.

Unless... I'm trying to decide how to introduce a marketing pitch to Cummins. One of the markets I'm doing is their private Farmers Market on Wednesdays at their HQ. Another is in the same location but is the city's public market on Saturdays. I want to talk someone into using me as a marketing "vehicle" so when they want to advertise their engines at the Louisville Truck Show or car shows or even just a car lot, they can send me with my sparkling Cummins-powered truck with hefty pizza wagon. They could probably hook me up with a demo model with manufacturer plates. If they like me a lot, anyway.

Nik pointed out that I didn't mention why Pizzeria Bianca is worthy of note. The world's best pizza is in Phoenix.

My Aunt and Uncle are in Phoenix. Their kids are older than me, so they're a bit far from useful, I'm afraid.

But the last couple days I've been reading Peter Reinhart's American Pie which weaves in and out talking about Pizzeria Bianco while touring Italy, CA, Seattle, Chicago, SF, NYC, Providence RI, and other places. Apparently it's the best pizza in the world.

Welcome to the site. See you around.

Here's a fresh review of kidscommons.

If you sign up and win the prize, send it to Nik! He goes as much as I do!

This article showed up in my FB Feedbag today.

It has funny points, but I found the part about being careful about how you deal with money in front of kids to be important. I don't think I know anyone who isn't living paycheck to paycheck, even if it's because everything extra goes into deducted retirement plans or aggressive mortgage payments or whatever. But when times get tough, it's hard to see the long term impact on the kids. The food points are good, too.

Welcome.

Since you learned the gender of your child, I'll ask my standard question. Do you have a name chosen and are you sharing it with friends and family? I don't really want to know. I just find the topic fascinating, especially after the last time I asked and got a couple hours of discussion out of it. My head is still spinning from that one.

Having kids when you're older is quite a shock. There are a lot of other folks the same age with kids being born. But you are very likely to be sitting on the playground with parents of kids who are older than yours but those parents being substantially younger. It has pluses and minuses.