Dave Aiello

The Aiello family had a great Christmas and are having a happy new year so far. We had time to spend with our family and closest friends on Christmas Eve at our house, and on Christmas Day at Kathleen's parents' house.

Peter and Jimmy got a lot of terrific gifts and we're thankful to our family and friends who gave many of them. We limited the number of gifts given within the family in the hope that Santa would be able to bring us a new HDTV on or just after Christmas. Luckily that happened for us.

This was a tumultuous year for us as a family. We were thrilled to welcome Peter into our lives. None of us will forget Kathleen's medical situation at the beginning of 2010, and we are all thankful that she has continued to recover her strength and energy.

Kathleen and I both enjoy our jobs immensely. We are fortunate to be doing things that we really enjoy in our professional lives. That makes a huge difference in our quality of life.

I'm still pulling together a Christmas 2009 Photo Set, but I've finally posted several good photos of the family and some of our experiences.

We wish all of our family and friends a Merry Christmas, a Happy Hanukkah, and a Happy New Year. We look forward to seeing you in 2010.

Although we struggled a bit as a family, we had a nice Halloween that we'll remember as a fun time.

Jimmy certainly had a great time. He participated in two parades: his preschool's Halloween Parade on Thursday and the Newtown Halloween Parade on Saturday. He also got to watch the Goodnoe School Halloween Parade on Friday, as he did last year.

Peter and Kathleen have had a tough time for the last few days. They've both had the flu, and Peter was still somewhat under the weather on Halloween. In spite of that, they ended up having a good time.

It seems like everybody in the Philadelphia area is rooting for the Phillies, so this Halloween will probably go down in history for a home loss to the Yankees. But that wasn't as big a part of our night as it was for some people in our neighborhood.

We had a great time in Stone Harbor at the beginning of September. I've been meaning to post a story linking to some of our photos of the trip, but I've been busy.

Jimmy and Peter loved the Jersey Shore this year. Peter enjoyed sitting on the beach blanket and playing with his toys. Jimmy loves the water and digging in the sand.

The biggest problem of the whole week was that the ocean was rough. That meant that Jimmy had to be in arms length of one of us while he was in the water, even on the guarded beaches.

I tried to disconnect from the daily rat race as much as I could during the week. I posted to Twitter minimally. I didn't do much with Facebook either.

I got online for a little while most nights after we put Jimmy and Peter to bed. But it was never a priority. It was the right decision.

Did I mention that we love firetrucks?

Jimmy's favorite television program at the moment is Mickey Mouse Clubhouse on Playhouse Disney. He doesn't watch it that much, but the dialog from that show has really pervaded his consciousness.

Jimmy: Can I have a cookie?

Kathleen: What's the magic word?

Jimmy: (Thinks for a moment.) Meeska Mooska...

Kathleen (interrupting): No! It's "please"!

Here's Jimmy eating his homemade Mickey Mouse cookie.
[ Photo: Kathleen Aiello ]

The 89th Annual Bucks County Firemen's Parade was hosted by the Newtown Fire Association. The entire parade literally passed in front of our house. So I tried to take a photo of every group and piece of aparatus as they went by.

The first major change I implemented to DaveAiello.com is the integration of Action Streams into the home page. Action Streams is a Movable Type plugin that Six Apart released over a year ago. It lets me pull in the information I post on Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, Vimeo, and other social networking sites that I use and display it along with the blog posts that live on this site.

I'm implementing Action Streams now because I've wanted to provide a more complete picture of what I'm doing on the Internet to people who aren't on following me on Facebook or Twitter.

Let me know what you think of these changes by dropping me an email at dave [at] daveaiello.com. I haven't turned on comments or trackbacks on this site yet (and I'm not sure I will) , so email or direct messages on Twitter are probably the best way to give me feedback.

I want DaveAiello.com, my personal website, to be more interesting. On the evening of Memorial Day I made some administrative changes to the site to make it easier to upgrade.

The first step is a realignment of sorts. I separated DaveAiello.com from CTDATA.com for the first time. These two sites aren't supposed to have much in common, so they probably shouldn't share the same hosting account.

My goal is to give both sites a clear purpose and to make them both more interesting. I'll be working on changes to DaveAiello.com first.

Peter is eight weeks old today, so I thought that now was a good time for a quick update.

Peter is a very strong baby who has already rolled over in both directions on more than one occasion. He doesn't yet sleep through the night, but he has a very regular sleeping and feeding schedule, which makes life a lot easier for his parents.

Now that the weather has started to get warmer and Kathleen is able to begin driving again, Peter and Jimmy are getting out more and more. This has helped life around the house immeasurably.

More photos of Peter, Jimmy, and the rest of the family are on my Flickr account or on Kathleen's Facebook or my Facebook accounts. If you want to see the Facebook photos, please friend us.

Peter Aiello was born on Wednesday morning, January 21 in a nearby hospital. He was 7 pounds 15 ounces and 20.5 inches long at birth. Peter did fine at the hospital and since he has been home.

Although both Peter's and our older son Jimmy's births were via caesarian section, they couldn't have been more different. The c-section for Peter was scheduled, but there were some significant complications for my wife as a result of the surgery.

Kathleen experienced heart failure as a result of peripartum cardiomyopathy and ended up spending five days in the cardiac care unit of a major Philadelphia hospital.

That experience wasn't fun, but Kathleen has made a tremendous recovery and is close to getting back to her old self. The doctors, nurses, and technicians that treated Kathleen did a great job.

Kathleen has been home since Monday night, January 26. We've been very fortunate to have tremendous support from our families and friends, and a very cooperative little baby who sleeps a lot. Jimmy (who is 2 1/2 years old) loves his little brother, and is getting as much attention as we can give him.

I've just launched HockeyRefCast, a webcast about ice hockey officiating. Episode 1 is now posted and available for listening. It includes:

• An introduction to the webcast,
• Hockey officiating news from the Summer of 2008,
• An interview with special guest, Referee Ian Walsh from the National Hockey League.