Has it been three years already?  It seems like three weeks.  The blur that is parenting two toddlers has been rewarding but tiring.  Now I understand why people have children when they are young!

As much work as it can be it all seems worth it when your little ones give you a hug or a kiss.  It is a lot more than that actually.  No one has ever told me that life was supposed to be easy.  The best you can hope for is that life’s efforts be rewarding, and the effort we put into our children is rewarding beyond description.

Decision-making is easy when you have kids.  We ask ourselves “is this the best thing for the kids” and then proceed accordingly. Lately that life filter has helped us with lots of important choices.  It puts everything in sharp perspective and the path we need to take has seemed all the clearer for it.  Clarity is always helpful.

Our daughter Maya is born! The name Maya comes from the Sanskrit and means dream or illusion.  Well there is no illusion about our Maya!  She’s real, alive and kicking!  She is however a dream come true… Naam and I both wanted to have a daughter to round out our family.  Quite significantly for Naam, in Buddhist myth Maya was the mother of the Buddha.  It is an auspicious name! It has been a long time coming, but after 8 years of very happy marriage we now have a son and a daughter, making our family complete!

Our baby girl a few minutes after she was born

Maya is a happy, hungry baby who loves to be held.  Everyone loves her, including her big brother Caden!  Our family is blessed! So now it is on to nappies and bottles and a little less sleep… a small price to pay for such a priceless treasure!

A digital painting of my wife Naam

With the birth of our daughter imminent I find myself inspired to start painting again.  It has been years since I picked up a brush, but I am feeling creative again.  I think it may be a combination of working in Applied Media and having a happy family at home.  Add to that the fact that I just upgraded my PC to a proper workstation at home and you have the ingredients for new art!

This image is a digital painting.  The detail is hard to make out at this tiny size.  The actual printed image is 17 inches by 28 inches!  At that size you can clearly see the canvas texture and brush strokes of the “oil paint”.

After you have kids everything changes! I know it is a cliche… but the cliche about cliches is that they are true!

Less time for things like blogs that is for sure! We are very happy with our family life, that is for sure. Hectic and tiring at times, sublimely satisfying all the time!

This year was Caden’s first Christmas on planet earth and so we decided to go traditional and actually set up a Christmas tree for the first time. It’s something we’ve never done before. We’ve lived in tropical climes for the past 7 years, and the notion of having a Christmas tree seemed a bit odd. There is also the whole culture clash thing. Naam has sketchy ideas about Christmas… the whole thing seems to be more of a shopping mall phenomonen to her than anything else!

At any rate, we went for it… got an artificial tree and decorations… bought presents and put them under the tree. Naam didn’t find the whole idea of buying presents for each other and keeping it as a surprise until Christmas morning very logical. Why buy gifts for each other when you yourself know exactly what you might want/need! It took some explaining but I think she gets it now. It’s all about anticipation. Now that she understands how it works I think we will all be ready for next year. No complaints though … Naam loved her gifts, as did I (after all, we picked them out outselves)!

In the end it is all about kids anyway… and Caden had a GREAT time. He LOVED the box his present came it… ignored the toy itself for about a week! Ate some of the wrapping paper! YUM!

We had a Turkey dinner with all the trimmings as well. I’ve been winning Naam over to the lures of roast turkey for a few years now and she is fully convinced of its worth now! Caden will of course grow up with all the Christmas traditions being part of his life. This year was the first of many we will spend together… no matter if there is snow or not! Presents under the tree, stockings and wondeful food… it’s a family tradition that will grow with us over the years to come. The best present under the tree this year was Caden himself… who was a wonderful addition to our family in 2007!

We now have a domestic robot.  It is a Roomba… a vacuuming robot that cleans the floors by itself and  returns to its battery charger all on its own!  It really works!  So far we have had it clean a few rooms and it manages to do a great job. It goes around obstacles and adjusts itself to hard floors and carpets.  It has a programming tool for it that allows us to schedule when and where it will clean.  I’ll be noodling with that on the weekend.  Naam absolutely loves this thing… calls it RoboCop.  Ever since we had a dishwasher in our villa in Ras Al Khaimah Naam has been a convert of mod cons.  This robot is however a step beyond that.  It is programmable: using the remote control you can tell it when to clean.  It comes with infrared signposts that act as virtual walls which keep the robot going into certain rooms.  These are programmable as well… so you can lock the virtual gate at certain times of day and open it at others.  This allows us to program the robot to clean different parts of the house at different times.  This is a good thing, because the Roomba only has enough juice in its recharge-able battery to clean 2 rooms before it needs to head back home and park itself on the charger.  That however is not the limit to the hacking that can be done with these devices.  They can actually be connected to a desktop computer so that you can upload new programs into them.  There are of course whole subculture communities devoted to this kind of thing.  People attach cameras, heat sensors, etc. to them.  You can even teach your Roomba to play music!  I won’t do any of that stuff with it… but it is hilarious to see what people do with this tech.  There are even web sites where you can buy a whole range of robots.  It is exciting to see that domestic robotic technology will be a reality in our lifetimes!

The current range of domestic robots from iRobot includes vacuums, floor washers (yes , they MOP the floor) and shop vacs… what fun! When I was a kid I always wanted a robot and now we have one!  I can’t wait until Caden is a bit older.  The programmable robot toy technology is going to be amazing!  It is already really cool, but in 6 years (when Caden will be old enough to start grokking  this stuff) who knows how advanced it will be!  There is a downside to all of this however… iRobot, the company that makes the Roomba has a military division that sells ROVs to police departments and the military.  That of course is the age old Faustian problem with technology… you are tempted to sell your soul for convenience (and startup funding).  I’m kind of hoping that these things become popular enough that a sustainable business ecology can be built up without having to resort to military applications.  That isn’t entirely naive… after all, the Internet was once a pure defense project…

Naam and Caden in our new apartment!  Caden is a very easy baby to raise.  He rarely cries and then only to let us know he is hungry.

He likes to play with his blanket.  He grabs it and stuffs it in his mouth then giggles.  He sleeps like a proverbial angel… rocking him in his crib always seems to work!

The dogs love him and Sophie is quite protective of him.  This is, of course, just as things should be!

Abu Dhabi is in the process of creating the most extraordinary concentration of art and culture in the Middle East, if not the world. It is in a place called Saadiyat island, which is really just a suburb of Abu Dhabi itself.  Construction has already started on the largest Guggenheim museum in the world as well as the only Louvre outside of France.

The island will house 5 major arts and culture projects of which the Guggenheim and Louvre are the most prominent.  There is also a spectacular performing arts centre, a maritime museum and a National History museum.  Supporting these foundation institutions are dozens of smaller museums, ateliers, etc. as well as countless galleries.

Make no mistake… they are VERY serious about this.  An afternoon spent touring the exhibit of this visionary project is quite convincing as to the earnest resolve behind it.  In the picture you can see an architect’s model of Saadiyat Island with the Guggenheim in the foreground.  The Louvre is the circular building and the performing arts centre the organic-pod structure behind that.

I wouldn’t book your flight just yet though… the Guggenheim and Louvre are scheduled for completion in 2013 and the rest of the island’s structures, housing, etc. by 2018…

Caden loves to watch himself in the mirror. Here Naam is playing “monkey” with him. He looks so happy! It is quite amazing to hear him laugh while he plays. He is still discovering his voice and he makes pretty bizarre sounds.

It has been a lot of fun watching him develop so far.

We’ve finally finished our move to Abu Dhabi… and it nice to be done.  Moving is always a pain, and this was no exception.  That being said, the move went reasonably well.  Nothing was broken and all it took was time and energy…

Abu Dhabi is wonderful.  Naam and I are happy to be in a more urban environment after a few years of living in smaller places.  Naam loves the parks and shopping and I like the ability to get western goodies like excellent fresh bread, Canadian bacon and the like.  Caden doesn’t care, but he will LOVE the endless number of kids play parks.

Abu Dhabi is clean, really clean.  There is an obvious effort to make it into a glittering jewel.  That effort is paying off.  We live a couple of blocks from the Corniche, a 7km long beach/sea front walk way that is incredibly well appointed.  It isn’t paved, it is tiled!  Ornate lamp standards and railings, flower gardens, bicycle paths, etc. along all 7 kilometres.  Behind that there is a 6 lane ring road that really makes driving in Abu Dhabi a lot easier.  Behind that is an incredible series of extremely well set up parks… these are all connected and you can walk from one to the next for kilometres!  They lack for absolutely nothing with flower beds, benches, play equipment, gazebos, etc., etc., etc…. When they do something in Abu Dhabi they DO IT!

We have yet to really explore AD, but we are definitely looking forward to it!