The first entry reminds me of someone I once knew. I was such a different person back then. My ideas and priorities were so different. I didn’t think that I would have one child, let alone four. It blows my mind to think how different life has become in six short years.

Our family grew in ways we couldn’t have anticipated. It really has been such a wonderful time. I am glad I took the time to write it all out in the detail I did. I know I wouldn’t have remembered half of it.

In the words of Gary Allen, “life ain’t always beautiful but it is a beautiful ride.” This couldn’t be more true these past six years. It wasn’t the road I had planned to walk along but I am so glad that I did. There have been joyous moments, deeply sad moments, scary times and funny days in life and on the blog. A big cyber hug to all of you who have been there hanging on every post, waiting to see how things work out in the end for the Brown Family.

As I couldn’t have imagined all this on that first entry 6 years ago, I can’t fathom what the next 6 years will bring. Kimberly and Annie will be 11 years old, Mimi will be almost 10, and baby Paul will be 7. I am sure we will be doing completely different things than we do these days. It will be interesting to see what comes.

The header was done by Sandi using her recently-acquired Photoshop skills. I think it looks great and we can switch out the family photos as new ones are taken. She also picked out the color palette from the header image. She’s got a great eye for this sort of thing and I’m sure that she’s now unleashed her inner Web designer. Expect more changes and variations.

We’ve also changed the name of the blog from FiveBrowns.com to 6Browns.com. I’ve put in place automatic redirection so your feed should adjust without any intervention on your part and all of our search engine traffic will likewise. With our dossier in Ethiopia, it’s starting to feel like Salty’s really real so it makes sense to change our Web presence to match.

The final change you’ll undoubtedly notice is the addition of advertisements. With some experimentation on my other blog, I discovered that we could get some pocket change just by putting ads on the individual entry pages thanks to the aforementioned search engine traffic. We put a lot of time and effort into this blog and it would be nice to have some income come from it, even though it’ll be a pittance. I don’t think they’re too obtrusive and we hope you don’t mind them.

All in all, it makes for a nice-looking site if I may be so bold.

I awoke this morning to find FiveBrowns serving up an installation message. “Uh oh,” thought Bill. I checked the database and it was empty. 5 years, 1206 entries, 1569 comments gone. No backups from the automated Dreamhost backup system. “OMG!” thought Bill. Oh wait, I backed up using the built-in WordPress tool last week. I can easily get the entries since then using my feed reader. The backup file is empty. “AHHHHH!” thought Bill. I immediately opened up a frantic support incident with Dreamhost and whipped up a maintenance page that wouldn’t freak too many people out.

A few hours later and I get a call from Justin at Dreamhost. They had a backup from this morning that I couldn’t see and he had already restored it before he called me. Everything was safe. I told him that I’ve got the backup religion now so this doesn’t happen again.

Dreamhost has its problems, but in a pinch they do the right things and most importantly they tell you exactly what happened even though it might put them in a bad light. That’s why I’ve been using them since November 2004 and have no plans to move. If you want a great host with tremendous value, go Dreamhost using that link and the Five Browns crew gets $97 off on future Web hosting.

And if you go Dreamhost (or are already there), do this or something like it. I plan to take advantage of Gmail’s storage for additional offsite backing up.

[UPDATE: It's not much of a public service announcement if I don't provide information about how to backup your blogs. Sorry about that:

WordPress Backups
WordPress.com XML Import/Export
Backing up Movable Type
TypePad Export
LiveJournal Backup and Search
Blogger Backup software

If I missed your blog engine of choice or you want more details, Google can help.]

Enjoy!

(If I don’t have you listed and you would like to be just send me an email.)

If you want to see a larger size of the PoD, just click on it and you will be whisked off to Flickr where you can also comment on the picture. Enjoy!

I modified the heck out of the Citrus Explosion free WordPress theme under Sandi’s watchful eye. Believe it or not, I actually chose a few of the colors! Our inspiration was a hat of Annie’s Madeline’s from Old Navy. I tried to keep the content metadata the same as the old system because I had it just the way I liked it.

My next big task is to add in a Picture of the Day box in the sidebar. It’s not as easy as it sounds because Sandi is quite a demanding client. She wants it to behave similarly to the Trixie Picture of the Day and that guy is a designer. I’m just a software engineer and design isn’t my thing. So we’ll see how well I execute that one.

Please let us know if you like it and, most importantly, if there are any bugs in the browser you use. At 5B, we do all of our browser testing in Safari and OmniWeb so we may not have covered your browser of choice.

• Feeding Time: pictures (1,2,3) of Kimberly feeding something
• Madeline’s Hospital Visit: pictures (1,2,3,4) of Madeline in the hospital during her RSV bout
• Annie Doing Crazy Things: pictures (1,2,3,4) of Annie acting like Annie
• Kimberly Playing Doctor: pictures (1,2,3,4) of Kimberly pretending she’s a veternarian

There’s quite a few more: they’re in Madeline > First Year > Fourth Month, Kimberly > Second Year > Grab Bag, and Annie > Second Year > Grab Bag.

If you need our email address, send us an email through the form and we’ll reply from our real, live fivebrowns.com email address.

[NOTE: The link to the contact form is on the right sidebar beneath the gallery link. Or, for Steph, right here.]

I still don’t know much about PHP, but I was able to cobble together those features. In keeping with the expanded scope of this blog, I’ve added mine and Sandi’s current ages as well. Well, I added my own—you’ll have to wait until Sandi okays the public display of her age. After twelve years of marriage, I know that you don’t just put such information up on the Web willy-nilly.

[UPDATE (5/26/05): Sandi suggested that our ages weren't important. She doesn't have a problem disclosing her age (we're 30), but she doesn't see the point. I guess there really isn't one.]

Enjoy!

So if you’ve seen the gallery before, you haven’t seen it with my helpful guidance. Get the inside scoop about the birth of the Brown that required another domain to be purchased!

Just kidding, they’re right here. I haven’t cleaned up the layout (and it’s not very girly at all), but at least they’re up.

Enjoy!

[UPDATE: Oh, and I'll be titling the pictures and putting descriptions up over the next couple of weeks. It may be sooner, but—you know—I just had a baby.]

Now I’ve got a new answer: we’re nine weeks pregnant! In true Brown fashion, we’ve known about the baby from about five weeks. We’ve held back the news from our reading public since we’ve got one baby from five pregnancies—it’s no fun making miscarriage posts. Since we’ve had two ultrasounds and Sandi’s vomiting daily (sometimes twice!), we feel like this is as strong a pregnancy as Annie’s.

Regular readers may recall that I registered the domain “fourbrowns.com” to house our future (and still undeveloped, sadly) family web site. Oops, that’s going to be worth zilch in seven or eight months. Think again, Chester! I speculatively registered “fivebrowns.com” months ago.

So, in addition to our regularly scheduled family news, we’ll also be bringing you updates about the upcoming addition to our family.