Matthew and Sarah Turn One Year Old! (12 Months of Photos)
One of the Earliest Pictures from Stanford Hospital A Year Ago
Exactly one year ago at this moment, my wife and I were at the Stanford University hospital in Palo Alto. She was in labor, and the two of us were eagerly awaiting the arrival of our twin boy and girl. We didn't know what they looked like. We didn't even know what we were to name them, and we didn't really know how much our lives would change. We didn't have a crystal ball into their budding personalities, and we never imagined how much fun we would have once they joined our family.
On June 20th of 2008, Matthew David Gray and Sarah Elizabeth Gray joined our family. We share with you some of the highlights in pictures. Even for those of you who follow us closely on other networks, some of these photos are new - having never been posted to the Web. Scroll down just to watch the kids grow before your eyes. You can catch more on Matthew and Sarah by following our Smugmug account or The Gray Effect.
Thank you for being part of our extended family and community.
My Tweet that night, alerting the world we were on our way.
(Discussed on Friendfeed)
Matthew and Sarah debuted on June 20th, but were quite small. Sarah stayed at the hospital another week, as she worked hard to grow.
Once we got the twins home, it was remarkable how small they were.
By August, they grew used to being part of our family.
In September, many evenings were spent with me, as my wife attended her masters' program.
By October, though still small, the kids' facial expressions became very clear.
By November, the two were playing along with our Schwag Magnets routine, sporting Web 2.0 logos which previously couldn't fit at all.
December saw Matthew and Sarah grow more curious about the world around them.
The two spend practically every waking (and sleeping) moment together.
As the twins grow, they present quite an armful.
One thing we never expected was how happy and upbeat Matthew and Sarah both are. The times they cry or get frustrated are far outweighed by their smiles and shouts of glee.
The two tag along with my wife to CostCo.
Sarah exults at a friend's party. (Photo by Rachel Fox)
Matching clothes are too tempting for the boy/girl twin set.
As the twins grow, they get more inventive about boundaries.
The pair relax together on Robert Scoble's recliner.
Flying down to San Diego for a cousin's wedding, the two prepare in the airport.
Anybody who has ever been a parent knows the perfect bond that can exist with children. That we were so blessed to get two amazing children at once is something that is indescribable. We are ecstatic every day, even during tough times. But there aren't that many, and we are looking forward to year number two!
posted by Louis Gray @ 1:30 AM
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I don't like anything to take too much longer than it has to. I tend to write blog posts from beginning to end in one sitting. I don't like to stop TV shows and watch the second half later. And I really don't want to have to make doing my taxes an ordeal. That's why for the last several years, I've jumped onto 
At the end of the year, it's a tradition for many sites and blogs to pick "best of" lists, offer predictions, show their best posts and the like. At louisgray.com, we're no different. In fact, we're probably worse than most when it comes to liking to sort, use statistics, find trends and display highlights. I thought it'd be fun (at least for me) to do a quick run through the year soon to be completed, looking at how things progressed - the good, bad, interesting, and not so much. Below is a quick summary, somewhat, of how each month went, including the top stories and new companies and people we encountered along the way.
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My wife is in the middle of crunch time to complete a massive paper for her Masters' Degree program in World History. With her facing a 30-page submission due in the middle of this upcoming week, I've been pulling extra time covering Matthew and Sarah, including virtually all of the last 30 hours or so. Not that I mind all that much, as it's afforded me the opportunity to get more pictures on the record, post some short videos to 
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With the photos on the site, I have a tremendous amount of flexibility for manipulating the images - far more than I could with the free version of Flickr. With Flickr, I could edit the title, the tags and the description of photos, but SmugMug lets me rotate the images, add captions, add a watermark, if I wanted, crop photos, and make color effects - for example, displaying the images in black and white, sepia tone or the negative, which can be flat out spooky. I found myself making a lot of bulk changes, rotating kids from laying on their side to facing straight up, and readying the pictures for display. 
I've been watching SmugMug from the sidelines for the last few years. I've seen the company's great engagement with the blogging community. 
I've made no secret of the fact that I'm not a huge fan of social media video sites. Videos take too much time to watch and slow me down in my daily consumption of the firehose. I'm still sitting on a 14-minute ode to copyright from 
I won't be wholly turning the blog over to family updates in lieu of tech and other news, but I thought it important to let you know Sarah's home, and we're very excited. So far, the kids have been absolutely great. I know there'll be days in the future where I won't think so, but it's exactly what we were always hoping for.
At 3 o'clock this afternoon, Kristine and I entered the local veterinarian's office with our 18-plus year old beagle Molly, who has been a member of our family, and a constant companion to my wife for more than a dozen years. A little over an hour later, the two of us emerged, and Molly was gone. After three bouts with cancer, the loss of a toe, innumerable odd moles and tumors here and there, not to mention thousands upon thousands of meals, walks, and snuggling time, today was the day we had to say goodbye.
Little is known about Molly's early years. Kristine found Molly at a Beagle Rescue in San Jose in 1995, becoming her second dog, joining Digger, a thicker, older male beagle, who, according to my wife, wasn't always too fond of Molly. The two vied for attention until 2001, when Digger passed on, leaving Molly as the sole focus of Kristine's attention.
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For the last two baseball seasons, my wife and I had signed up to approximately 40 games a year. We didn't make all of them, but we made a good amount. We spent a lot of Friday evenings and Saturday mornings going up and down I-880 in the East Bay, headed to Oakland. But when news of the twins hit, we knew we had to adjust, taking the total package down to what we thought would be a more manageable 20 games a year. I even planned ahead by leaving a big gap in our ticket schedule around when the kids are expected to show up.
Living in the Bay Area, and not preemptively well off, my wife and I own a 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom condo in Sunnyvale. It's not the largest of homes. It doesn't have a backyard and isn't in a plush neighborhood. The kitchen is small. The elevator between floors can be an adventure, and our dining room is barely more than a table's width long. But now, with 
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