Hanging up the Christmas lights!

Nora loves that thing.

For Thanksgiving this year, Aunt Tiffany & Uncle Rex were hunkered-down in Charlotte with Alex & Brody — their new twin boys! Make sure you check out their blog for some cute pictures and videos.

And a Happy Birthday to Lauren!

One of the great things about being part of a large family is that sometimes the blog posts just write themselves. Here’s a video that Lauren’s sister Annie (Aunt Annie to Nora & Quinn) put together after a recent trip to the apple orchards.

Thanks, Annie!

Nora and her old buddy McKinley take phone calls on the stairs.

What you’re looking at is a brand-spanking new design for FSI. From here on (unless there’s a massive revolt), all posts will live in one convenient place — on the main page. Here’s a quick list of things that are new and receiving some ongoing thought…

• Thumbnails (or no thumbnails) for Picture of the Day posts. For now I’m going to try no thumbnails to see how it feels and what it buys us. I think it’ll allow more long-form posts to evolve out of PODs — no longer should we need to decide if a picture is strictly a POD, or a regular post. The hope is that they can all live in harmony without having to push Lauren’s writing too far off the page. (to counter that, I’ve also increased the amount of posts that fit on a page from 5 to 15)
• Speaking of Lauren’s writing, the blog should be more readable than ever with an increased font size and comfortable line length.
• Twitter, at last. Up there on top of the sidebar column, you’ll see a place to catch up on the latest Nora quotes (one day Quinny!) and the rest of us. Integrating that wasn’t easy, so I’ll be keeping an eye on it over the next few days. It’s not perfect in my eyes, but it’s close enough for now.
• Post comments. Right now they’re pretty tucked away visually. I’ll find a way to elevate them. In the meantime, you can always see the latest comments on the sidebar.
• I haven’t tested the design in all browsers yet, but it works great in Chrome, Safari, and decently enough in Firefox. I’ll make sure it works perfectly in each of them soon enough.

Redesigns generally aren’t fun for site visitors, so I hope you’re able to give it some time, settle in, and see how it feels! Please send me feedback if you’ve got ideas that’ll make it better. Lastly, many thanks are due to Lauren for putting up with my endless second guessing, tweaking, and multiple restarts that went into this redesign.

Okay. All done. Now keep scrolling to enjoy today’s Picture of the Day. :)

I think we all know how this battle ended on Saturday. (let’s keep it clean, Annie) :)