Dear Friend,

I (Leon) am now back in the office full time after having taken 2 weeks off to get our heads around having Asher in our lives. It has been an eventful past month. Chrysti is slowly recovering from giving birth and we have been blessed by a visit from Chrysti’s parents.

Chrysti's Story

At the end of February I took my practical test (road test) to get my UK driving licence. Unfortunately I didn’t pass. It turns out I wasn’t as prepared as I thought I was for the test. A lot of people don’t pass on their first try. I plan on resuming the process later this spring.
 
My life over the last 2 weeks has dramatically changed! Our sweet little boy Asher has been such a blessing to us amidst the struggles I’ve faced since his birth. I lost a lot of blood due to injuries from the birth, Asher spent the night in Special Care (similar to the NICU) because of dehydration, and I’ve had struggles with feeding him because of the blood loss I’ve experienced. It’s been a growing experience as I recover and figure out this new life as a mother.

Leon's Work

A few days before Chrysti’s due date I worked with our email vendor to move OM’s email servers to a new data centre which is less expensive. The move went flawlessly and we are already experiencing the faster bandwidth available to us at the new data centre.
 
I had also been working furiously to switch OM to a new spam filtering company. We needed a new company since the one we were using no longer is doing spam filtering from the end of March. We can’t do our own spam filtering because we need the anonymity that a 3^rd party company provides to us. Just days before our deadline we settled on a new company. The new solution is not as good as what we had in that it catches too many non-spam messages as spam, but we were in a corner. After Asher arrived in our lives a work colleague picked up the ball and finalised our agreement with the new spam filtering company.
 
Once things settle down we can start to look at upgrading to Exchange 2010. In the mean time I am now doing initial clean-up work to link our extranet to Active Directory for authentication. This has been a desire of ours for several years. It would make many things much easier, but there is a lot of work still to be done to see this actually come to fruition.

Around Town

As I said before, Chrysti’s parents arrived a few days after Asher was born. They have helped with meals, cleaning and feeds. We have both enjoyed having them around to cope with all the newness of being parents. I (Leon) have enjoyed doing things with my father-in-law around the house.
 
On Monday, I (Leon) applied for UK citizenship. Based upon some research, I should receive my approval for citizenship 3 months from now. I will then be a dual citizen. Asher is already has dual citizenship.

Praise & Prayer Requests

1. Praise God that Asher Samuel Hedding is now healthy and thriving. He is growing up so quickly.
2. Praise God that we were able to find a new spam filtering solution for OM in the time given us.
3. Praise God that the email server move went without a hitch.
4. Do pray for us to have wisdom to raise Asher and to be good parents. We already have had to make some decisions. After much striving we have had to give up on breastfeeding. Chrysti's milk never came in sufficiently.
5. Pray that we have restful nights, that Chrysti recovers quickly from all the trauma she went through, and that we can quickly discern all that Asher is communicating to us through his cries.
6. Pray that my (Leon's) citizenship application is successful and comes back soon.
7. I (Leon) have a number of projects for email that I would like to complete. Pray that I can meet with the right people to move these projects to completion.