Apparently it’s pretty incredible that they were able to get two cysts on the first try. So that’s awesome, and we’re pretty thankful for that. But because of the two that aren’t draining, he needs to have another surgery. What his surgeon will do this time is go in with a camera through the same incision, and poke holes in the other two cysts so that all of the cysts will connect and drain through the same shunt, rather than having to put multiple shunts in.

The surgery is set for April 11th. We wanted to have it done sooner rather than later to give Remi the best chance as far as his development is concerned. We want the extra fluid to be taken care of so his brain can do what it needs to to heal. We don’t know that it has slowed his development necessarily, and we won’t for a while. This is all still a waiting game. So that’s that. We didn’t get bad news, and we didn’t really get good news — we kind of just got news.

As far as normal life is concerned, Remi is doing really well. He’s been a lot more alert lately and he smiles all the time now. He also likes long walks on the beach and watching the sunset. But really, we love him and he’s a really happy baby. Thanks to everyone who’s kept us in their prayers and been so supportive. We truly appreciate it.

Good design is the simplest one that works.

–Albert Einstein

Users that come to the websites we create should have a purpose. A reason for being there. Just like you are here, reading this post right now. If users are coming for something, whatever it is, the website should be designed such that it is as easy as possible for them to quickly find what they’re looking for.

The most important consideration is organization. Walmart, Home Depot, Lowes, Harris Teeter — to name a few — spend massive amounts of time and money organizing. They lay out new floor plans, studying their user flow meticulously. They A-B test the arrangement of products on shelves, placing the higher profit items at eye-level and making further adjustments to design the optimal shopping experience.

Why do these multi-billion dollar companies focus so much of their energy on design?

They understand that customers — their “users” — will be frustrated, and those customers might leave. They might try to find the things they are looking for at a competitor’s store. Or worse — on the internet!

No. 2: Websites that showcase great UI/UX

UI is the saddle, the stirrups, and the reigns — UX is the feeling you get being able to ride the horse, and rope your cattle.

–Web Designer Depot

There’s something that reaches beyond textures, colors, imagery, a grid, organized content, says the experts at eWebResults Houston web design company. It’s called user experience. UX is a feeling. It’s the emotion you feel when doing or using something. And when whatever it is that you’re using works well, exactly as predicted, it feels natural. It’s a perfect fit. You immediately relate. And relating feels good.

In 1996, Starbucks revolutionized a market. At a time when any gas station and hotel lobby offered a cup of joe for a buck, Starbucks taught a brand new kind of customer to believe that specialty coffee drinks could cost $3, $4 and $5.

But why? Why would anyone pay five times the going rate for a marginally better product? Because of a great experience. Customers began buying into a feeling — a lifestyle choice — not a product. They bought into a brand. And they allowed it to dictate their life decisions. They woke up 10 minutes earlier for work just to have it. And they began putting Starbucks stickers on their most valuable assets: cars, laptops, I’ve even seen some pretty shoddy Starbucks tats. (Pro tip: never get a trend tattooed on your body for life. Your future self will thank me.)

No. 3: Websites that offer compelling content

The quality, visibility, and relevance of your content will be the most influential factor in determining the success or failure of your new site. Shouldn’t it be given some attention during the design process?

–Search Engine Watch

You’re bound to hear it if you haven’t been around advertisement for long… “Content is king.” Without something to talk about, without a beneficial service, without a story to tell the world, who cares?

But what makes good content?

There’s no short answer, unfortunately, so I’ll have to tackle that in a future blog.

No. 4: Websites that can be learned from

There are now some amazing tools in the marketplace that didn’t exist 20, 10 or even five years ago. Google Analytics (GA) hails as one of the most influential tools for running a successful website. Offering insights on user flow, demographics, response to paid advertisement and more, GA gives us as marketers a direct correlation between cause and effect.

Just as Walmart studies their customers’ moves from one section of the store to the other, as I mentioned before, we can also watch our users’ behaviors when interacting with our website. And we can make intelligent decisions based off of those insights.

These insights can justify why or why not to move, remove or create content. Post rationalization shouldn’t be the means, but sometimes a little reinforcement can talk your clients into sticking with the right choice.

(Related: Tips For Better Website Voice Search Rankings From Professional Web Developers)

Use the Right Editor

Finding an editor that fits like a glove is crucial to agile development. Sublime Text is, by far, my editor of choice. Touting hundreds of plugins and extensions, this editor is extremely malleable, allowing for customization of nearly everything. As a bonus, Sublime is cross-platform, and works just as well on OSX as it does Windows.

There are a handful of alternatives, Coda, Espresso, Brackets.io, TextMate, but regardless of which editor you choose, master it. Learn keyboard commands, code snippets and shortcuts decrease your development time and increase your productivity.

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

Open source, mass-tested frameworks and boilerplates are always the best place to start. They’re free to use, and can save you hundreds of hours, cutting out the trivial and time consuming development that’s typical at the start of a web project.

HTML5 Boilerplate acts as the skeleton for your website’s front end. The source is riddled with nuggets of gold that veteran dev professionals have injected to turbo charge your websites. When used in compliment with CSS3Please snippets and font sizing from PXtoEM, focus can remain on the meat, not the bones.

Complimentary to front end, there exists a handful of back-end frameworks that act as a common code bases to begin from. Laravel, CodeIgniter and Ruby on Rails are excellent springboards for your websites and web apps server-side scripting. Developing in these frameworks cuts down time spent building mundane chunks of code, such as routing, pagination, database interfacing, asset management and so on…

Develop Locally

Long gone are the days of frantically uploading PHP files via FTP just to test and see the 12 errors filling up your view. It is arguable that this was always the wrong approach, but before a couple of years ago, setting up one’s own server, which ran the choice server side language and database, terrified any developer unfamiliar with the command line.

Queue MAMP for PHP and Ruby Stack for Ruby. These apps are a one-click install that allow you to develop in server-side languages locally on your machine. It’s incredibly important to develop locally because it shaves off precious seconds that can add up to hours at the end of a project.

Note: if you’re on Windows, XAMPP and the Rails Installer are a great alternatives.

Subversion

If you’re not checking your code in, you’re risking losing hours of your life to frivolous mistakes that every developer is bound to make. For many small projects, Git and can seem like overkill. However, SVN is much simpler, and is relatively easy to setup on most service providers. MediaTemple has an article on how to set up SVN on their Grid Servers. You’ll also need an SVN client like Cornerstone to commit and checkout repositories. It’s highly recommended if more than one developer is working on a project at the same time.

Anything Else?

This is a very brief list of ways you can speed up your workflow. There are hundreds of ways to speed up your process further. So if there’s a great app, tool or service you feel we’ve left out, leave a comment about what resources you might recommend and why.

We planned to have a home birth. We found a midwife whom we met with regularly throughout my pregnancy, took a home birth class, bought a birth kit, and set up a birth tub so a water birth would be an option. This was our plan, and for most of my labor, things went as planned.

I woke up at six in the morning on Friday, January 31st, to some contractions that couldn’t be ignored. It was the day after my due date, and I kept thinking, “Is this it? This can’t be it. Is it?” I couldn’t sleep through them because they were too distracting, so I got up and made biscuits, did laundry, dishes, and cleaned anything else I could find. I just tried to stay busy. By 8am, I knew he was really coming. Things were progressing slowly, though. I contacted my midwife and gave her details of what had been going on. She said, “Ok, this is the phase where you pretend like it isn’t happening. Go do fun things today, and keep yourself busy. Go see a movie, have lunch with a friend, go shopping… maybe all of the above!” I woke Caleb up and said, “You shouldn’t go to work today. I’m pretty sure this is it.” So he stayed home and we went to lunch, got coffee, went to the park, and then walked around our neighborhood. They were all nice distractions and at that point I was still talking and laughing in-between contractions.

Around 4 or 5pm, my water broke. This being my first baby, I wasn’t sure if I had just uncontrollably wet my pants or if it was my water. It was my water though, so yay bladder control. Time went on and things got a bit more serious. Contractions were getting stronger. My sister in law/bff got to our house some time after dinner, and my midwife showed up around 9 or 10pm. I really had no concept of time at this point. I was focused and gearing up for whatever the night held. More contractions, more contractions, more painful contractions. My midwife suggested lots of things for me to do to try to keep things moving along and progress quicker. I tried them all. Even getting dressed in winter clothes, putting shoes on my unbelievably swollen feet, and going for a walk through my neighborhood through some of my most painful contractions. The main thing I remember during that walk is throwing up in my neighbor’s gardenia bushes. Whoops.

Some time after our walk, my midwife checked and told me I was nine and a half centimeters dilated. It was encouraging to hear that, but she also discovered that the baby’s head was in a place that was making labor a lot harder than it needed to be, and part of my cervix was blocking him from moving down. I did everything I could to get him to move. We worked for hours. Finally, I felt the urge to push. That unmistakable thing women talk about that I couldn’t imagine until it hit me. So, I pushed, and I pushed, for what felt like a lifetime but was really about 2 or 3 hours. Nothing was happening. Our midwife checked again and said something along the lines of, “He’s still blocked. You’re both healthy and fine, so you can keep trying if you want to. Your other option is to go to the hospital and get an epidural and get some rest”

Sad times. I was so worn out, and felt like I’d given it everything I had. Little man was stuck, and I was exhausted and in tons of pain. It had been almost 48 hours since I’d gone into labor and I’d had almost no sleep. So through a lot of tears, I told Caleb I couldn’t do it any more. I wanted sleep more than anything, and we decided the best thing to do was go to the hospital, have an epidural, and hopefully that would let me relax enough to fall asleep and let labor progress in the meantime.

So that’s what we did. We packed a quick bag, and hightailed it to the nearest hospital. We got funny looks when we arrived and answered all of their questions with responses like, “No, I haven’t had any prenatal visits. No, I don’t have a primary doctor. Yes, we planned to have a home birth. No, we weren’t going to come to the hospital.” The first doctor that saw me asked why I changed my mind about home birth and I said, “Pain. Give me an epidural.” He laughed. I had gone from 9 centimeters dilated, back to 5 in under an hour. They gave me the epidural and I got some sweet, sweet relief, and even a nap. I kept thinking “Thank you, God. I think I’ll actually make it.”

I progressed quickly without feeling anything once the epidural started working. It was great. I got to 8 centimeters in a short amount of time, and the nurse said, “Looks like it won’t be long now. Let me know when you feel like pushing.” As I got closer, the doctor came in and checked and told me the same thing my midwife had – that the baby’s head was being blocked by my cervix. He told me that he thought I had a really big baby, and that my pelvis was too small to deliver him naturally. I didn’t believe him. He let me keep trying because I told him a C-section was my last resort.

I finally reached the pushing stage for the second time, and gave it everything I had for three hours straight. My Mom, Caleb, Bekah, and my midwife were all telling me how great I was doing, and telling me how I was getting closer, and giving me tons of encouragement. Then the doctor comes in, looks me in the eyes, and says, “It’s been three hours, and you haven’t progressed at all. You have two options, keep going for a little longer, or have a C-section.” Hearing that I’d made no progress after feeling like I’d come so far made my heart sink. I knew he wasn’t coming out the way I wanted him to. So I said that I wanted to have a C-section, and they started prepping for surgery.

Which, by the way, was a terrifying experience. The doctor read the risks to me, and I signed without a second thought. I pretty much didn’t hear anything he said. All I could think about was how much pain I was in and wanting it to be over as quickly as possible. I didn’t even know that there was a risk of never being able to walk again (albeit, very slim) until Caleb mentioned it a week later. It felt like within minutes I had been moved, drugged up, pinched, moved again, arms strapped down, more drugs, and excruciating contractions all in between. I kept asking for Caleb and they kept assuring me that he’d come into the operating room once I was all set up. That’s the last thing I remember – tons of white light and lots of nurses and doctors talking.

They ended up putting me to sleep, which I had no idea they were going to do. So, Caleb waited outside for 45 minutes while they delivered our son, and he missed everything. So did I. Remi Bennett Loffer, weighed 9lbs 12ounces, measured 21 and 3/4 inches long, and had a whopping 43 centimeter head. Woof. We did not see that coming. They brought him out to Caleb after he was all cleaned up and they told him that Remi had an enlarged head. Which was basically the sentence that started a week long nightmare, and the start of a life we weren’t expecting for our son.

I was brought back to my room and I could hear people talking but couldn’t open my eyes or move. I heard Remi crying, and Caleb was talking to my parents. I was dying to see and hold him. I felt so cheated that so many people had met him before me.

When I started opening my eyes, I saw my parents and I looked to my left to see my husband sitting skin to skin with our new baby. Which is what I wanted to do and couldn’t for obvious reasons, so I was so thankful that he decided to “hippy up” and take my place for him. Finally when I could open my eyes long enough and didn’t feel like I was going to drop my son, I got to see and hold him for the first time.

We stayed in the hospital for three nights and we were never left alone. There was always a doctor or nurse coming in the room and mostly messing with Remi. It felt like they really wanted there to be a problem. Every time someone would come in the room there was something they needed to test him for. He was poked more times than I have been in my entire life. He passed every test, despite their determination to find a problem.

Here is where things get really scary. Days and nights in the hospital were a little bit blurry. They told us because his head was unusually large, they suspected that he had a condition called Hydrocephalus, which means “water on the brain.” Neither Caleb or I had ever heard of this, and I was immediately struck with fear. They wanted to do an ultrasound and possibly an MRI to see if that’s what it was, and if they could see anything else. So two ultrasounds later and he was diagnosed with Hydrocephalus, and they also told us that they thought that he may have Porencephaly – a rare disorder characterized by cysts or cavities in the brain.

Now we were terrified. He seemed so normal from the outside. Everyone told us how healthy and great he was. It was so hard to believe anything could be wrong with him. We went from having a normal baby and being so relieved that after about 64 hours of labor, he was finally here, to feeling like our brand new baby had been given some sort of death sentence. The neurologist who came to our room to tell us that Remi needed to be transferred to a hospital uptown for an MRI was not empathetic at all. He lightened up a tiny bit when he came back an hour later and realized we’d been sobbing since he left. I had Remi Sunday night, Wednesday morning I was discharged and a team from ICN at Presbyterian uptown Charlotte came and put Remi in an intensive care incubator, then he was transferred in an ambulance that neither Caleb or I were allowed to ride with him in.

My mom was awesome enough to be our taxi for the day since we’d slept so little over the course of six days. Remi had his MRI that Wednesday night. It was nerve racking. We were told they’d have the results the next day, and we’d go from there.

The first night home without him was the hardest. Not that any of them were easy, but coming home from the hospital without a baby either in my belly or in my arms was not what we’d planned. Our house didn’t feel like our house. There were reminders everywhere that Remi wasn’t with us, but he should have been. Sleeping was nearly impossible, regardless of how badly we needed it.

We got up first thing Thursday morning and went to see our little man and wait for MRI results. We met more doctors, and the results came back and confirmed that he did have Hydrocephalus. Both sides of his brain were enlarged due to extra fluid, but the left was a lot more extreme. Hydrocephalus can cause seizures, brain damage, and all sorts of other scary things if left untreated. To fix this, they wanted to put a VP Shunt in his head that would drain the extra fluid to another part of his body. It’s a tube they put between his brain and his skull that goes from the left side of his head, behind his ear, down his neck, and into his abdomen.

We gave our consent, and the surgery was set for 7:30am Friday morning. We got up bright and early that day and drove to the hospital as quickly as we could so that we could walk down to surgery and be with him before they took him back. I tried really hard to be strong for him, but of course as soon as we got to the waiting room I lost it. I had my first surgery at 23 years old, and my son was having his at 5 days old. Both Caleb and I’s parents came and sat in the waiting room with us. Parents supporting parents. It meant so much to have them there.

There was a big monitor in the waiting room with numbers on it that represented the status of each patient having surgery at the time. Of course I checked Remi’s every five minutes. After half an hour, the receptionist came and told us they had started the surgery and it was going well. More time passed and she came back again and told us they were finished and took us back to a private room where we’d wait for the neurosurgeon to come in and talk to us about how it all went. Our parents waited with us there too. Which was a lifesaver because I think I would have thrown up during that wait that felt like a lifetime. Finally the surgeon came and said the surgery went well, asked us if we had any questions, and told us they were moving Remi back up to his space in the ICN.

We got to go up and see him about half an hour after they moved him. His head was all bandaged up, and they had shaved part of his head. He has a pretty sweet haircut now. The next two days were spent recovering. We visited him every day, all day, and our families visited us and brought us meals and kept us sane. Sunday before we left we were told that as long as everything is going well, Remi would be discharged the next day. We didn’t hold our breath because we didn’t want to be disappointed if something changed over night. Thankfully, when we arrived the next day they were ready to let him go.

We went over some last details, signed paperwork, and Remi had four appointments within three months lined up before we left, all with different doctors and therapists. We finally got to take him home. Which made us feel complete.

So, what does all of this mean for Remi and his future? Basically, there are a lot of unknowns at this point. We do know he’ll have the shunt for the rest of his life. They put extra tubing in when they put the shunt in his head so that it will grow with him for a while, but as he grows he’ll have to have more surgeries to lengthen it. The first of which being when he’s around four years old. We were also told to keep an eye out for any signs of a shunt malfunction, which would also lead to surgery. As far as the Porencephaly goes, we still don’t know for sure if he has it, or to what degree. We have to wait until the extra fluid is drained from his head before they can do another MRI and have a better look at what’s going on. We were told it would take a month or two, and that’s when they’ll do another MRI and we’ll know a little more. In May, Remi will have his first appointment at a developmental clinic and they’ll assess him and give us recommendations for any therapy he may need to make sure he’s hitting milestones. We suspect there will be a lot of therapy in Remi’s future. Some with professionals, and most of it at home with Caleb and I.

It’s been a wild, insanely exhausting month. I’ve never cried or prayed so much in my life. We don’t know what Remi will be like as he gets older, and we’ll just have to wait and find out. For now, we couldn’t be happier to finally have him home with us and enjoy him for who he is. And no matter what he’s like as he grows, he is ours, and he is awesome.

Why Foundation?

First, what’s the point of using a front-end framework? Why wouldn’t we use something simpler, like HTML5 Boiler Plate or HTML5 Blank? While both of these are fantastic options for starting with a fresh set of HTML, CSS and JS to work from, Foundation goes further.

The Grid

Foundation uses a powerful grid system, giving us a tremendous amount of flexibility when writing markup. By adding some simple classes, we can make intelligent decisions on how a layout flows on small and large screens. Infinite nesting, centering, offsets and pushes mean better markup, and better markup means better SEO. The grid is responsive, too, so everything scales up or down to maximize screen real estate.

Everything and the Kitchen Sink

Foundation comes with a plethora of minimally styled elements. Form elements, various navigation types, tabs, accordion menus and much more. All of these elements can be built upon and further styled, which is where SASS really comes into play.

SASS & Compass

Every Foundation project is built with Compass and utilizes SASS. And that is great news, because it gives us the power to change huge chunks of CSS — literally hundreds of lines at once — by editing a few variables. The _settings.scss file in the project gives us the power to change the number of columns we’re using, the gutter and margin of the columns, colors of elements, fonts, borders, you name it.

Note: if SASS terrifies you, Foundation 4 can be downloaded as a static CSS build, too.

Reusable Code

The ultimate decision to use Foundation at Myjive was made because, finally, our developers can go from prototype to final deliverable on the same set of code, saving hours per project.