In the last month, we made a couple decisions that are of the variety that will shape our lives tremendously. If you would have asked me a year ago if I thought I’d be making a blog post with these two items in it for the world to read, I would have said you were crazy. But many of you have become friends of ours, even if we have never met in person. If you ever end up in northeast North Dakota, you’ve got a warm bed and good eats waiting for you .

The bigger of the two decisions we made, was to expand our family. Casey is roughly 6 weeks along. After being inspired by The Macs, we are going to wait until out child is born to find our if we’ll be blessed with a little girl or another rambunctious adorable boy. So we now have another room to get baby’d. It’ll be a little different not knowing the sex, but I think we could have fun with it while making it work for whatever little bundle calls it home. We’ll be making the other upstairs bedroom into the nursery. I’d love to talk for paragraphs about this topic, but it is a bit difficult at this stage to come up with much more than what I provided .

The other big decision made is a major career shift on my end. We currently are blessed to be able to have me be the sole provider in the home, allowing Casey to raise our kids. It is the most underpaid (monetary) position in the world, but the reward of being able to spend your day with your kids are worth it (just don’t ask her on a bad day ). But, anyways, that big career change I mentioned… I’ll be transitioning from a full-time, salaried job to owning my own software development contracting company.

I’ve been paid to program since I was 15. I’m going to give you my story, whether you want it or not . I started out with one of those free websites with a full template back when I was ten. I’m pretty sure it said something like “I’m Shane, I’m ten. I have a website.” Impressive, right? I was mighty proud of it. From there, I transitioned into learning HTML to do some basic markup. Next, I transitioned into learning PHP so I could do cool things like tell you the date or something else jaw dropping like that. Then I got crazy and decided to write my own forum software. It was surprisingly successful until a huge security hole was discovered and I didn’t have enough time between school and it so I ended up selling it for some other poor schmuck to fix. I was 14 years old then.

Next, I started working for family doing some basic manufacturing to save up enough to buy parts to build my own computer. I was 15 at that time. With that new computer (using my futon as a chair, and the edge of a hand-me-down entertainment center as a desk) I started doing some free work to get my name heard. It wasn’t long until I was getting paid to do that work. I didn’t make much. Mostly enough to pay for gas and some gas station pizza at high school lunch breaks every now and then. Once I moved to college, I took up a job at Sears while moonlighting doing freelance programming. I lasted there for a year, and did another year at Napa until I landed a job after my sophomore year working for the company I do now. After graduating, I took a job at a $40bln company 5 hours away. It ended up being too hard to be that far from family, so we jettisoned back up here around the time this blog started and I went back to working for the company I am at now while letting them know I eventually wanted to go out on my own.

That takes us to now. As of November 1st, 2009, I’ll officially be self-employed. I’ve got my work cut out for me (speaking of which, contact me if you are an aspiring programmer [web or Windows based] and want to take on some work). I imagine this will explain the rush to get my downstairs office finished up soon.

Sooo, if you need any website or software development done, let me know. Also, if you are, or know, a good website designer, please let me know. Good designers are hard to come by, and I’ve got so much work I could dump on someone as long as they don’t expect to get paid a gazillion dollars per hour .

Sorry for rambling on so long about a career and leaving a paragraph to the more important point. I’m sure there will be much more to come on the baby, but little on self-employment . If you are coming over from houseblogs.net and are wanting to get baby updates, be sure to subscribe (http://www.google.com/reader, “Add Subscription,” “http://www.shaneandcasey.com/feed“) to our blog as I won’t be tagging it in a manner that will cause them to show up on there.