Week 18: Fingers Crossed

No need to cross your fingers for the baby, the baby's fine. Cross 'em for our house, we just put an offer on another one, this time in Old Lake Highlands. A couple of fine Ole Ags live there with their little (boy? girl?) Beck. All we know is what the lettering on the walls of the green baby room tell us, and what it says to us is that the parents probably sing him/her to sleep like Tuuuuuuu eres un perrador/You're a loser baby*...

At any rate, since people actually live in this house, it's got a better chance of not being a smoldering pile of junk like that last house turned out to be.



Vitals
Location: Old Lake Highlands, Lake Terrace subdivision
Year Built: 1957
Size: 3 br, 2 bath, garage turned into 2nd living area with room for a TV as big as me
Backyard: Yes indeedy, plenty.
Haunted: Unknown

At any rate, they've accepted our offer, but now we've got to make sure it passes inspection and appraisal, which we feel it will. If all goes well, we should be moving into the new place by the end of May.

That's about all the quasi-baby related news I have (it's quasi-baby related because the baby will live in the house, I guess). If Monica has any comments (which, of course she does), she'll tack them onto the end. Or the beginning, she's ca-raaazy.

Current baby size: 6 inches
Current baby weight: 8.5 ounces, or about 54 Hershey's Kisses if it's a girl. A pile of 240 caterpillars if it's a boy.


*If you're struggling with this reference, ask someone younger. :)

Weeks 16-17

Hello! Not very many updates, except that I'm getting bigger every day. I did put on two of my old pairs of jeans, and I can still pull them all the way up, so that's good news! I didn't even have to jump or dance around to pull them up, either, so I'm feeling pretty slim right now :)

On another note, we decided not to buy the house (in post Week 15) to put the baby in, which means we're still looking. We found one we liked the other day...too bad we can see the Dollar General from the front porch!

The appointment on the 9th went fine- they took my blood, but I didn't make a big deal out of it. And, I got the smoothie, which was a plus! I go back on the 27th for the gender-diagnostic sonogram, and the technician is going to write down the baby's sex and seal it up in an envelope for me, and we'll open it together when Chris gets back from Coachella (below) on the 30th. For all you people who think I can't keep from opening the envelope...watch this. Well, don't really watch. You won't see much. You'll see me NOT opening an envelope, that's for sure!!



That's all there is to report for right now! Week 18 is coming up on Friday, but there may not be another post until after the sonogram on the 27th. Or until I do the Drain-o test, which my mom keeps telling me to do. I'm supposed to pour Drain-o crystals into a container and then potty into the crystals. Apparently, if it ends up blue it's a boy, and green it's a girl. No, thanks. I don't like tests that involve mixing Drain-o with...anything, really. But we'll see! If I do the test, I'll let you know!

Week 15

While Chris is behind me freaking out about dictating to me while I type, I'll say a few things! I'm in week 15 now, and there's not much to report. Oh, except that a co-worker came up to me, put her hands on my stomach, and said, "You've got a little girl in there!" WEIRD. I guess we'll see. If I do have a little girl in there, maybe my co-worker is some sort of medicine man.

Chris: "Children are our future. Invest in our future with love. That is all."

That was refreshing. He stopped my typing, informed me that he was ready to dictate, and that's what he said. Sigh.

Another doctor's appointment is coming up on the 9th, and we'll do the trisomy testing, and then on the 7th of May (I think), we find out if there's a little girl in there! After that, I don't know what will happen, but I DO know that I'll be getting another smoothie after the testing on the 9th.

Oh, yeah, and we bought a house to put the baby in! Very exciting. Here it is:


Man, this kid gets everything! Maybe it will want a nice Bentley to be driven around in...I'll have to ask about that one.

Weeks 10-13

Ok, folks! Sorry it's been so long, but since we've skipped about four weeks we have a few updates! At the end of week nine, we got our first sonogram, which was pretty cool. I didn't realize that the reason sonograms are so blurry is that the baby is moving around in there! We have quite a little dancer. Or soccer player, whatever.


Weeks 10-12 went by without much news, and then again at week 13, we got to hear the heartbeat. My mom came with us to the doctor's appointment, and tried to hold the phone up to the Doppler machine while the doctor was listening for the pulse, so my dad could hear it. It was pretty funny when the doc was all, "Yeah. You're creating quite a bit of feedback." Oh, Mom...

They also did lots of blood work at this last appointment, which grosses me out, but it also bought me a smoothie after my appointment since I was so good :) "Good" meaning, I didn't cry or yell when the nurse said, "Your vein just rolled...do you want me to take the needle out?" Wow. I may need another smoothie after I finish typing this.

In four weeks, we have the trisomy testing (to see if our kid is going to have chromosomal defects), and then four weeks after that, we find out if we're having a boy or a girl! Hopefully we'll find something to write about in between, but if not, we'll find some more cool text book pictures to post and trick everyone with.

Feel free to keep posting your family-friendly comments, and please keep the salty language under control- the baby has ears now!

CJ:
Current baby size - 3 inches
Current baby weight - 1 oz., or about $592.80 in gold at current market prices.

Week 9

Welcome to week 9, and though it's almost over, it's worth a post because cool stuff happened with the baby this week (apparently).

Check out what our baby looks like. Getting this photograph was complicated - I won't go into the details.It's an alien! Look at those beady eyes, he's hatching some sort of plot. We should probably stop watching so much Family Guy, that Stewie Griffin is a bad influence.

The salivary glands and vocal chord begin to form this week. The mouth is now able to open as well, completing the drooling, screaming and spitting up trifecta. The intestines are formed but very immature at this point. At any rate, it looks like this kid's now got a full arsenal of weapons with which to inflict parenthood on us.

Monica found an ingenious little piece of clothing yesterday, it's stretchy and shaped like a tube top, but you wear it around your waist and stomach. It lets you leave your pants unbuttoned while keeping everything smoothed out, covered up and together, so you can keep wearing regular clothes as things begin to expand inside. You can probably use it to smuggle items like basketballs, large round fruits, and anything that fits into a Tupperware container as well. We'll be eating plenty of barbecue and soup at the movie theater the next few weeks.

Current baby size: 5 cm
Current baby weight: 10 g, or a bit less than half your daily recommended allowance of dietary fiber.

*Edit 2/11/07* To be clear, that's not actually a picture of our baby. That's a joke, because I'm sure it's incredibly complicated to get such an up close picture of a fetus in the womb. Not sure who's baby it is, but there's a good chance that it's walking around inflicting parenthood on some folks by now. Also, for those who asked, the barbecue and soup are presumed to be smuggled into the movie theater in my wife's cleverly concealed Tupperware, being, I would say, pretty tough to smuggle in otherwise. Seems I'm a bit too dry for my own good. Get it right, Jackson!

Week 8

Hello, welcome to the one-stop clearinghouse of all things Baby. Our baby.

Currently, our apartment is pretty empty. The only little one we've got running around is our cat Scout, who's about as much fun as a three year old, but with some pretty sharp teeth. He also doesn't repeat bad language he hears from the other, less classy cats.

I don't think he and our baby are going to be very good friends.

Things will be changing quickly over the next few months. We'll be out of an apartment and into a house by May. By then, Monica will be pretty big, or at least big enough to politely decline to help me move boxes of makeup and shoes and purses.

We'll be going to the doctor next week to hear the heartbeat, I suppose. These doctors never really tell you anything with certainty, but I get the feeling an ultrasound is coming soon.

Check back often, we'll keep everyone updated on new happenings. Leave comments, and tell your friends. It's a baby!