Our Baby's Nursery

It wasn't a quick process by any stretch. But, we're having a baby and the baby needs a place to sleep and grow. So we needed a baby room. A nursery. Originally, we thought we would use the spare bedroom since we have three bedrooms in our house and the other two were already our bedroom and my office. However, after being woken up by our white trash neighbors one too many times at 3AM we decided that putting the baby in the room right next to their house was not a good idea.

The decision was made to move my office into the spare bedroom and convert my office into the nursery. That meant that I got to paint my new office, move all of the furniture and electronics from one room to the other, and then build and arrange all of the new furniture in the nursery.

The old office...ready to become the nursery

It took a few weeks to get everything done, but it is finally complete! I've been enjoying my new office, especially some of the choice conversations held from time-to-time over at the neighbor's residence and the nursery looks great! We still need to add pictures, new curtains, and accessories like that, but I think it will work out perfectly for us and our new son.

The finished product

I've posted a slideshow below so you can view the progress as the work was being completed. Click on the individual photo or the link to "View Album" if you want to go to our Picasa Web Album and see some larger photos.

View Album

What Women Do During Baby Showers

Interesting. I note the presence of a few glasses of alcohol in this photo, too. Who knew? My apologies to all men for my previous post.

This photo is from the second baby shower I attended in as many weeks. My good friend Severine (not shown; the photo is of Kristen, Jen and me) is expecting her very own baby boy in February. It's practically raining babies around me - everywhere I turn, another pregnant woman appears!

What Men Do During Baby Showers

In case you were wondering...

Bryan and I spent last weekend in Pittsburgh, showering his sister Kristyn with love and gifts for her little one, who is due just after Christmas day. I have my fingers crossed that she actually delivers a few days early so that we can meet her little one when we're visting again at Christmastime. Otherwise, it may be months before we get to meet him/her. How sad is that?!

Bridget's Choice

I had a brownie and a banana on my desk. Is it wrong that I went for the brownie?

In my first trimester, I ate just like normal, but I could barely look at any sugary food - I made an entire pan of brownies and didn't eat a single one! In my second trimester, my appetite has remained somewhat normal: no unusual cravings or indulgences, I'm simply much less likely to skip my afternoon snack. Very recently, however, my love of sugary food has returned...and doubled. It might be due, in part, to Halloween and the recent availability of Milky Ways in my fridge, but I like to think it also has something to do with my new theory that baby boys like chocolate as much as women do!

RSS Feed Subscription Links Now Available

Yes, I know. I should have had this setup when we first created the blog, but I didn't think about it until last Friday. You'll see that there are now links in the top left of our blog page that will allow you to subscribe to an RSS feed using your RSS aggregator of choice.

Right now, I have provided links for the standard RSS feed as well as ones targeted to Google Reader, My Yahoo!, and My AOL.

If you aren't sure what I am talking about when I say "RSS" here's a brief description. RSS is a standard way for types of content, like blogs, to communicate their content around the internet. RSS is great because regardless of whether I write a blog on Blogger or someone else writes a blog on WordPress the RSS feed still looks the same. People, like you and me, use what are called "RSS Aggregators" or "RSS Readers" to get updates about the blogs we are interested in without having to go out to each blog we like to read and find out if any updates have been made recently. I'm a big fan of Google Reader but most blog readers have the same basic set of features.

Of course, this blog post is not nearly as interesting as the previous one.

It's A BOY!!!!!

That's right! We had our ultrasound today to make sure that everything is going well with the little one and during the ultrasound we found out that we're going to have a son! We couldn't handle waiting until he was born to know so we had decided long ago to find out as soon as possible. Needless to say I'm ecstatic. I would have been happy either way, boy or girl, but this is awesome! Time to head to the store and buy the littlest baseball glove that they make, right?!

I've posted a couple pictures from the ultrasound below.

It's officially a boy!!! (The nurse added the captions)

A good shot of his little head

Now we need to really focus on names but fortunately we only have to choose from 50% of the 10,000 names in the books that we have. Choosing from 5,000 names can't be that hard, right ;)

Thanks to everyone for voting in our poll! For the record, I voted it would be a boy...

Best Halloween ever!

Is She or Isn't She?

Allegedly, my tiny belly is now cradling a baby the size of a large mango.

Why Do I Have to Learn Math to Have a Baby?

The last time I touched a math book was my freshman year of college. I took my one required semester and then moved on to enjoy some liberal arts. I'm not ashamed to admit that in the years since 1996 (gulp!), I have lost nearly all math ability I may once have had. I'm one of those people who starts sweating and shaking when I have to make change or calculate the correct tip. My career doesn't really require me to do math, and I was smart enough to marry a math genius who gratefully does any necessary calculations for me.

So it's no surprise that my (current) worst fear about having a baby is that it's forcing me back into math. Recently, a colleague asked me, "How far along are you?" I replied 18 weeks. She asked, "So how many months is that?" (Cue sweating and shaking.) I threw out some random number and then went back to my desk to immediately google "pregnancy calculator" to discover that I was 5 months pregnant.

My doctor and all my baby books document the pregnancy by weeks, not months! And I know that pregnancy is really 10 months, when all is said and done, which makes me sweat and shake for multiple reasons. And you start counting your pregnancy from 2 weeks before conception, which means I was already two weeks pregnant before I was pregnant. You see why I'm fearful and confused?!

I'm sure that I'm going to have to do a lot more calcuations even after this baby is born. Isn't there some rule that we have to refer to our child's age in months until he/she reaches puberty, but I'm always going to want to translate that into years. And I think bottles and formula come in ounces, so I'm probably going to have to learn how to half and double those measurements. There are probably tons more math problems related to baby and child that I cannot even fathom...yet another mystery of pregnancy that noone tells you about.

Will It Be A Boy Or A Girl???

If you haven't been to the blog in a couple days (and I don't know why you would have been since we haven't posted anything new) you haven't seen the new poll that we posted up there. On October 31 we are going to find out the sex of the baby! Yes, Halloween, which just happens to be my dad's birthday. In anticipation of our appointment we wanted to get other people's opinions about whether it will be a boy or a girl.

Go check out the blog and vote! Or, if you're reading this on the blog itself you'll find the poll in the upper left corner.

The BabyBjorn Bib

I ran across an article on the Consumerist blog today that linked to a post on the "Kevin Kelly Cool Tools blog" talking about the BabyBjorn bib. Not sure if this bib has been around for a while or not, but it seems handy. It is ergonomically designed to fit a baby's neck and body and the coolest part of all is the "drip tray" fashioned into the bottom of the bib.

I know very little about what is available for babies right now and my guess is that the baby will still find a way to overshoot the drip tray, but it caught my eye.

Kevin Kelly Cool Tools Blog Post
BabyBjorn Bib Web Page

WE'RE HAVING A BABY!!!

That's right! We're going to be parents! At last count we're a little over 16 weeks through the pregnancy and the little one's estimated due date is March 27, 2009. That gives Bridget and I about 5 1/2 months to get ready. I'm excited, scared, and I think part of me is still in denial. It's hard to prepare for a baby when it seems so surreal and so far away. But the heartbeats and ultrasounds tell me it's coming whether I'm ready or not!

Speaking of ultrasounds we've had a couple already and they're amazing. We also had an MRI recently and got to see the baby, crossed legs and all, in Hi-Def. I've posted the pictures below.

The baby's first picture from September 12, 2008

The second ultrasound on October 3, 2008 - It looks a lot more like a person and it's easy to spot the spine

The picture from the MRI. You can see his big ol' head, both arms, and his legs crossed.

Yes, I'm referring to the baby as a "he," but it's too early for us to know for sure. It just sounds better than referring to the baby as "it."

I'm sure Bridget will have a post soon talking about how she's feeling and all that good stuff. Hope you enjoy the picures. More to come as we march toward March!

Our First Post

Hello, and welcome to our new blog! Over the coming days, months, and years we hope to fill up this blog with all sorts of interesting (and some not-so-interesting) content.

We hope you enjoy!