Baby Showers and much gratitude.

My coworkers and department threw a lovely baby shower for me and another woman on the floor on March 21st. We had a tasty cake and everyone was way too generous. I have no pictures to share, but much thanks! Particularly to Molly who organized the whole thing. It was really wonderful of you guys.

And then…

My family and friends all gathered up north for a baby shower on the 22nd hosted by my loverly sister Kim. Before we went up, I made cookies as table décor/favors – I am really proud of the way they came out. And before you all start wondering why I made cookies for my own baby shower, I wanted to. My dearest friend Sarah found the cookie cutter for me; I had been searching for ‘the perfect’ one for a few weeks “with a tail”.




It was really great to see everyone and just have a good time. Unfortunately, after double and triple checking that we had the digital camera with us when we drove up to Mass, we left it at home the day of the shower. One of these days we’ll figure out how to have a camera when we need it. The only pictures I have were taken by others – and I want to thank you all for sending them my way. Here are a few of the highlights.


28 weeks along - and all belly (photo courtesy of Ann)


Justin and the dino sweater grandma Ann made for the Baby (photo courtesy of Ann)


The obligatory gift table picture. (Photo courtesy of Sue)


Mo with the cookie she decorated. (Photo courtesy of Sue)


One of the many (and my favorite) gifts that grammie Sue made. (Photo courtesy of Sue)

While ‘real’ thank you cards will be coming soon, I wanted to say thank you to all that were so thoughtful as to bring me and the baby gifts at both showers. You were all so very generous. I wish I could see you all more often.

Lots of excitement.

And this time, it's the good kind.

Baby showers!

Today my coworkers are throwing a baby shower for me here at the office (in a few hours) which is so incredibly sweet of them.

Then, tomorrow Kim is throwing me a shower at home with the assistance of TC and Ann. For this one I made a bunch of bunny cookies...yes, I made cookies for my own baby shower, but it is OK I asked to. As soon as I download all the pics from my camera I'll get to show them all off. They are SO cute.

It means I get to go home and see the family this weekend, which I am really looking forward to. It's probably the last time I'll make it up there until after June.

Other than that - things are, well, things. Being pregnant is really a roller coaster. Sometimes you don't even realize you're pregnant, and some days you either emotionally or physically cannot function within the real world. There's no predicting it.

Anyway, I promise pictures early next week.

Happy Easter everybody.

Murphy's Law

I know, delinquent blogger...it's been more than a week. More than two to be fair. But at least one of those was spent in total chaos. The proverbial Murphy came to visit, and stayed for a week.

In my last post, I mentioned tangentially:

...on Friday we discovered that due to a clerical error at the DMV, our plates came up surrendered, a fact explained to us by the very nice cop who pulled Justin over and confiscated our plates. Not fun. Now we expect to have quite the adventure trying to get it all straightened out and getting new plates for our car.

Right now, we're just lucky to have a backup vehicle (THANK YOU GRANDPA) otherwise we would be totally up the river. Go figure it happened on the President's Day Weekend so we can't even start to straighten it out until Tuesday morning.

Well, it turns out that was only the tip of the iceberg.

Friday night (in a bit of shock after the nice officer confiscated our plates from car #1) we took car #2 to our optical appointments, which we were running late for.

Which means on Saturday, when we went to go shopping, the battery was dead (yep - I *still* cannot remember to turn my lights off...) and we had to jumpstart the car. Minor details, easily done. (Since I so often do this, we own a pair of jumpers, and a car doesn't have to have plates to jump start a battery).

Sunday and Monday, as I recall, were unblemished by Murphy. Ironically, I had to cancel my oil change appointment on car #1 for Monday, because I couldn't drive it the mile to the shop with no plates. On the bright side, Mom, Jimmy and boo came down to visit for the night, and we had a loverly evening visiting.

Then Tuesday hit, Murphy was back.

Plan: Jus goes to work with car #2 at 7am for scheduled data collection and returns by 8am. We both then take car #2 to the DMV to get plates straightened out for car #1.

Reality: Jus leaves the front door at 7am, only to return 10 minutes later. The transmission won't engage on car #2. Now we have 1 car with no plates, and 1 car with no transmission. Fantastic.

Thankfully, mom and Jimmy were still about, so Jimmy drove Jus to work and back and I got everything together for the DMV (and made a transmission appointment for car #2 at the shop). Then mom drove us to the DMV. An hour+ later, we had determined that something 'unexplainable' had happened and that while we were still responsible for the tickets at least we had new plates for the car. The woman at the DMV was very nice, and recognized that we were somehow the victims here, but there was simply nothing she could do. (Try proving you didn't make a transaction. Good luck with that.)

When we got home we put the new plates on car #1 and drove it down to the autoparts store to get transmission fluid to fill car #2 with in an effort to drive (as opposed to tow) car #2 to the shop. SUCCESS!

Thursday we dealt with the fixing of one car and the replacement of the front plate bracket on the other (plus the delayed oil change.)

By the end of Wednesday, things were looking up with the car situation, and a friend of ours was in town visiting. It was a pleasant evening. More wings. Good times.

But Murphy was not done.

Thursday night, our DVD player died. In the middle of a very special movie night. With 12 people watching it. Argh.

All day Friday we were waiting, but with the end of the week (Fri-Fri) came the end of Murphy's visit. We were drained, and tired, and were muchly glad to be done with Murphy.

Since then, things have been uneventful - knock on wood - and perhaps even (dare I say it) normal.

'Normal' Week

One of the drawbacks to a post-a-week promise is that some weeks...well, some weeks defy normal description. Here are the odds and ends from this week:

Tuesday night we had movie night - this week we were (very belatedly) celebrating Doug's birthday and as such, he got to choose the movie. Therefore, we got to watch the esteemed Hensen classic, "The Dark Crystal". I'm sure we've ruined another priceless childhood memory by rewatching a movie that was chosen because it "was one of my favorites". Kids movies (or movies you loved as a kid) don't always stand up to time. We did have the most fantastic meatloaf with it though (affectionately being called, Dark Crystal Meatloaf). Maybe I'll post the recipe later.

In addition, Tuesday was Darwin Day! For those that aren't married to a paleontologist or evolutionary biologist, Darwin Day is the celebration of Charles Darwin's Birthday. (Feb 12, for those keeping count). In celebration, Sarah made flying spaghetti monster treats. Note the edible googly eyes. Super cool.



For a primer on why a flying spaghetti monster is a Darwin Day appropriate treat see the Wikipedia article here, it'll describe it far better than I. And if you want to make flying spaghetti monster treats all your own, the geniuses at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories were the ones that came up with the recipe.

On Thursday we celebrated Valentine's Day in splendid fashion - we did laundry. Yep, our romantic evening was spent toting laundry back and forth from the laundry room.

Now, to be fair, this probably deserves a post all it's own, but the long and short of it is that on Friday we discovered that due to a clerical error at the DMV, our plates came up surrendered, a fact explained to us by the very nice cop who pulled Justin over and confiscated our plates. Not fun. Now we expect to have quite the adventure trying to get it all straightened out and getting new plates for our car.

Right now, we're just lucky to have a backup vehicle (THANK YOU GRANDPA) otherwise we would be totally up the river. Go figure it happened on the President's Day Weekend so we can't even start to straighten it out until Tuesday morning.

Oh, and we found a fantastic buffalo wing place. If you are a buffalo wing afficionado and are lucky enough to find a Buffalo Wild Wings Bar and Grill, I highly recommend stopping in. Both the baby and I survived our test drive of the hottest wing sauce on the menu, but OH MY was it hot. I did only eat one.

The weekend was spent running errands, and relaxing at home. I spent the whole day today playing in the kitchen - made coffee cake, banana bread, chicken soup with dumplings and Valentine's Day cookies which we spent all evening decorating. I love decorating cookies.



As you can see, a strange week. Funny thing is, looking back on it, other than the ridiculous car problem, it was a pretty average week for us. Guess strange is just the norm around here.

23 Weeks

Just yesterday I posted - well, you get another today. Don't get too used to it. Lot's of neat things happened in the last 24 hours.

First, Justin and I celebrated Valentine's day a bit early, since last night was a performance of the Flying Karamazov Brothers at Stony Brook's Arts Center. It's been too long since we've gotten into the theatre, and even longer since we've gotten to enjoy a great juggling performance. As a matter of interest, it seems that we got to observe the last performance of the last of the original Flying Karamazov Brothers. A neat historic event.

Since we were going out, we dressed up (a bit) and I thought I'd treat you all to a current picture of me and my stomach. As you can see, I'm starting to really get 'big'. I cannot imagine how much more I have to go.

Finally, I received a postcard from ANTARCTICA yesterday! Turns out, one of my dearest friends from Pitt is currently residing in Antartica, working as a IT guy for the science base. Cool stuff. If you want some cool photos (and a very detailed blog about his experiences in Antarctica check out his blog here. Some really neat stuff there. Not every day you get a postcard from Antarctica.

It was a banner Saturday.

Funny Story

So, most of you know I knit. Having a baby on the way is exciting because it means lots of little instant gratification projects with the added bonus that they are constant reminders of the baby-to-be.

As soon as I knew it was a boy, I hit my favorite online knitting suppliers. I bought a book of baby patterns that had a few really great little boy patterns in them, and the yarn for my first project. I, of course, started knitting the first one the day it came the door.

In this case, it's a vest - made in a cotton blend - for the little one. I have knit the back completely:


And I started the front last weekend, roughly Sunday morning (in front of the pregame show for the Superbowl, and straight through the evening's festivities) So far I'm here:


This morning, I sat down to work on it some more. Now, for those of you who are unfamiliar with knitting, how long something becomes is dependent on two things, how many rows you knit, and how much length each of those stitches takes up, known as gauge. So, for this project, when I knit the back, I counted very carefully how many rows I had to the bottom of the armhole to make the length I wanted, and then when I knit the front, I simply knit that many rows again.

Only I knit the front, *During The Superbowl*.

I was tense during the whole game. So I pulled the yarn tighter. So the rows took up less length...

Yep, you got it, this morning I was a few inches from finished at the top and realized that the pieces looked different.



All because of the darned Superbowl.

I don't plan on fixing it. It's a small enough difference that when I put it together it should come out ok. But it is funny.

At least to me.

What this post was supposed to be.

For the last few days, I've been thinking...'what goes in the blog this week?' I mean, it's not every week we get sono pictures, or even so much as a doctor's visit. This week was fairly run of the mill, with a fun movie night to celebrate a friend's birthday and a lazy weekend. However, it was going to end with the Superbowl. So I thought to myself that I would wait until today to post a celebratory "We won the Superbowl!" kind of post. You know, it never even dawned on me that I might be a bit disappointed today. Alas.

As a result, Jus and I are kinda down. Ever tried to mourn your team's loss in the heart of the victor's territory? Yeah, it's been that kind of day. Even the dog is having a hard time of it - since she A) didn't understand why we were screaming at the tv during the fourth quarter last night and B) doesn't understand why we are less than happy go lucky today. She has been doing her best to be cute though.



I just keep telling myself that it's only 12 days until pitchers and catchers report for spring training. We can't really expect to be reigning champions in all sports every year, can we?

It's a little boy!

With the little one on the way, we (ok I) thought it might be a good idea to start a blog to be able to share photos and adventures with you all. So here it is.

We found out last Thursday at our 20 week sonogram that we are having a baby boy. We are very excited.



The telling image... (the sono tech added the notations)



and a nice profile.