Ramblings of a mad pregnant woman

It has been way too long since a post has been made on our blog. My belly is expanding, and Chris is running more miles each week. We registered at Babies R Us. Oh my goodness, that was an experience. I highly recommend that if you are wanting to register, go to another store first. We registered for over 200 items and spent over 4 hours. It was quite a bit overwhelming. We haven't been to register anywhere else, because we aren't sure we are ready to devote that kind of time.
Marvin has been kind of clinging lately. He likes to lay his head really close to Chris or my face. He also has been sort of ornery. His favorite thing is to try and eat our socks before we notice. He also likes to tear up the couch. We are dealing with his little tanturms the best we can. If he has a particularly good day, we try to treat him with a trip to the park or another type of special treat.
We were surprised to have a niece born earlier this month. Addison Renee made quite an entrance. Chris and I had a lot of fun shopping for her. I also spent some time shopping for our little guy while we were out. Chris says that all clothes that are small are cute. I disagree. We just happened to find a lot of really handsome outfits! We are starting to make a collection in the range of newborn to 6 months. Don't worry; I am sure our baby will need lots more than what we have so far.
Names have been quite a hot topic with Chris and me. Right now we have a spreadsheet of names that we like that include middle names and different combinations of the names. We cannot decide what we are going with yet. It may become a question on our blog soon.

Well, I am tired, so that is all for now. We will post some more belly pictures soon!

And the Winner Is...

As you can see at the right, out of 22 votes in our gender prediction poll Girl won a majority of the vote over Boy by a vote of 12 to 9 with one vote for Alien (thanks Thom). So on Thursday we had our doctor's appointment and ultrasound as planned. Most of the visit we watched the ultrasound technician take pictures of the developing bones and organs and explain what we were seeing.

Above is a picture of the face. On the right is the forehead and eyes, in the middle is the nasal cavity and upper lip.  At the bottom is a hand that had made it's way into the picture. Below is the baby's profile with the head at the right, torso in the middle and a knee sneaking up on the left side.  Notice the hand up by the face still.

Finally, after she had shown us the whole baby from head to toe, and everything looked normal and seemed to be developing how it should she asked if we wanted to know the sex of the baby. We said we did and this is what she showed us:

In a slight upset Boy takes the title.  We are so excited, and family and friends seem to be excited too.  We would have been excited either way, but it's really cool to know. Now the baby is a "he". Now we can start focusing on names. (My brother Thom who was the one Alien vote says it should be Elliot due to the initals it would create. He's so clever). We went to Babies-R-Us today and started our registry, which was an experience and will have to be a story for another day.  It all has reached a new level of realness. The feeling is amazing.

The coolest part of the ultrasound for me was the clarity of the images.  The still pictures are detailed, but it doesn't hold a candle to what we saw on the actual screen.  I was surprised how often I knew what we were looking at before she told us, which I think was rather amazing considering how fast she talked. But the coolest and most detailed images came when she showed us a 3-D rendering of our baby's face and put it into motion.  Below is a still capture:

Notice his right hand and forearm stretched in front of his face.  You can also see some of his other hand above his head.  We seem to have a shy, wiggly little boy. As I'm sure you've figured out, he kept moving his hands up in front of his face and moving around as though he didn't want his picture taken. All of this also confirmed to Annalee that what she had been feeling was in fact the baby moving.  She was pretty sure that's what it was, but to see it happen on the screen confirmed it. Now it seems like he's moving all the time.

The rest of the doctor's visit went great, except for all the time we spent waiting for the docotr.  Everything seemed to be in good shape.  He is currently 11 ounces which they said was right where he should be. Annalee's gaining weight at a healthy rate, and her blood tests from our last visit were all normal. The ultrasound technician was not able to get a picture of the baby's stomach because it was empty.  She said it was nothing to be concerned with, just Annalee has to stop back briefly next week to hopefully get a good picture.