Nursery Furniture and Dinner

In my weekly emails about my baby's progress, it's started to include not only how many weeks along I am, but how many week I have left until 40.  Thirteen weeks is much more ominous than 27 weeks!  I hope he is growing as well as he should.  He's supposed to be about 2 pounds right now, and I just want him to get bigger and bigger and stay in there until he's totally ready to come out.  I know we're not ever going to be really ready for him to get here, but we're trying really hard!  His furniture came in and last night Patrick worked on putting his crib together.

Here's what his room looks like right now:

We have lots of things to put up on the walls, but I think we're going to wait until the glider rocker gets here before we do.

I'm really proud of the dinner I made last night, so I wanted to share pictures.  I had the desire to make bread, so I made pretzel bread, which is Patrick's absolute favorite.  I also made chicken and turkey sausage soup, with stock I made myself from cooking down a chicken.

Here's the recipe for the pretzel bread.  It is so very good!

99 Days...

This morning, Becca and I went to see the pediatric cardiologist to check on our son's yet-forming heart. We did this because our niece Gwenyth had a rare heart defect called truncus arteriosis, and we just wanted to be sure that we did not pass on this or any related condition to our little one.

The doctor was very abrupt although not unkind. He barely said a word to me other than to give me directions ("Shut the door. Turn the light off. Turn the light back on."). He spoke a little more to Becca, and the gist of it was that he thought it was a little bit of a stretch for us to think our son would have truncus just because his cousin had it.

We sat down for the fetal echo cardiogram, which was pretty cool. When the heart beats, there are blue and red flashes overlaying the heart. I assume that these represented the different chambers of the heart. Bottom line: the doctor said that he can never guarantee that a heart is perfectly formed before the baby is born, but he did not see anything in the way of structure (chambers, vessels, valves) that was concerning to him. Good news!

I cannot think of a good photo to put in this post... so how about the SleepSack that Becca bought from kids.woot yesterday?

By the way, the subject there, 99 days, is the countdown to the due date. He'll be here before we know it!

Snow, 25 Weeks, Doctor's Appointment

On Sunday night it snowed pretty hard for how southerly we live in the world.  Seven inches at our house in one night!  The temperature hasn't really gotten over 34 since then, so all the snow crusted over with ice and has caused schools to cancel for at least 4 days this week and the Army base Patrick works on to completely shut down for two days, which meant we got a 4 day weekend together! Hooray!  I felt very spoiled just being able to be with him and do nothing.  Usually when we have time together we end up with friends or in Chattanooga, so it was pretty great just being together.  Patrick must have liked it too because this is what I woke up to yesterday morning:

I had a doctor's appointment yesterday which we made the decision not to go to because of the snow, so I managed to get one this afternoon instead.  Everything still looks great, but the doctor decided after we talked about Gwenyth that I should have an ultrasound with a pediatric cardiologist, mostly for my peace of mind than anything.  The likelihood that our baby has anything wrong with his heart just because his cousin did is very, very low but my doctor is all about covering the bases and making me feel good about anything that's going on with my pregnancy (which has been almost nothing).  Our appointment is on Tuesday and I'm kind of excited because it means I get to see him again and hopefully we'll get to see his face this time!

Here's come pregnant belly pictures in the snow:

e.e. cummings

One of my favorite authors just got married and he posted on his blog about his wedding and the poem that was read during it.  It made me think of the joy that I feel when I think about having my son.

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginably You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)