He's here

After all the wait, he's finally here. Here are some pictures.

Nursery Mural

With just 4 weeks to go, Jeff and I decided we should get highly motivated this weekend to do some baby preparations. Jeff & I had started a mural in the nursery a couple weeks ago and it's finally finished. We also managed to put away and sort all of the awesome baby presents we've been receiving. We feel loved :)

I'm still feeling fine. My feet are the size of watermelons but Jeff says I'm only grumpy if I've had to walk around a lot at work.

Here's the mural:

DIAPERS AGGGGHHH

Greetings from 14 weeks to go--
Everyone asks how I'm feeling and honestly the answer is fine, like usual. Still love sleep; still getting the crap kicked out of me from the inside (it feels so funny:~); still love how much Jeff pampers me.

I love shopping at Costco. Their prices are usually very good and they don't have an overwhelming selection that makes me overthink my choice. Costco sent out their coupons this week. Included was a coupon for $9 off the purchase of a box of Huggies diapers and a box of Huggies wipes. I kept telling Jeff that this is the only time that buying diapers would be fun. We decided it's worth trying to stock up now and went to Costco to use the coupon on the purchase. I'm still gasping that we came home with 2 boxes of diapers and 2 boxes of wipes for $110. This is going to go on for how long? Wow that's going to be a lot of money.

We bought the diapers, but came home to do a bit more comparison of price on the Huggies versus the Kirkland house brand. When we got home, Jeff figured out that the Huggies brand was 2/100th of a cent cheaper than the Kirkland with the coupon. We'll have to attest to quality at a future date, but until then, I'll let Jeff show his work here:

It's a ...

I knew if I didn't go to this appointment with her, Annette would leave me in the dark as well.

Here is a very poor quality ultrasound picture of our baby boy, followed by some slightly higher quality pictures of him.

The Parent Visit

Hi there,
Annette here--

With Jeff and I being so excited about being pregnant, I was trying really hard to be able to tell some people in person to watch their reactions. My parents had been praying for us for quite some time and so I decided that I definitely wanted to tell them in person.

So with much manipulation, my parents accepted my third proposed travel itinerary of when to come visit. My dad just bought a used diesel VW Beetle and was determined to drive it. My mom wanted to come in their diesel VW Passat. (50mpg vs 65mpg. Big difference to the rest of us huh.) Even until the week before they were coming, the trip was pending because of them disagreeing on which car to bring.

My sister decided that this trip was the best opportunity for her to send me her used baby supplies. My sister called my dad and told him that he had to find a graceful way to give into taking the passat because she had a lot of stuff she needed to send out to me. He grunted and asked what kind of stuff--my dad hates to haul stuff. My sister said "Baby Stuff." My dad said, "OH REALLY!" :) I think this was probably the first time my dad got to know about a grand child before my mom, so he went along with this. He made up a story to tell my mom (a very elaborate one!) and we continued to prepare the surprise for my mom. My mom was delighted that she had won the decision to bring the Passat.

With great delight, we post the following video of my mom's reaction to the news when she arrived for their visit:.

Touring the hospital

So, before we get to the fun, here's a quick status update:

Annette has been feeling pretty good. She never really had any morning sickness.

We are at 17 weeks now, and according to the all-knowing iPhone, she should be able to feel the baby moving sometime between 16-20 weeks. Nothing yet, though.

Annette has met with the midwife once and the delivering doctor once. Next appointment is on Feb 24th, when we should find out the sex of the baby.

Now for the fun...yesterday we went to the hospital to take a tour of their birthing facilities. Immediately, we knew we were in trouble. As we walked to the lobby for the tour, we saw a woman from the Relief Society Presidency of our ward with her son and daughter in law. This would not have been a problem except that no one from our ward knew Annette was pregnant. Oops! Suddenly our secret was out. Less than 24 hours later just before church, the Bishop came up and said, "did I hear that you were expecting?" You've got to love the LDS gossip networks!

As we took the tour, we went into the delivery room. The room was very nice--large with flat screen TV, jetted tub, long bench for the husband to pretend to sleep on, etc. Pretty good ambience for a hospital room. When the nurse asked for questions, a pregnant woman we'll refer to as hippie #1 asks, "can you have candles in the room?" Um, are you kidding me? You are in a hospital--why would you want candles? What about this idea seems even remotely smart.

The nurse politely pointed out the sprinkler heads in the ceiling and said, "these like to go off in the presence of open flames or heat. Unless you and your baby want to be wet, no candles."

The tour continued, with hippie #1 and her sister, superhippie #2 asking more and more bizarre questions.

Finally, as the tour ended, we settled down in the lobby for a quick Q&A question with the nurse. You can guess who had TONS of questions. Superhippie (a mother of 2) and her sister Hippie busted out all of the following:
"Do you allow natural childbirth?"
"Does the staff try to push drugs onto the mother if it is against her wishes?"
"Is marijuana permitted in the delivery room? (okay, I made that one up)"
Several other entertaining and silly questions, all before the bombshell dropped:
"We plan on using a midwife named "xxx" who advocates hypnosis-delivery. Will that be okay?" WAIT A SECOND...did she just say hypno-delivery? I'll be the first to admit that I'm not the most into alternative medicine, but what the crap is hypno-delivery? Are there really people who are delusional enough to convince themselves that delivery is not painful?

I've had over 24 hours to mull this over, and I'm still incredulous. You are unwilling to do an epidural, that has been medically shown to be safe and help ease delivery pains, but are willing to try to self-delude yourself?

I'm still baffled. But, then again, I'm a man.

Annette's turn:
In case anyone is wondering, my attitude is "DRUGS DRUGS DRUGS." If anyone asks, I'd like two epiderals please. I heartily concur with my sweet husband on the above. I also gathered that you have to spend lots of money, do lots of homework and go to lots of hypno classes prior to the delivery. As if! My favorite part was super-hippie's husband asking if he could have the epideral instead of his wife. I love the hippies in Oregon.