Saturday, June 9, 2007

Registering for your Baby??

Aside from a really bizarre stretch of weather, this week has passed by without much ado. It was 90 or so Tuesday morning, and after a bunch of wind, dropped to below 50, dumping snow on the mountains again. Kind of a cool thing to see; not cool to experience as it left me with bad headaches and I ended up sick Thursday and Friday.

Cindy had a "ward" baby shower with friends from our ward getting together to hang out and share in the joy of all things baby. "Share" really means "give us stuff"- something I will never complain about. It still seems odd that there are gift-giving parties that aren't birthday related, but I'm not looking a gift horse in the mouth (odd saying, isn't it? Turns out it actually means something. Go Figure.). I've come to realize already that we have some pretty nice friends as they were quite generous in helping us get started with baby-life.

A handful of people have asked us if we registered. At first, I thought they meant wedding registry, but that doesn't make too much sense and I hoped our friends were smarter than that. They were. Turns out you can register for baby gifts. We have a Babies"R"Us up the road from us and that's the "place" to register around here. Personally, I feel odd registering for baby stuff. It kinda feels like we're begging. I mean, it makes sense if people want to be generous and celebrate this with us, but setting up a want list still seems odd. I may be alone on this one, but oh well.

We did end up registering. I got to use a scanning gun again- always a good time. I found, however, that registering for baby things was not at all like registering when were engaged. For one, there are thousands of things we needed before we got married. With the baby coming, there are things we need, but there aren't as many categories to fill this time around. Clothes. Definitely need clothes. The more baby clothes we receive, the happier Cindy gets (something about girls and little baby-clothes; don't quite understand it), so there's no reason to skimp there. After that, we have bottles and diapers and burp-cloths. Pacifiers, more diapers, more burp-cloths. Once we take care of that, there's some toys and maybe first-aid stuff. But that about covers the basics.

Oh, except the BIG stuff. That's the other struggle with registering. If people really want to know what we need/want, it's the expensive stuff. We need a crib. We'll also need a car seat, a stroller, high chair, changing table, glider, breast pump, etc. I don't think any of those are under 75 bucks. So, do I feel comfortable telling people they can drop a bunch of cash on us? Can't say I do. I mean, it's definitely welcome, but I'm not expecting anything more than a congrats and maybe some little baby socks to make Cindy happy. When all was said and done it was fun to see all the junk out there for babies... makes it seem a little more real that there's actually a baby headed our way in a few months.

Tuesday, June 5, 2007

30 Weeks!

Well... today marks the start of the "two-hand" countdown before we start sleep-deprivation-- 10 weeks until the baby's born. Now, we're sure that the baby will come EXACTLY on the due date because that's what the doctor said and science is NEVER wrong. On the off chance that the baby doesn't understand science, doctors, or technology and decides to come earlier or later, we'll make due; but for now it's still officially August 14th.

Cindy's looking and feeling pregnant. I mean that in the nicest, greatest way possible because there's no way I could ever handle what she does. Besides working full-time to help keep me in school, she spends the day off-balance, sore, and getting kicked and prodded by our little bundle-of-joy as her organs and the baby compete for space. She looks great though. I even have her permission to post pictures of her online, which is a miracle in itself. We took these over the weekend, so that makes her just about 30 weeks along.



Like I said, she looks great. I'm a lucky, lucky husband. The picture quality itself leaves something to be desired, which is why I'm still looking at upgrading our camera before the baby comes. Just need to head out to our money-tree and we'll be all set. (yes, that was sarcastic). Oh, here's one more of her, too.



Aside from baby news, life is fairly routine. I'm taking one class this spring term: Calculus. It's two hours a day, 5 days a week with a good 3 hours of homework a night. I don't mind math, but 5 hours a day is more than I'd want to spend on the subject. The nice part is that, while the course is hard, it's only 8 weeks long. This means the semester's almost done and I'll be finished in a few weeks. I was planning on Calculus II for the Summer term, but I'm not a glutton for punishment so I'm forgoing the math class until fall.

The biggest reason for this change is because the baby will come exactly August 14th, right before the supposed math final. As I said earlier, if our son doesn't get the memo to come on the 14th, he may just come during finals. That's a lot of pressure for a newborn, so I'll just spare him the stress and not take the math class, leaving him free to come into the world when he's ready. And by ready, I mean August 14th. This will give me some extra time during the next couple months to finish up projects around the house and make sure we're as ready as possible for our lives to change.

On the social scene, we're still semi-retarded and don't get out much. We do things with Sam and Jessie (Cindy's brother and sister-in-law) from time to time as well as with Cassie and Kent (my sister and brother-in-law). In the past, we'd also include Sam and Lori (my brother and sister-in-law) into our social scheming, but they decided to play grown-up for the summer in Houston on an internship with Exxon. I know we could actually call friends and be active but for some reason, I'm allergic to the phone, and I think Cindy may have caught my disease, too. It's really just too easy to say we're tired (which we usually are) and don't want to do anything. From there, we've settled into a habit of being "too tired" all the time. I'm hoping we can change that a bit over the next 10 weeks, because from what I hear, we don't have any concept of what being "too tired" really means. So.. if you read this and you get a phone call from us trying to be socially active, please don't think that something wrong or that we're going to die- we're just trying to better ourselves a bit and think you're just the people to help out.