Beantown, USA

Today we went to Jordan's Furniture to look for new couches. The couches we have are a little over 25 years old! Mike inherited them from his parents. They certainly did their job well, but since we are losing our guest room we needed to get a sleeper sofa anyway. We got some pretty sweet sofas...

If you know Jordan's Furniture, then you know it's pretty much a Disneyland there with an amusement park style set up. So the one we went to today was Beantown.... centered around Jelly Belly. There were all these sculptures made out of jelly beans! It was pretty cool. The Jelly Belly store was covered in jelly beans too. Here's a few pics:

Jelly Bean Ducks
hanging flowers (with lots of dust)

Crib bedding madness

I've found it easy to avoid my homework with this blog; while another fun distraction is looking at all the baby bedding patterns that are out there! So I'm trying out this polling program that can be put on the blog. I've found some cool crib bedding (including one called Malawi!!!) and wondered if anyone is interested in giving their opinion about any of them. I love things that match so these crib bedding sets have given me hours of pleasure, with such matching items as night-lights and light switches. I think so far I love the turtle one the best, but tell me what you think! And if you happen to know of any other patterns, send them along! (This is taking for granted that my dear readers have got to be as thrilled about crib bedding as I am.)

Here are the options:

• Jungle Safari
• Turtle Bay
• Kidsline Malawi
• Moon and Stars
• Snoopy
• Winnie the Pooh
  

Naomi's Celebration at Sound Bites.... Congrats!

Tonight we met up with our friends Naomi and Stefan and a bunch of other friends to celebrate Naomi graduating from Tufts with her Masters in Environmental Engineering! Right on Naomi! For those that don't know Naomi or Stefan, they are the couple on the left... Mike and I actually met at their wedding in Minnesota way back in 2003. We owe them for the rest of our lives :)! They should have our firstborn!!.... or at least babysit a lot (ha ha).

Beau and Katie are the couple on the right... they just had a cute little baby girl named Sylvie, who came to Sound Bites as well to join in Naomi's celebration.

Sylvie spent the whole time napping...despite many eyes watching her and wishing that she'd wake up and do something cute. Here she is at about 5 weeks:
Here's only about half the amount of people that came for Naomi's party....

And best of all, we got a special appearance by Sound Bites one and only owner... who was a perfect host!

It's a boy!.... we're pretty sure at least

Here's a picture of our little one somewhere between 6-7 weeks, it's the little blueberry looking blob in the middle of the black space that's my uterus:


Here he is now at 18 weeks:


This morning was my very much anticipated ultrasound appointment. I've been waiting so impatiently for this day (as I'm sure you can imagine if you know me)! I just can't stand not knowing things, and I've been bouncing off the walls waiting to see if we could tell the gender from today's ultrasound. So Mike and I get there around 9:20, I gulp down some apple juice per advice from others saying that it makes the baby move around more...(and possibly move into a favorable position to check out the baby's goods).

I lie down on the table with an extremely full bladder, because that's what the referral paper said to do. When I told the ultrasound woman I had to pee so bad, she looked at me strangely and marched me to the bathroom! The ultrasound referral paper is apparently wrong about needing to have a full bladder; needless to say I was pretty happy to relieve my bladder before she started pressing down on it with that cold jellied up ball.

So she starts taking pictures, telling us everything looks great, describing what we are seeing, measuring the humorous of an arm (that I didn't recognize)... and the femur of a leg... then she showed us what she was sure is our baby's little wee wee; Mike verified that he thought it looked like that as well.... having seen the baby's legs on either side. But then the second ultrasound reader came in and she was all business, kind of curt and wanting to get done with her job. After she was done, she casually mentioned she didn't see any appendages that would suggest a boy so she says it may be a girl. Then we told her the first tech said she thought it was a boy and she just nonchalantly said "well I couldn't really see".

So.. we're going with the first ultrasound woman... she seemed pretty sure.. and so did Mike.

What we learned from little Noelle

So our visit with Mike's sister's family has come to an end, we really enjoyed their visit; and having Noelle in the house taught us what we need to do in order to baby proof our house and get it ready for our own little one! Here are some pictures from following her around this morning to see what she would get into. From that we learned:

We need to make sure and keep the blinds up when possible.....

Noelle was about to experience what it would be like to chew on some fur, we better hide the cat toys from little ones!


Oh yea, we better get a gate at the foot and top of the stairs too... Noelle was a little climber...
And we'll definitely have to get those drawer stops to keep little hands from glass and knives!

We let her play with this cup though as it was plastic.....

Ok, Ok, I have to be fair and let you know that I coaxed Noelle into some of these shots this morning! But it was all stuff she had been doing all weekend.... got to watch them constantly!

It was a chilly 15 degrees this morning, with the wind chill making it feel like 0 degrees! Mike and Neal still decided to go out for a jog while me, Lisa, and Noelle stayed inside to keep warm.

17 weeks pregnant

Here's a picture of me at 17 weeks.... one day away from being 18 weeks pregnant. I'm getting to the point where my pants are to too tight to zip up, and my shirts feel like they are getting shorter! I took a trip to the Cambridge Mall today and bought myself some maternity clothes. I must say it's not much fun getting fatter.. but I know it's just the beginning and I have a long way to go!

Our Niece Noelle Comes for a Visit

Mike's sister Lisa, her husband Neal and their daughter Noelle are here visiting us from Atlanta! It's fun having a baby in the house and figuring out how much our house is NOT baby proof.... and how much the cats freak out when they hear a baby cry. We have pretty much not seen Pootie since everyone arrived on Thursday night. I put Noelle in my Malawian chiefs chair to be a mini chief for the day:

We had fun exploring the Museum of Science yesterday too
Lisa and Noelle rode the see saw with me, I think Noelle was into it:
This morning we took them to the Deluxe Town Diner in Watertown for some great eggs and pancakes, it was a hit by everyone!

Our cats Animal and Pootie

I wanted to put up some pictures of Animal and Pootie Tang, our two cats... Animal is the one that is darker, and in the picture below she's got Pootie in a head lock. Animal definitely plays the mama role with Pootie, grooming her and bathing her with her tongue, while Pootie just sits and enjoys it.














Pootie likes hanging out in our clothing drawers, while Animal thinks she's small enough to fit in the little carton. Think again fatty kitty!

Our first Baby Furniture

We went to New York to visit Mike's family this weekend, and his brother Charlie gave us our first piece of baby furniture! We were so excited we (my husband I should say) put it together as soon as we got home.... Mike made sure to get out of the crib before attaching the other rail.



we also got to play with their cute puppy Maxie. She was so little when we saw her at Thanksgiving, now she's getting big.... but is still so very cute and lovable. Here's her picture at Thanksgiving:





Here she is from this weekend, almost grown up:

Ok, We started one of these blogs... but it took a snow storm

Here is the shared courtyard to our condo and the outside stairs leading to our deck

And going out the courtyard to the street:


I really didn't want to go out this morning....


It's Monday morning, about 10am, and I'm at home because there's a pretty good snow storm happening in Boston today. I would be at my nurse practitioner clinical today working towards my 240 hours for the semester; but Boston has pretty much shut down and hence our clinic is closed today. Of course I trecked through the snow and slush to the clinic before finding that out.

That's ok though, I'm home now... and decided to start this blog so Mike and I could record our pregnant life... and our life in general! So stay tuned for lots of pictures and short stories about what's going on with us in Cambridge (unless I get lazy..... which is very possible).