Six Weeks To Go!!!

Welcome back.  Today is Thursday, August 7, and we only have six more weeks to go.  I suspect that those weeks will fly by and then we’ll have a brand new bouncing baby boy.  We’re super excited.

Also in recent news, my sister Makaela just had her baby, Brady Patrick, and he’s super cute.  And my sister-in-law Shari is also pregnant, due around Valentine’s Day 2009.  And my other sister Lori just had a baby girl in the last year.  Lots of babies in our family will make the cousins all near the same age, which we think will be a whole lot of fun in the coming years.

Crisi is doing well for the most part.  She’s having contractions (the Braxton-Hicks “fake” contractions) more often now.  Today it happened seven times.  Her stomach becomes rock hard and it looks extremely uncomfortable.  She just waits for it to pass and then keeps on trucking.  Other than that, the Jellybean seems to be constantly moving around inside her belly, trying to find a comfortable spot to settle into.

She has done a fantastic job sticking to her new diet and is keeping the gestational diabetes under control.  That’s great because it means we won’t have to do the insulin.  Lord knows I didn’t want to stick her with a needle, and I know she wants to do it less than I do.

Here’s a quick video that shows some of the highlights from the 4D Ultrasound that we had a few weeks ago.  It also shows the baby’s belly with hiccups from another recent ultrasound.  And then there’s a couple of pictures of us preparing the room and furniture for the Jellybean.

We hope you are all doing well.

4D Ultrasound

Today is Wednesday, June 18. We’re at 26 weeks and 6 days. Last week, we had a check up ultrasound. We found out that the baby is larger than average by nearly a pound!! The doctor says that’s just fine and he thinks the baby looks great, but it certainly explains Crisi’s ever-growing belly.

In more exciting news, Crisi and I took the opportunity to have a 3D/4D Ultrasound done of our baby Jellybean. Don’t ask me what the fourth dimension is, but it was hecka cool!! We were also able to have both Cris’s and my mom join in on the fun. He doesn’t just look like a faceless blob of fetus anymore – he’s our baby boy, with a face and a personality. He kept kicking the ultrasound probe on Crisi’s belly and insisted on putting his hands and feet in front of his face when we were trying to take his picture. We also saw him sucking on his hands, making all kinds of faces and squirming around to get more comfy. I have some video that I’m hoping to have posted in the next day or two. In the mean time, enjoy some of the best pictures of the Jellybean.

ps.  As a note of explanation, what looks like dark hair on his head is not actually hair.  He does have hair – we’ve seen it on both the standard and 4D ultrasounds, but it looks different and is not seen in these images.  To get these images, the ultrasound generates sound waves that reach a specific depth.  The black areas represent stuff that is out of focus or deeper than the sound waves are penetrating – like where his skull bones are sloping back.  The widow’s peak “hairline” is actually where his two skull plates come together.  A little bit further beyond that, in the black area, is where his soft spot will form.  -Trav