Baby Update

We've been going all over the place this week. Wednesday we went to the doctor's office for Christi's 16 week check-up! I can't believe it's already been 4 months! All they are supposed to do is listen to the baby's heartbeat on a crappy hand-held ultrasound machine as well as make sure Christi is progressing properly and do a few small tests (blood work, physical, etc.) Thankfully, my cousin happens to work there and she gives up the hook-up when it comes to doctor's visits. We were fortunate enough to get a sonogram done on here 12 week visit and Wednesday we got a 16 week visit sonogram! By the way, they can tell what it's going to be at 16 weeks ;) We did find out and are very excited. I have sonogram pictures that I was going to post that evening; however, our scanner has decided to be a POS and isn't scanning. I'm working on it and hope to have them posted by tomorrow. Until then, you'll have to wait in suspense!


After we found out we called or went to see most, if not all, of our family and friends who live close by. Then we realized that we might want to surprise some people, but that hasn't worked out so well (I'm sure all of you reading already know what it is going to be, but just in case I'm holding out.) We went out to eat with Christ's parents and Jason for a celebratory dinner. We also went to Kohl's afterward and picked out a few baby clothes because we couldn't contain the excitement.


Saturday we rode up to Norcross to a baby furniture store that Christi heard about from our insurance agent. The insurance agent, Mary, works in the same building as Christi's mom and Christi went to lunch with her on Friday and ended up talking with Mary for about an hour after lunch. Mary is also pregnant and has a due date 4 days before ours, so we expect to be in the hospital around the same time. Mary also goes to the same doctor as us and is sad that she wasn't able to talk the doctors into giving her a 16 week sonogram like Christi was able to do.


So we embarked on our journey to the furniture store after I finished up some yard work that morning. The drive wasn't really that bad and we were there faster than I thought we would be. I had no idea baby furniture was as expensive as it was. We had looked at some other places before this one and they were pretty high. This store wasn't cheap, but it had really good quality furniture for better prices than we had seen anywhere else. We ended up buying a build-as-you grow crib, a 3-drawer dresser with changing table to fit on top (that is removable), a 5-drawer chest of drawers, and the expansion kits for the toddler bed and full bed. We plan on using this furniture until the baby (I almost wrote the name!) graduates high school. The crib is cool because the headboard and footboard is reusable for each expansion - you only change the side rails. I'll post pictures of those when our scanner works (we have the brochure but didn't take pictures.) Here is the link to the product, but we didn't get white, we got "espresso" which is a fancy way of saying dark brown. I think it's going to look great. This is the set that Christi liked the most online and after walking around the store for over 2 hours, decided we liked it better than everything else in the store as well. Now all we have to get the bedding, which is even harder because she knows what she wants.


On the way home we stopped at a Babies-R-Us just south of Atlanta. We found a several more outfits for the baby as well as some very cute shoes. I will post pictures of those as soon as I get the sonogram pictures loaded and posted.


Christi has been doing better with being sick. She got sick last night, but we're pretty sure it was because we waited to late (about 8:30) to get something to eat. Other than that, she hasn't been sick for the last 2 weeks. Definitely progress. She's also off the Zofran, so we feel good that it isn't the medicine keeping her from being sick; it's seems that it has actually passed (crosses fingers.) I'm still working on getting Christi to post and give her side of the story. Maybe some more encouragement (she thinks noone wants to read what she has to say) will help!


Look for pictures to be posted ASAP. If I can't get it working here, I will use the scanner at work.

Movies

Christi and I have seen a few movies this week and I wanted to write a few words about each of them. It's probably not the movie you think we saw (Transformers), although we do want to see it.


Earlier in the week we saw "The Hangover" with Christi's brother, Jason. It was hilarious. I haven't laughed that hard in a long time (harder than I did in Role Models.) It was one of the funniest movies I have seen, probably ever. Highly recommended. The whole entire movie was funny. There weren't any slow parts or anything that didn't contribute to the overall make-up of the movie. Jason and I got Christi to go see it and she was glad she did. Initially, she thought it was going to be dumb funny and that's not her style of movie. But, she like it so much that we almost went and saw it again today. We're considering going to see it again this week. We probably will. It's a movie that you can't pinpoint one moment as the funnies part of the movie. You'll be thinking about it later and just bust out in laughter because it was that funny (be careful when in public, people will think you are strange.) It's got a ton of quotable moments (tigers love pepper... they hate cinnamon!) It's not a movie for the kids or those who don't like strong language. Imagery isn't that bad until the end (won't spoil it.) That's my only cautions, besides the fact that you'll like it so much you'll want to see it again! Now quit reading this and go see it if you haven't.


The other movie we saw today was "The Proposal." It's a romantic comedy - definitely Christi's favorite style - that admittedly wasn't high on my movies-to-see list. Christi had told me that she wanted to see it as well as Transformers and My Sisters Keeper. We looked at the times today and decided The Proposal was the best choice today. Besides, I had talked her into seeing The Hangover and it was time to let her see a movie that she wanted to watch. It turned out to be really good, actually. I was pleasantly surprised with the movie. It had a lot of funny parts and overall the movie was very good. Guys, I would recommend going with your girls to this one. It's not horribly mushy or anything like that (and they show a lot more of Sandra Bulloch than I was expecting. A lot more.) Overall, the movie was very enjoyable and I'm glad we went to see it. My only complaint is that the movie was a little shorter than I thought it should have / could have been. It sort of just ended and I thought they could have squeezed some more out of the ending, but that's better than sitting at a movie thinking that it should have ended a long time ago. Overall, I liked The Proposal and I also recommend seeing it as well as The Hangover.


We're hoping to see Transformers and My Sisters Keeper by the end of the week, but I'm not sure that will be able to happen. I'll let you know what we think of those when we see them. Let me know any other good movies you have seen this summer.

Mother Nature > Us

We had a bad storm come through today. It didn't last very long, but the power was knocked out at our house as well as strong winds and heavy rainfall. Everything was ok at our house, but unfortunately someone down the street wasn't as fortunate.








As you can see, the tree destroyed the car. I stopped and looked at it for several minutes on my way in from work. I'm guessing the tree was beginning to rot on the inside and the strong winds blew it straight over. The entire trunk came up but the roots appeared to break off instead of bringing up a massive root-ball like they did when the tornado came through last year.


I assume noone was in the car since there appears to be no effort to remove the tree at the moment. I hope noone was around when it happened. I hope they had insurance because that car is destroyed.

Iran Election

Is anyone watching what is going on in Iran? In case you aren't, incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's re-election is being disputed. I think he's pretty insane, personally. Anyway, his challenger's supporters are protesting the results, which I think are completely false. He may have won, but there is no way you can count 45 million votes by hand in 2 hours. This is almost as bad as Saddam Hussein claiming that his citizens voted for 100% for him (his ballots only had 1 name (his) and anyone who wrote something else wasn't heard from again.)


Now the Republican Guard is using violence to crack down on the protesters who are protesting all over Iran. Supposedly there is a media blackout, but the protesters are using the internet to get all the information out. To me this makes it obvious that the results were at least tampered with, if not completely fabricated. Why else would the regime order all foreign journalist removed and declare that the protesters are breaking the law? I don't think Iran could have handled the situation any worse. Now the whole world is watching them kill their own citizens, all because they want a re-count and are trying to let their voices be heard instead of having the ayatollah and some other old, conservative, hard-liners dictate what they can and cannot do.


The point of my post is this - I feel terrible for the Iranian people, especially those who are trying to stand up for their beliefs. It's one of those things we Americans are blessed to be able to do. I don't know how this is going to end, but it looks like chaos is erupting on the streets. The militia and the protesters are squaring off and people are being killed on both sides. I hope some sort of resolution will come out of it, but it looks like Iran is going through a political and cultural revolution. I hope they are able to gain some more social freedoms from this. This is one of those things you hear about in school but I never thought I'd be seeing this unfold before my eyes. I don't know what the American government will do, but if gets worse I imagine the UN will have to step in (of course, it will probably be too late.)


I'll keep watching what is going on. I'm on the side of the protesters. Whether their candidate won or not, they deserve to have an outside third-party committee validate the results. I can hear my political science professor going crazy right now. She traveled to other countries as part as one of those committees to watch elections and ensure that the people had a fair election. Hopefully the regime doesn't start a civil war. I don't think they will back down from their stance without intervention from other countries. Only time will tell how it will go, but the Iranians deserve some support from world powers who promote democracy. Let's hope they don't wait too long to get involved.

It's Hot

Wow, it's ridiculously hot outside right now. I just got back from the working out at the gym and I think I sweat more waking to my car than in the gym! Sorry for the insane lack of posting lately. I've been trying to catch up with things at work and around the house. It just started raining and I'm not happy at all because I washed my car last night. It wasn't supposed to be above a 20% chance of rain until Sunday! Oh well, it's the summer - these showers pop up all the time. My car needed to be washed to get the thousands of bugs off the car. Every time I travel to Savannah or the St Simons area I think I kill entire populations of bugs. Those things are everywhere down there and they always end up in large numbers on my car. We had a great time at the beach and I'll post some pictures and a more detailed account of what we did later.

There hasn't been too much going on the Patterson household this week. We did some much needed grocery shopping last night and came home to cook a great (and easy) Mexican meal. We just had tacos (hard and soft) with various topping and some cheese dip. We found some queso cheese in the store and used it to make some great tasting cheese dip. It was pretty easy - just add some milk and melt in the microwave. I was skeptical but it was really tasty. I think it would be just as easy to melt in a small pot on the stove, but since it was our first time we followed the directions on the package. I'm sure there are similar brand cheeses out there so if you saw some in the store and were curious if they were any good, I say go give it a shot - ours tasted good. I think next time we will use a little more cheese or a little less milk to get it a little bit thicker. As it cooled it thickened up, but I prefer it a little less runny.

Christi is now in her 15th week or pregnancy. Time is flying by. We ran into the lady who was her daycare director while in line at the grocery store. We talked to her for a little while and turns out she is still in the daycare business. She is the director of the daycare that is literally right next to our subdivision entrance. We've heard it's pretty good so I think we are going to check it out. There is also another place across the street that we want to check out. It is new and looks nice, but we heard it might not be as nice as it looks. Daycare is a really difficult decision. It is something we definitely do not want to do, but right now we think that is the best course of action for us. Hopefully Christi will be able to stay at home full-time soon, but we're still looking at the costs/benefits of all of this and honestly we aren't 100% sure all the expenses a baby will bring. We know there will be tons of diapers, food, toys, furniture, etc. I guess since we're first time parents we aren't 100% what to expect, except a severe lack of sleep for the first few months.

Christi has still been sick. We were hoping the sickness would have stopped by now but hasn't. She's on Zofran, which is supposed to be a miracle drug but so far it has only helped slightly. As we've fought being sick, we've learned that Christi can only really have vegetable at night. Obviously, that gets old fast so we've tried some other food with mixed results. A bowl of rice works most of the time as does grits. Breakfast food generally works well also, except if it's something greasy like a sausage patty or hash browns. Surprisingly, Mexican food also sits really well with her stomach; soda crackers do not. Some soups work well and fruit is also good; however, I've also seen fruit really upset her stomach. So basically the sure fire dinner to have is vegetable, rice, or Taco Bell.

Please keep her in your thoughts. Christi is very tired of getting sick and I can tell it is really wearing her out. It was to the point where when we were at Cracker Barrel the other night she teared up some because she knew whatever she got was going to come back up (and she was tired of eating veggies - it was probably the 5th veggie plate of the week.) Times like this are when I feel completely helpless? What can do you? All I know is that our baby is going to be the next President or something after all the stuff he/she has put Christi through.

I think we are about to go get look at some baby furniture and other items such as strollers and whatnot so I'm going to end this post here. I enjoy going to look at all of these things even though I'm not really certain what a lot of these things are for. I'll find out soon enough, I suppose. It's hard to believe that the pregnancy is almost halfway over! I owe you all some baby pictures and posts about my work trip and the beach. I promise to post them by the weekend is over. Have a good evening.

I'm back

I'm back from my work trip. I had hoped to post while I was there but I didn't have a laptop and the hotel internet was slow in their business center.


The trip was pretty good. I was in Milford, Ohio, for a training class. The area was alright; it was a fairly small city with not really anything to do. However, Cincinnati was only 15 miles away. I went with 2 other engineers at work, one who is eligible for retirement and one who is my age. I get a long really well with both guys and we had a pretty good time exploring the area and learning the new software. It was a good trip.


I had planned on writing a detailed post about everything we did, but I haven't really had a chance to do that this week. I spent the whole week in training on the computer, so I haven't been wanting to get on it at home now that I'm back. Also, work has been VERY busy this week. Half of our group is gone and those of us who are at work at busy trying to hold down the fort, but we are getting a little behind on some things.


When I get home, we've either been hanging out at someone's house or looking for baby stuff. We're trying to get an idea of what kind of furniture we want, etc. We did move Christi's baby cradle from her parents house into our bedroom! That was exciting and it's pretty cool that our baby will be using the cradle Christi used when she was born.


We are going to a couples shower in Jesup, GA, Friday afternoon for my good friend Kam and his fiancee Lindsey. Jody, Jessica, and Kaden are going to be coming along with us. While we are at the shower they are going to hang out in the area, then we are continuing on to the St Simons Island for the weekend. It should be a lot of fun!


When we get back I promise to post more updates about my first work trip, baby Patterson sonogram pictures, updates about how Christi is doing, and just life in general. Hope everyone has been doing well. I promise to catch up on my reading and posting next week. Take care.