Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Say Cheese!
Sometimes Chili's upper lip gets hung up on his lower eye-teeth, and we think it looks HIGH-larious. Well, we just noticed that in one of the tummy pictures, when he wasn't yelling "I'm going to be a big brother!" he was saying "Cheese!" when his lip got hung up on those teeth. And since his lips are puffed out his front teeth are showing and it looks like a big grin. Great picture. He's a Chili Cheese Dog!
Monday, February 18, 2008
Pictures!
Susie was sixteen weeks yesterday. She joined the pregnant yak club (her words, not mine) last weekend while up in Bloomington. I was a little disappointed in Chili because I've showed him how to hold her hair back just in case I couldn't be there, but according to Susie he just stood there and watched. Bad dog!
Ok, I promised pictures a few weeks back and am finally delivering on that promise. Here are a few tummy pictures of Susie. Chili just had to be part of the picture process. You should have heard him. He was yelling “I’m going to be a big brother!” over and over. I was lucky enough to get a picture of him while he was yelling. You can also see a picture of our Bible study's pregnant Cingular bars. Susie is kind of out in the country, Shannon is getting towards a big city, and Nicole is standing right underneath a cell phone tower. In fact, Nicole is so close to the tower, she may lose her coverage this week.
Ok, I promised pictures a few weeks back and am finally delivering on that promise. Here are a few tummy pictures of Susie. Chili just had to be part of the picture process. You should have heard him. He was yelling “I’m going to be a big brother!” over and over. I was lucky enough to get a picture of him while he was yelling. You can also see a picture of our Bible study's pregnant Cingular bars. Susie is kind of out in the country, Shannon is getting towards a big city, and Nicole is standing right underneath a cell phone tower. In fact, Nicole is so close to the tower, she may lose her coverage this week.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
An iPod on a stroller?
Well, it’s a mid-week blog; I hope both of you regular readers are ok with that. Honestly, though, I’m feeling pressure to produce since babygronseth is now linked on the great Conner Byrd’s blog. :) Plus I skipped a week due to the Super Bowl. So here’s to catching up!
We had our doctor’s appointment on Monday and it went well. As part of the appointment we lined up the ultrasound that will hopefully produce an answer to whether it’s a boy or a girl! We’re going in on March 3rd, and unless our baby is extremely modest we’ll know then! I’ve thought about it a lot and I honestly can’t say that I’m really pulling hard for one sex or the other. If you pushed me really hard to decide one way or the other I’d probably lean towards a boy. I know it sounds incredibly cliché, but I’m just praying for health, both for the baby and for Susie.
We have a lot of friends taking guesses, and so far more have been guessing boy than girl. Also, Susie had a dream the other night that it was a boy. But at the end of the day everyone’s got a 50/50 shot, right? I really am looking forward to knowing though. If we find out it’s a boy I’ll be looking for onesies with no right arm hole so he’ll be forced to develop as a lefty. If it’s a girl I’ll have plenty of time to start both my mental preparation toward not being over-protective and also start my gun collection.
Also, on Monday we were able to hear the baby’s heartbeat for the second time. The first time it was pretty faint since it was kind of early to be listening to the heartbeat. This time I was excited as the nurse spread the jelly on Susie’s belly. The first few seconds as she moved the Doppler around were honestly the longest few seconds I can remember. I guess I can’t shake this tiny fear that something could go wrong. So as she moved the Doppler around I was listening expectantly and it honestly felt like the world had completely stopped and was hanging in the balance. And as the rushing freight train sound came roaring through the speaker and my blood resumed its course through my veins I said a quick thankful prayer.
Have I ever mentioned that I feel like a complete novice? We went to register at Target this week. I have no clue as to the specifics of what a baby needs. There are the obvious necessities like diapers and socks and bottles and stuff like that. But the number of options is complete overkill. I had no clue there would be so many options for car seats and strollers and cribs. Has anyone ever actually purchased the stroller with the iPod jack? I didn’t realize that you had to buy special laundry detergent for baby clothes. Did you know that they make warmers for baby wipes? I have to keep reminding myself that billions of people have done this before us and we’ll figure it out. So we kept the registry list short partly because we don’t know the sex of the baby yet and partially because we are still figuring it out.
We had our doctor’s appointment on Monday and it went well. As part of the appointment we lined up the ultrasound that will hopefully produce an answer to whether it’s a boy or a girl! We’re going in on March 3rd, and unless our baby is extremely modest we’ll know then! I’ve thought about it a lot and I honestly can’t say that I’m really pulling hard for one sex or the other. If you pushed me really hard to decide one way or the other I’d probably lean towards a boy. I know it sounds incredibly cliché, but I’m just praying for health, both for the baby and for Susie.
We have a lot of friends taking guesses, and so far more have been guessing boy than girl. Also, Susie had a dream the other night that it was a boy. But at the end of the day everyone’s got a 50/50 shot, right? I really am looking forward to knowing though. If we find out it’s a boy I’ll be looking for onesies with no right arm hole so he’ll be forced to develop as a lefty. If it’s a girl I’ll have plenty of time to start both my mental preparation toward not being over-protective and also start my gun collection.
Also, on Monday we were able to hear the baby’s heartbeat for the second time. The first time it was pretty faint since it was kind of early to be listening to the heartbeat. This time I was excited as the nurse spread the jelly on Susie’s belly. The first few seconds as she moved the Doppler around were honestly the longest few seconds I can remember. I guess I can’t shake this tiny fear that something could go wrong. So as she moved the Doppler around I was listening expectantly and it honestly felt like the world had completely stopped and was hanging in the balance. And as the rushing freight train sound came roaring through the speaker and my blood resumed its course through my veins I said a quick thankful prayer.
Have I ever mentioned that I feel like a complete novice? We went to register at Target this week. I have no clue as to the specifics of what a baby needs. There are the obvious necessities like diapers and socks and bottles and stuff like that. But the number of options is complete overkill. I had no clue there would be so many options for car seats and strollers and cribs. Has anyone ever actually purchased the stroller with the iPod jack? I didn’t realize that you had to buy special laundry detergent for baby clothes. Did you know that they make warmers for baby wipes? I have to keep reminding myself that billions of people have done this before us and we’ll figure it out. So we kept the registry list short partly because we don’t know the sex of the baby yet and partially because we are still figuring it out.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
I'm a bum
Ok, I admit that I’m a bum for not posting last week. My lame excuse is the Super Bowl. And I’m not sorry, because it was a heck of a game! I wonder how many kids out there went out and starting practicing a one-handed catch against their heads. So now I’m back to posting. I’ve had a lot of thoughts running around in my head that I’ve wanted to get down, but just haven’t had the time to get them down.
Susie is 15 weeks along today and the baby on the widget is looking less and less like an alien, which is good. We have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow. I’ve read that you can tell the gender of the baby at this point, but the next ultrasound isn’t scheduled until our next visit. They have an ultrasound machine in the doctor’s office, so maybe we’ll catch them on a slow day and they’ll take a look.
One thing that makes this whole thing fun is having friends in all different stages of baby-making. I’d like to say congratulations to our friends Mike and Kelly McFadden and their addition of a little baby boy named Campbell. You can see pictures of them and Campbell here. We also have a couple friends in our Bible study group here in Owensboro that are pregnant. I think it’s kinda fun to look at these ladies to get an idea of what Susie will look like in a few months. Susie has a little tummy that's really starting to show now and it’s beautiful. Tonight the three of them were sitting in order of due date on the couch. They looked like the Cingular bars.
We are struggling with a little bit of uncertainty. There are some things that we need to figure out in a short period of time. One thing we don’t have nailed down is childcare for when Susie goes back to school this fall. Most of our friends here are from here and have family in the area. With all the moving around we’ve done we don’t have that advantage of dropping baby off at Grandpa and Grandma’s on short notice. And with Susie going to school almost three hours away in Bloomington, we aren’t sure how that will work out. We do know that the fact that she’s in school is a blessing because now her schedule is so much more flexible and she’ll be able to spend more time caring for the baby than if she was working a full-time job. But we’re checking around in Bloomington and looking at different options and we know that we will figure it out. (Christen, if you’re reading this, you should really transfer from Louisville to Indiana so you can take care of our baby. :) We’ll keep asking.)
We also are starting to come to grips with how much having a baby costs. The one thing we didn’t count on was the fact that our deductible doesn’t count towards our annual out-of-pocket maximum. Also, since we found out about the pregnancy in December, we met the deductible with the doctor’s visits in 2007 and now we have to meet it again in 2008.
Now, I don’t write all that to complain, but more to describe our thoughts and how we’ve been processing them. We’ve spent time discussing it together and getting frustrated together and then realizing together that we are incredibly spoiled. I have been blessed with a great job with a great health insurance plan so we are only responsible for our share, not the whole cost. We live in a country with a well developed health care system that regularly monitors and delivers healthy babies in a clean, safe environment. The timing is perfect because Susie can have the baby in the summer between semsters. We’ve been blessed to the point where more money out-of-pocket means we eat out less or go to the movies less; it doesn’t mean we’re going into debt. We live in a safe house and have warm clothes. We have money to pay for heat in the winter and money to put gas in cars that are reliable. Our stomachs are filled whenever they get hungry (and maybe more often than that, judging by my love handles). Susie has been blessed with a fellowship that actually pays her to go to school at IU. We are so blessed and yet we are so quick to focus on the negative and what we see as deficiencies in our lives.
In our small realm of friends and family I can immediately bring to mind people who are dealing with situations that make ours pale in comparison. When I sit and ponder this fact it is incredibly humiliating to realize how much I focus on myself. I’ve mentioned Matthew 6 before in this blog, but God keeps bringing it to my mind – probably because I need to consider it a little better. He talks about how he takes care of the birds and the flowers and how we’re so much more important than they are. One of God’s names is Jehovah Jireh, which means “God who provides.” Do I believe He provides or do I just say I believe it? Because if I truly believe it I don’t worry about the fact that we don’t have child care lined up yet and I don’t worry about the fact that it’s going to cost more out of our pockets than we originally estimated. Instead, I can focus on what we are blessed with - those things that I listed above - and rest in the assurance that God has our best interests in mind.
There’s one more thing that I specifically left off the list of what we’ve been blessed with, but I’ve alluded to it a couple times in this post. We’ve been blessed with the greatest group of friends here in Owensboro and around the country. We’ve already had a number of our youth calling dibs on watching the baby, and the support we feel from our church family and both our extended families is mind-blowing. So thank you to all of you that are reading this that fall into that group. Know that we love and appreciate you, and that we may be calling on you in the near future for support, prayers, wisdom, love, and babysitting.
Susie is 15 weeks along today and the baby on the widget is looking less and less like an alien, which is good. We have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow. I’ve read that you can tell the gender of the baby at this point, but the next ultrasound isn’t scheduled until our next visit. They have an ultrasound machine in the doctor’s office, so maybe we’ll catch them on a slow day and they’ll take a look.
One thing that makes this whole thing fun is having friends in all different stages of baby-making. I’d like to say congratulations to our friends Mike and Kelly McFadden and their addition of a little baby boy named Campbell. You can see pictures of them and Campbell here. We also have a couple friends in our Bible study group here in Owensboro that are pregnant. I think it’s kinda fun to look at these ladies to get an idea of what Susie will look like in a few months. Susie has a little tummy that's really starting to show now and it’s beautiful. Tonight the three of them were sitting in order of due date on the couch. They looked like the Cingular bars.
We are struggling with a little bit of uncertainty. There are some things that we need to figure out in a short period of time. One thing we don’t have nailed down is childcare for when Susie goes back to school this fall. Most of our friends here are from here and have family in the area. With all the moving around we’ve done we don’t have that advantage of dropping baby off at Grandpa and Grandma’s on short notice. And with Susie going to school almost three hours away in Bloomington, we aren’t sure how that will work out. We do know that the fact that she’s in school is a blessing because now her schedule is so much more flexible and she’ll be able to spend more time caring for the baby than if she was working a full-time job. But we’re checking around in Bloomington and looking at different options and we know that we will figure it out. (Christen, if you’re reading this, you should really transfer from Louisville to Indiana so you can take care of our baby. :) We’ll keep asking.)
We also are starting to come to grips with how much having a baby costs. The one thing we didn’t count on was the fact that our deductible doesn’t count towards our annual out-of-pocket maximum. Also, since we found out about the pregnancy in December, we met the deductible with the doctor’s visits in 2007 and now we have to meet it again in 2008.
Now, I don’t write all that to complain, but more to describe our thoughts and how we’ve been processing them. We’ve spent time discussing it together and getting frustrated together and then realizing together that we are incredibly spoiled. I have been blessed with a great job with a great health insurance plan so we are only responsible for our share, not the whole cost. We live in a country with a well developed health care system that regularly monitors and delivers healthy babies in a clean, safe environment. The timing is perfect because Susie can have the baby in the summer between semsters. We’ve been blessed to the point where more money out-of-pocket means we eat out less or go to the movies less; it doesn’t mean we’re going into debt. We live in a safe house and have warm clothes. We have money to pay for heat in the winter and money to put gas in cars that are reliable. Our stomachs are filled whenever they get hungry (and maybe more often than that, judging by my love handles). Susie has been blessed with a fellowship that actually pays her to go to school at IU. We are so blessed and yet we are so quick to focus on the negative and what we see as deficiencies in our lives.
In our small realm of friends and family I can immediately bring to mind people who are dealing with situations that make ours pale in comparison. When I sit and ponder this fact it is incredibly humiliating to realize how much I focus on myself. I’ve mentioned Matthew 6 before in this blog, but God keeps bringing it to my mind – probably because I need to consider it a little better. He talks about how he takes care of the birds and the flowers and how we’re so much more important than they are. One of God’s names is Jehovah Jireh, which means “God who provides.” Do I believe He provides or do I just say I believe it? Because if I truly believe it I don’t worry about the fact that we don’t have child care lined up yet and I don’t worry about the fact that it’s going to cost more out of our pockets than we originally estimated. Instead, I can focus on what we are blessed with - those things that I listed above - and rest in the assurance that God has our best interests in mind.
There’s one more thing that I specifically left off the list of what we’ve been blessed with, but I’ve alluded to it a couple times in this post. We’ve been blessed with the greatest group of friends here in Owensboro and around the country. We’ve already had a number of our youth calling dibs on watching the baby, and the support we feel from our church family and both our extended families is mind-blowing. So thank you to all of you that are reading this that fall into that group. Know that we love and appreciate you, and that we may be calling on you in the near future for support, prayers, wisdom, love, and babysitting.
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