Wow how the months fly!

What everyone wants to know.... What does Jennifer look like pregnant?!?
Well I really didn't start taking pictures until I was five months. So here they are!

5 Months

6 Months

Our baby boy still does not have a name although a lot of suggestions have been made.

We are still deciding between about four. We will let you know once we have made our decision. (Which might be the day he arrives, at this rate!) Mostly it is me holding up the final decision. This is a lot harder than I thought!!

Baby is kicking and moving a lot, unless Tony is around and then he seems to go stealth!

St. Louis Cardinals will be the theme of the baby's room. Tony has a ton of great memorabilia to bring into the room. Now we just need to get the rest of my stuff out and get painting!

Aunt Evelyn and Uncle Dale were the first to contribute to the theme, a baseball shaped rug! We are very excited about planning the room, just not the work to put it all together!

I will keep you up to date!

Well, here goes nothing. If this worked right, you should be able to view the ultrasound we had on Friday, right here in this post. It's a wmv file so as long as you have Windows Media Player (which if you are running Windows you probably have it), it should work. If you have a Mac, get Windows Media Player 9 HERE. I've been messing with the video alot so it loads quickly for me right now, probably because I have it cached. I would expect that you may have to give it a minute or two to load up but it should work. Post a comment and let me know if it doesn't work for you.

* Edit: Due to some confusion, I thought that I would clarify that there is no sound with the video.

Without further ADO, the ultrasound

We had our doctor's appointment today and I bet you are all waiting to see if you made the right selection in our poll. Well........if you chose 'girl'

you were.....WRONG! Jen and I were wrong with the rest of you, so don't feel bad. We are having a boy! He was moving around a lot during the ultrasound so the nurse had to really work to get the pictures she needed to get. She told us he is healthy and is right where he should be at this stage of the pregnancy. He currently weighs .95lbs.

So below are the pictures of the ultrasound that we were able to keep. I am hoping that I can get the video of the ultrasound up on the blog here in a few days. Here are the pics!

Here, his head is to the left and you can see his eyes (closed) and his nose. If you click on the picture and see the larger size, you may also be able to faintly see his ribs.

Not really sure how the nurse was able to do this one, but this pic is from behind the baby. You can see his eye sockets and eye lenses in this picture. You can also make out the spine. I think this is a really cool picture.

Here is the definitive pick that tells us it's a boy. If you follow the arrow...well, you get the idea. It was kinda funny but when the nurse first started the ultrasound, as soon as the picture came up, he was flashing us! Luckily we were wanting to know if it was a boy or a girl and not wanting to keep it a surprise. You can also see his hand, just to the left of the arrow. He was reaching down to grab his... foot. (get your minds out of the gutter!!)

In this picture the nurse actually labeled the body part because it was a little harder to make out. Right above the word 'FOOT' is, well his foot. Pretty much all for this picture.

Here is another shot of his face and this time his eyes are open. You can see a little black dot where his eye is and that is the lense. I think it looks like he is laying on his back and has his head turned to the right to look at the 'camera'.

So that was our trip to the doctor. Like I said earlier, I hope that I am able to put the video of the ultrasound up here in some form or another. It may end up being a link to click on to watch it but I am hoping to actually have it so you can view the video right on the blog. Now we have to figure out a name for the little kid. We'll definitely post what it will be once we decide. That's all for now folks!

Well, I flew an airplane for the first time today. No, not a Microsoft Flight Simulator plane, a real life, honest to goodness airplane.

Jen had bought me a "Discovery Flight" gift certificate as a graduation/birthday present. I got to use it today and she went with me and took pictures. Here are a few of them from the flight.

This is the gift certificate for the flight.



Here we are going over a few things before taxiing to the runway.



We are next up to take off!



We have lift off!!



The colors from the air were really awesome.



Here's the Mall of Georgia from about 2000 ft in the air and about 140 mph.



We flew over and made a few passes around Lake Lanier.



Here we were turning right over the lake. Even though it doesn't look like much of a banking turn you can see from how much the pilot and I were leaning that it was a pretty decent banking turn.



This picture gives a better idea of the bank of that right turn. It's a weird but neat feeling at the same time when you look to your side and you are actually looking down.



Here we are heading back getting ready to land and you can see the airport runway. This is out the left side of the plane. I actually got to perform the take-off and the landing.



Here's me and the plane we were in. It's a Cessna 172R with 160 hp fuel injected engine. I had a blast! It just re-enforced my desire to someday get my pilot's license. The instructor said that I flew well enough that if I had a log book he would go ahead and sign off for .6 hours of flight time towards my license. So of course a bought a log book. .6 hours down, 39.4 hours to go! ;-)

On the way

On our way to MO for Thanksgiving we saw these cool clouds in Tennessee during sunset.

Maybe some gold?

On the way home we saw this rainbow. Hopefully it shows up.

(Edit: looks like it came out ok. It was actually REALLY bright and the colors were extremely vivid. You could also see both ends of it. It was the most intense rainbow I've seen in a really long time.)

Welcome Jacob to our family!!!

I was able to meet Jacob this weekend when Debra* and Ben came to visit. Ben lives about 3 1/2 hours away so they were able to fit us into their very busy 'tour'. Jacob is now 2 month old. He loves to bounce and has a fixation on ceiling fans! Debra looks great, of course! and It was great to meet Ben.

Welcome to our family!


(*Tony Edit: For my family that doesn't know who Debra is, she is one of Jennifer's cousins that live in New York/New Jersey.)

No, He isn't mine!!! :)
Jennifer getting some well needed practice and
appreciation for my quiet time right now!

Debra on Mommy duty! Jacob loves baths and Debra is getting good at baby bantering moms must do!

Debra with a baby!

Wow who would have thought! :)

Bye Jacob! We will miss you.

Grow big and strong.

Keep mom on her toes!

One of my co-workers gave me this picture of the three of us. We can't do Halloween at our school but we had a storybook parade. (Yes there were spidermen and Dora's among our preschool crowd!) So we decided to dress up as Eric Carle books. Karen was the Grumpy Ladybug, Jane the Very Hungry Catepillar, and I was the Very Busy Little Spider. We had a great time. Some other Storybooks were The Three Little Pigs, The littlest Scarecrow(s) and more we had a great time!

Clown Car

Not sure how this will show up. I was following this car and it was made up to look like a toy car, complete with the thing you would twist to make it go. That thing actually spun around too.

I know it's a little late. I do have an excuse though. There comes a time when you have to reload the operating system on your computer. This past week was that time. I just finished it all up this weekend so can now post some pictures from Halloween. This first one is of Levi dressed up as a ninja. He kinda reminds me of Sub Zero from the Mortal Kombat games.

Here's Emily dressed up as a Princess with her glowing wand. She was more intrigued with the glowstick than she was her original wand so she just used it instead.

This one is of Bryson (Brandi and Cam's son. They are some friends of ours we met through Tom and Gretchen) dressed up as Dash from The Incredibles.

Beauty and the Ninja?

New Awning

Well we've got our new Sunsetter retractable awning installed now. Jennifer's dad and stepmother came up from around Columbus, Ga. to help us. It actually wasn't too bad to put up, surprisingly. We were very thankful for their help.

Here it is finally

I am finally posting the picture I was talking about from the hockey game this past Saturday. We were kinda far away for my camera phone. It was nice to be at an NHL game again.

Well, it obviously didn't go through. Saturday I had gone to the Atlanta Thrashers home opener with my cousin Aaron. I had taken a picture with my phone during warmups and tried sending it from the arena. I thought it had gone through but I never did get a confirmation back saying that it had posted. Turns out, it's because it hadn't! I'm at work right now and do not have a cell signal in my building but after work, I'll try posting that pic again. Was a great game. Thrashers ended up winning 8-1 over the Washington Capitals. They were up 5-1 in the third period with about 10 mins to go. At that point there was a pretty cool fight. Actually there were 3 different fights going on at the same time. One fight even ended up underneath a goalie net. After the fight Aaron and I left for the Marta (same as the Metro-Link for those of you back in MO.). While waiting for the train I got a text message with the final score. The Thrashers had scored 3 more times in those last 7-10 minutes. Oh well, at least it wasn't like Washington came back to win it or something.

Oh, interesting note for those of you that follow Blues hockey. Found out that a couple ex-Blues now play for Atlanta. Scott Mellanby and Ronald Petrovicky. Mellanby had at least 1 goal and an assist in the game and he is actually the Thrashers' captain as well. Hmm, maybe I can do like I did with getting a Drew Cardinals jersey to wear to Braves games. I can get an old Scott Mellanby Blues jersey to wear to Thrashers games!!

Baby shower for friends

Our small group was having a baby shower for some friends. They are having twins. The whole Thor and Diesel thing is an inside joke. It's not the babies real names. Those would be Preston and Landon.