Baby G's Room

Back in October my parents and I painted the room while Cookie Pockets had a play day out of the house. I'm working on building and painting some shelves for the left hand wall that you can't see, and I think CP wants to put is name in letters above the crib. Now, if only we had a name picked out for him...

Here are a few pictures of his future home taken back in October. I hope he'll like it!

Cookie Pockets - Rounding out 2008!

Here are a few shots of CP over the past few weeks.

Here's a clever and cute belly shot from Nov 23, 2008.

CP taking the infamous walk that simultaneously helped her breath more easily and put her in bed for several days due to back pain. This was over Thanksgiving, and luckily things have been back to "normal" for a while now.

Here's the belly dressed up like a silver Christmas ornament ball taken Dec 5, 2008.

Christmas in Spring.

Baby G's clever costume for Jeff's Christmas Party.

Babymoon and the Birds

It's been a while since we updated this, so here will be several all at once.

Back in November we went on a weekend "Babymoon" to Lake Buchanan and later took a ride on the Vanishing Texas River Cruise. This happened to be a "Freedom Flight" where a bird of prey conservancy group released rehabilitated birds into the wild. It was way cool.

A Beautiful sunset outside of our cabins.

A Bald Eagle that isn't able to be released. If I were her, I'd have some glasses on with that beak so close!

A beautiful Owl (I think it was a Great Horned Owl).

I forget what type of Hawk this was; possibly a Cooper's, but I'm not sure and don't have a bird book on me right now.

The Belly is getting bigger!

Here we are on a walk exploring the outer bounds of our "close to a bathroom" requirement. As you can see, Baby G has been growing quite a bit! We had a chance to soak up some vitamin D outside this weekend, so baby's belly is moving from the ghostly white shade of Halloween toward the gentle glow (and shape) of a thanksgiving pumpkin. Quite appropriate for this time of year...

Booooo!

My wife rocks. She threw me a surprise birthday party this year! It was great fun, and I enjoyed getting to see everyone all dressed up for my birthday! Thank you to those that could make it.

Here are the winners of the costume contest (without my aunt, uncle and cousin who also won ribbons and are featuered in the next photo).

Here's a separate shot of the Oz winners:

Shower Pics

I finally put the shower pictures up on Picasa. You can find them by surfing to picasaweb.google.com/FirstLast / and replace "FirstLast" with my name.

Shower Fun

Thank y'all for coming to our shower and making it a great time! We appreciated all of you coming and helping us celebrate. We are blessed to have y'all as friends and family.

At some point I need to figure out how best to share the photos from this weekend, but for now, I'll just post these 2 group shots. Click the image to click through to a medium size for downloading and viewing on your computer.

If you have any special requests you'd like me to email to you, just send an email to my name (FirstLast) at gmail dot com.

It's a BOY!!!

So, we went to the sonographer this morning, and got some great news. First, Doc thinks the slightly echogenic abdomen falls within the normal range, and he didn't see any other indicators that something might be wrong. He thinks it's a healthy baby. Second, it's a BOY! The above picture is looking from the feet up between his legs where there is definately something showing. Like I said in the office, "He likes the ladies..." That explains why he was shy around our normal male OB Dr.

Here's a profile shot where you can see a little nose and forehead. It looks like he was sleeping, but he wasn't! There was lots of wiggling and jumping going on. Plus some stubbornness in rotating for the camera.

"Nature Walks..."

We were debating on the title of this picture. Perhaps "Not Carrot Top, but Carrot Bottom" or something along those lines. CP liked "Nature Walks", which I thought was cute. Then she came up with "Veggie Tails," which takes the carrot!

This carrot from our garden has some serious junk in its trunk. I think CP might use the term "truncal obesity." From the looks of the hairy legs, I'm thinking this is either a Hippie carrot, or possibly French (perhaps both!). Y'all come up with your own description and post in the comments...

Have fun!

Here's proof...

Cookie Pockets at ~18 weeks

Cookie Pockets' belly is getting larger!

It's impressive how much her belly is growing these days. I'll try to post some pics this weekend when we get a chance. We went to the doc last week and everything looked to be doing well. We had another ultrasound that I videotaped, but this one was a bit blurry since the camera doesn't auto-focus on the CRT very well.

I hope y'all are doing well!

Hurricane Ike in Austin

We went out to Lake Pflugerville for a walk and some kite flying on Sunday, the day after Ike made landfall near Galveston. Other than a nice cloud cover yesterday, this wind is about all that we received from the storm.

We go to the Doc on Thursday, so perhaps we'll have an update with more baby info soon. Oh, yeah, that reminds me...for future reference, I highly recommend taking along a camera with movie capabilities to the ultrasound. I wish I had for the 1st one, but I smartened up for the 2nd one last month. It is SO COOL to be able to watch the lil' guy/gal move around when you get back home!

"LFoD": NH's State Motto

Yea! The internets are working tonight, so and I can finally upload the pictures I found last night.

BTW, we go to the Doc on Thursday, and he's supposed to do a Doppler exam on Baby.


We saw many beautiful waterfalls! This is one from the Flume Gorge area.


This is in front of Jackson Falls about 0.5 miles from our hotel. Absolutely beautiful!

From the top of Bald Mountain, looking over at Cannon mountain (on the right). This was our first day of partial sunshine, and it got a wee bit warm (~80F) hiking up the mountain.

"Live Free or Die"

We got to take a wonderful little trip up to NH where we found much beauty and enjoyment. My internet is being picky, so I'll put more pictures of our trip in the near future, but here's a start:

Lake Winnipesaukee

Cookie's first round of chowdah!

The 1st Photograph

Here's the lil' "guy"! Seeing the movement in real time was amazing! You could see his little arms and legs moving around, and he even rotated for us. I'm kicking myself for not taking a video camera to the appointment...

Flower Admiration

Our Red Rocket Crepe Myrtle is on fire! I'm glad we held out for this cultivar...

Our 7ft tall sunflower has finally decided to open up. The cool thing is all of his little buddies are soon to open up as well. CP finally agrees that they are pretty.

Glacier Spotting

A few weeks ago we were roughing it in Alaska. Cookie Pockets found a bear.


The tall peak is Mount Saint Elias (the second highest mountain in both the United States and Canada [18,009 feet]). It's ~40 miles in the distance.


Hubbard Glacier, the longest tidewater glacier in the US with a calving face 6 miles long. That's right, six-miles long, although we are only seeing 3-4 miles wide here, due to the island and land on the right hand side.

We're Growing Things

Cookie Pockets holding the largest zucchini we'd ever seen!!! The yellow squash was a good size, but man, that zucchini was huge! Much bigger than the peanut she's carrying...

Our garden on 7/11/08

Fresh from the garden when we got back from AK. They may look big, but the bell peppers are only about the size of golf balls.

Coming soon to a blog near you...

Stay tuned...