Jason Moreno and I have been friends for a long time -- about 9 and a half years and counting. More recently, I haven't gotten to keep up with him much beyond the occasional email, so his more... how can I put this?... spastic qualities have been sadly absent from my life. Today that all changed, when he sent me this video (that's him in the cape and mask):
38 weeks now.... Feeling very READY. No cholestasis so far, but I was 38 1/2 weeks along last time when I started itching, so not out of the woods yet. Will an induction be scheduled for next week? Will the baby come naturally before then? Will it be even longer? Stay tuned to find out!
Meanwhile, post your guess in the baby pool if you haven't already!
Pregnant women can be emotionally unstable, so if you must talk to one, it's best to treat the situation like you're on the bomb squad, and you're trying to choose whether to cut the blue or the red wire. If you say the right thing, you might get a medal from the commissioner! If you say the wrong thing, you might get a chunk of metal. In your face.
My wife is 37 weeks pregnant, and she's kindly put together some lists of things to say or not say to pregnant women. For your own safety, please, take these to heart.
The Blue Wire: Things that are (almost) always okay to say to a pregnant woman
5. How are you feeling?
4. You have such a cute pregnant belly.
3. You are so tiny!
2. I can't believe you are already 8 months pregnant! (This only applies when she is actually 8 months pregnant, of course.)
1. You look great/terrific/fabulous!
The Orange Wire: Things that are sometimes okay to say to a pregnant woman (proceed with caution!):
5. Look at you! You're showing!
4. You have that pregnant glow.
3. The due date will be here before you know it.
2. You look like you're ready to pop! or, Any day now, huh? (Only say this if you know she is within a week of the due date or overdue. Otherwise, just don't go there.)
1. You look ready. (Again, only say this to your friend if you know she is full-term and really ready to have the baby.)
The Red Wire: Things you should never, ever say to a pregnant woman:
5. Do you mean that, or is that just the pregnancy hormones talking?
4. Seriously, what are you going to name the baby?
Hooray! We had our annual Fall weather today! A big cold front swept through this morning, dropping our temperatures from 90+ yesterday to the 50s today, complete with cold rain and lots of wind. What a relief it was for us (especially the pregnant one). Needless to say, we had to get out and enjoy it (once the rain stopped at least). Naturally we forgot to take pictures.
Kaeta was so excited about the cooler weather, she went around wearing her purple jacket all day (even in the house), repeating, "love this weather!" Here are some pictures we took when we finally thought to:
If you look in the sidebar on the right, under the "Baby Cam" picture, you will see a new feature on here called "Breaking News." For the slightly nerdy and curious among you, here's how you can set something like this up:
Create an account on Twitter.com. If you log in to Twitter, you see a big white box that asks, "What are you doing?" Every time you type something in there, they log it, and your friends (or anybody, really) can then keep up with every little thing you're doing. This is a concept called microblogging. It seems kind of dumb to me, but whatever, it's about to be useful.
Go to twitter.com/badges to create a "Twitter badge." Get the source code and stick it somewhere on your website.
Go to twitter.com/devices to configure your cell phone so you can send a text message to post to your tweets. Yes, the list of things you are doing is called tweets. I'm not sure who decided that.
On the same page, configure your GTalk or AOL instant messenger program so you can post to your tweets by simply sending an IM. This is insanely easy.
So, the killer thing here is the ability to post from the phone. My plan is to, to the degree that it doesn't interfere with anything important, live blog the birth of our child. If you are RSS-inclined and don't want to miss that, subscribe to: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/7236682.rss
One downside to this is that it highlights the banality of daily life. "Should I post that I just got up from a nap? No, that's lame. Should I post that I wrote a script to do an incremental hard drive backup? Do I have friends who think I'm cool, and then they're going to read that and realize I'm not?" Well, I better face facts. As a father of two, I left my chance at "cool" behind a long time ago. But there are more important things, no?
One other technical note. The photo of Kaeta with a unicorn toy in the post below was also posted from my cell phone thanks to Flickr. Just set up a Flickr account (free!) and go here to set up your blog for that.
Tonight for some reason, Kaeta decided to start calling me either "Humpty Daddy" or "Daddy Dumpty." I don't think I'm flattered! But she sure is cute :)
This week is 36 weeks. (Full term!) Still no itching to speak of, unless you count "itching" to have this baby! The pregnancy is still going well, although we've discovered our baby is quite the dramatic (that story to follow). We have a feeling the baby is going to keep us guessing as to when he/she decides to grace us with his/her presence. It's sure to be a grand entrance!
Oh, and amazingly enough, still no swollen ankles, and still able to wear my wedding ring!
First of all, Happy Birthday to Aunt Laurie, whose 50th birthday we enjoyed celebrating in Kemah this weekend... where it all began. A delicious dinner at Babins on the Boardwalk, followed by a fun boat ride on the bay, which Kaeta had been looking forward to all day (she kept blurting out "Go BOAT RIDE!" at random times).
The boat ride started out fun. Kaeta had a blast dancing around and eating up all the adoring attention everyone lavished upon her.... But then the drama began. Let me just say that I have been having harmless Braxton-Hicks contractions for the last several months, so when the contractions began I didn't think anything of it. Until I noticed that they were coming fairly close together, fairly regularly. So I started keeping track, mostly just to prove to myself that it was nothing. After all, I'm only 8 months pregnant. Not time yet. But after about an hour with the contractions five minutes apart or less, Derek convinced me to call the doctor. The doctor said we better head to the hospital. The nearest hospital.
Here is Derek's rendition of what happened next (he tells it so much better):
I went to someone who worked on the boat -- he looked to be about 20 years old -- and told him, "My wife's having contractions. We called the doctor, and he said we need to get to a hospital." His eyes got wide and his face paled. "Yes, sir," he said, and went to the captain. All he said was "his wife's having contractions," and then the boat lurched forward as the captain pushed the throttle. I'm sure he was thinking, "No way we're having a baby on this boat!" We were at the dock in 2 minutes.
So after adding quite a bit of drama to the boat ride, we proceed to the hospital in Houston. At this point it's about 10:30 pm. We're both still in disbelief that I might actually be in labor, but the contractions are suggesting otherwise. This is where the story gets a little anti-climactic. We were admitted to the labor and delivery ward, where after about two hours of monitoring, it was determined that I was not in labor, and that the contractions were likely caused by not getting enough water that day. The nurse had me drink plenty of water, and the contractions slowed down, but never went away entirely. So at 1:00 am they let us go.
We decided it would be best to go on home so that if something more happened, we would be near our hospital. Yep, we drove three hours in the middle of the night, as though we hadn't had enough excitement for one night. Kaeta was great the whole time. She fell asleep on the way to the hospital, and slept through the whole thing... until, of course, we left the hospital, and she spent probably half the trip sleeping and the other half still going on about "the boat ride!" and how much fun that was. Thankfully, she went back to sleep when we got home, and we all got to sleep in the next morning.
So from all this, we have learned something very important. This baby, while still in utero, has already figured out that the best way to compete with Big Sister Kaeta's charm and beauty, is to make as big a scene as possible. Because apparently being melodramatic is the only way this kid is going to get any attention around here.
So in light of our baby's character trait (which we were fortunate enough to be warned about early), we are trying to think of names which might be more fitting. Like maybe Kemah for a girl, or Hamlet for a boy..... Anyone have any other suggestions?
Bible Explorer is totally free Bible software that's stuffed with features and has a growing library of electronic books (currently around 150 free, plus over 1400 additional books for sale. Click here for a list of the free books). I highly recommend giving it a try! I work for WORDsearch, the company that makes it.
Instaverse is a free progam that makes Scripture references pop up when you mouse over them in a web browser. This is nice if you read online commentaries, devotionals, etc. that refer to verses without quoting them. If you have the Bible memorized, please disregard.
(If you don't know about RSS feeds, I recommend spending 5 minutes at bloglines.com. I'm hooked on it -- it's a great way to check multiple sites for updates in one fell swoop, and you can keep up with news, your friends' blogs, and anything else with an RSS feed very easily.)
If I put our names here, maybe googling for them will someday lead people to this page, so here they are: Derek Kurth, Karianne Kurth (formerly Karianne Leikam, aka Kari Leikam), and Kaeta Kurth.
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