Making room for baby

We spent the past weekend going through the house trying to organize and downsize in order to make room for all of the baby gear that we've been steadily acquiring. This included recycling some old class notes, donating unused clothes and "stuff" to Goodwill (thank you Eric for agreeing to get rid of the old, non-working TV even though it once allegedly belonged to the surfer Tom Curren, you really are the best husband), and stashing things in our garage storage locker. My favorite part was using "space bags" which triple your storage space when you vacuum out the air between your blankets and clothes.

Chez Panisse

Our sources tell us that we won't be able to go out to nice restaurants anymore after the baby arrives, so Eric and I decided to treat ourselves to an amazing meal at Chez Panisse this past week. Chez Panisse is something of a Bay Area institution - the birthplace of the organic/local food movement here. The meal definitely lived up to our expectations!

Yosemite trip

While Julie can still move around a bit and before the newest addition to our family arrives, Julie and I are trying to go on adventurous trips. Last week, we went to Yosemite National Park (California). We saw some beautiful sights (like Glacier Point) and managed to go for nice and long hikes. We probably hiked 15 miles. Julie did really well, even on steep slopes covered by a foot of snow; not bad for a 25-week pregnant lady! The baby was kicking away and enjoying the trip too.

On the other hand, I didn't do as well, as I fell through the snow into an freezing river. You can see in the last pic that I had water all the way up to my waist! Needless to say that I was a bit cold for the rest of that hike...

24 weeks down

Eric and I have been getting weekly updates on the baby's maturation at babycenter.com . Apparently, the baby is now a foot long (or as Baby Center says, "picture an ear of corn"), and my uterus is the size of a soccer ball. Yep, that explains why my belly is sticking out so much! Our son has also taken to kicking me when he needs attention - let's hope that he outgrows this trend by birth!

Notes from Daddy

Though Julie has been doing most of the work until now (e.g., finding baby stuff on craigslist, carrying the baby, ...), don't think that the daddy-to-be has been idle. I've taken my homework very seriously, as you can tell from the picture below. So far, I've learned many important things, such as how a fetus breathes, not to name our baby after people famous enough not to need a surname (Santa, Elvis, Tarzan or Roseanne), and that I finally have an excuse to spend long hours in a toy store.

Grandparents

We're in Toronto visiting my parents. They might be even more excited than us about the baby. Thanks to their generosity, the baby will never be naked or illiterate...

It's a boy!

We had our 18th week ultrasound on Monday. Unfortunately, no nice profile pictures, but they did a full anatomy scan and caught a lot of great pictures (our favorite is the one of the baby's foot (row 4, column 2), followed closely by the the one of a hand doing the "thumbs up" gesture (row 2, column 2) ). Don't feel bad if you can't make out anything in these images (the technician's annotations are somewhat helpful, especially the big arrow that says "Boy" (row 2, column 1) ).