This is a quick note to let everyone know that Stephanie has successfully given birth.  Emma Leigh and her mommy are healthy and resting right now.  She seems to have gotten in a fight on her way out, so she has a black eye.  But the doctors say this is superficial and she will be okay soon.

Whenever someone at my office has a baby, usually they will send a photo around of the newborn.  And everytime I think “wow, that is gross, why would you share such a gross picture.”  I had always wondered if I would feel differently when it was my own child.  I can now tell you with confidence that I do.  So I hope you’ll forgive me for sharing a picture of our beautiful bruised 93-minute-old baby girl.  More pictures will be up later.

Part of our Christmas gift from Stephanie’s parents this year was some time at a timeshare.  We decided we would use the time before the baby gets here, and so we spent the last weekend in Atlanta.  While we were there we visited Zoo Atlanta and the Georgia Aquarium.  I have put up photos from this trip for any who are interested.  A lot of the pictures from the aquarium turned out much better than I had expected.

A few comments

• The elephant will hold a paint brush in its nose and create elephant art.  That was interesting to watch.

• Apparently dried up Christmas trees are a part of the wallaby’s natural habtat?  Actually they had these in several of the exhibits, I guess some kind of recycling program or something.

• The zoo had a baby panda, possibly God’s cutest creation.  The adult pandas must not appreciate this because they won’t breed even to save their species.

• I have determined that Bowser King of the Koopa is in fact not a Koopa at all, but an alligator snapping turtle.  Apparently some Wikipedia editor agrees with me.

• In the aquarium, they had this huge wall that was filled with jellyfish that was incredibly relaxing to look at.  It was kind of like a giant screensaver, only not annoying.

• There were a couple of tanks that arced over head, and one tank that had a glass tube running through the bottom of it.  This allowed you a few places where you could look up and see sea creatures flying overhead.

• The pictures of the sea turtle turned out surprisingly well.  I guess there was just plenty of light in the area.

Michael: Hey dude. I just got back from Jamaica.
Packer: Big whoop! I was in HOTlanta. That whole town is whack!

So I said over four months ago that I would try to put up some pictures of our new house.  Well when we decorated the house and then cleaned it up before we had company over, I decided I’d take some pictures.  Without further ado, you can find those pictures on our photos page.

Among the highlights is Stephanie’s snowman nativity scene.  Because, you know, most biblical scholars agree that it is likely that Jesus was a baby snowman.  You’ll also see a picture of Stephanie barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen.  Making dinner no less!

I also want to make some comments about this picture of my messy bonus room/noise room/office.  You can see the following things in the picture, from (roughly) left to right:

• The cardboard cube you see there was going to be a Mario ? block to hang over my cubicle, but I never finished it.  In part because I would need to buy some yellow paper, and in part because I thought it might be too corny even for a programmer’s office.  And I’ll openly admit that I got the idea from someone else.

• You can see the Sumo Lounge bean bag chair that I won last year.

• There is a book of Christmas music for the ukulele that I got last year.  Mele Kalikimaka!

• You can see my big amp, my acoustic guitar, and my Micro Cube mini-amp (which I wrote about on this very blog a while back).

When I went to take the pictures off my memory card, I realized there were still pictures from our Labor Day trip to Lake Lure with Stephanie’s family (we also went there last year).  If anyone is interested, I put those pictures up for your perusal.

We’re having a baby GIRL!

Kip and I went to the doctor’s office on Tuesday and we learned that our baby is a girl.  It was exciting until they got started and we found out that Emma (that will be her name by the way) had decided to be camera shy.  It took about thirty minutes to get a decent shot of her face in the “4D” view.  I actually thought that the 2D view looked better than the 4D view.  (You can judge for yourself, but we think it looks weird.  In fact, Kip thinks the fourth dimension they are referring to must be creepiness.  Sorry, he made me put that in here.)  The technician kept shaking and poking my belly to try to get her to roll over, but somehow it gave her the hiccups.  It was actually really cute to see her with the hiccups because her whole body would spasm, but I still can’t feel it.  It is amazing just how much I love her already, just from seeing her on the monitor.  We think she is going to have my nose, chin, and (sadly) my feet.  You can see for yourself in the picture of her feet.  I had fun today getting out all of the baby girl’s clothes that we already have (from numerous yard sales over the last few months) and washing them so they will be ready for Emma’s auspicious arrival next March.

Other exciting news on the baby front
I actually felt the baby move Friday night.  She decided to finally let me know she was down there.  It feels a lot like somebody is thumping you, but from the inside out.  She is especially active in the last hour or so before I go to bed in the evenings.  She also will roll around if I wake up in the middle of the night.

And in case you haven’t noticed, the pictures link to larger versions of the sonograms.

I meant to say more in my last post but I got distracted because I couldn’t upload the picture (I have an admin page I use to upload pictures to go along with blog posts, so that I can do it on a machine with no FTP client, or where port 20 is blocked, but it wasn’t working yesterday).  By the time I walked Stephanie through doing it on the phone, I didn’t feel like writing much post to go along with it.

Some additional thoughts/comments:

• They can’t determine the baby’s gender yet; it will be about two months before we know that.

• The baby is about 2 cm long right now.  That’s less than an inch!

• We could see the heart beating on the screen, at around 170 beats per minute.  That sounds like the baby’s about to have a heart attack, but they said that is a normal rate at this stage.

• It may have been hard to tell from the picture, but the baby’s head is on the bottom-left, and is almost the same size as the rest of the baby.

• Although we didn’t want to tell everyone at the time, this was the main reason Stephanie quit her job working as a pharmaceutical tester.  Not exactly the safest environment to be pregnant in.

• “Morning sickness” is a misnomer, it can occur at any time of the day; Stephanie gets it mostly at night, and it seems like every time we mention this to someone they say that they had worse morning sickness at night too.

I guess that’s all the additional information I have to share.  So, umm.. peace out y’all.

What you are reading right now is the official announcement that the shrimp-shaped person pictured below is looking forward to meeting all of you, sometime around March 19th.

That is all.

Update: Additional information can be found on my follow-up post.

Well, a week ago today Stephanie and I closed on a house, which officially makes us homeowners.  I advise anyone reading this to not listen to anyone who tells you that it takes 30-45 minutes to close on a house:  counting driving time to the attorney’s office (on the opposite side of downtown Charlotte), I was gone for nearly three hours.  But anyway, we aren’t fully moved in yet; all the big stuff is going to be moved this Saturday.  The new home is in Concord, but still pretty close to where I work.  We’re also really close to the speedway, which means I’ll have to take a different route home from work during the two race weeks, but I already had to plan my life around avoiding races in my apartment as well so that’s nothing new.

We don’t have many pictures, and if we did they would be of sterile white rooms with no furniture.  Maybe after we’ve done some painting and decorating I’ll put some pictures up for you guys to browse, but for now I’ll put up one that the home inspector took:

My what a big month April was.  Kip and I had our second anniversary, as he posted about, there was Easter, I decided exactly when I would be quiting my job, and I have sprained my foot pretty seriously by falling down the stairs at church on Easter Sunday.  That is correct ladies and gentlemen, I said fell down an entire flight of stairs, and as it was on Easter Sunday, I was dressed appropriately in my new Easter outfit.  I was told that my skirt did not go over my head though, so I managed to remain modest on my quick trip down to the basement of the church.  So, I spent my Easter Sunday in the emergency room of Northeast Medical Center in Concord, NC.  I fell down the stairs because the heel of my shoe caught on the step and I lost my balance.  I am very heart broken because the very tip of the heel, or the grip of the heel, broke off when I fell down, and those were the shoes that I wore on my wedding day.  They are irreplaceable.  After spending the day in the emergency room, having a pregnancy test (it was negative for those of you keeping track or at all interested), having four x-rays taken, and waiting for quite awhile, we learned that they couldn’t see that anything was broken, so they think it is simply a sprain.  However, the doctor told us that if it still hurt after a few days I should to to the orthopedist to have them do a more thorough exam of my foot.  Well, it is now several weeks later and I still have a sore foot, and it pops almost daily.  On the shoe front, Kip took me to the mall and I bought the cutest flat ballet slippers that were eyelet material to match my Easter skirt perfectly (the same one that I fell down the stairs in).  Of course they were flats as I have pretty much decided to give up high heels for the time being until my foot heals and I will be able to walk in them again.  I shared all of that to share that within the month of buying these brand new shoes, that I absolutely adored, I ruined them too.  I wanted to wear them to Scott’s (and for those of you living under a rock, that is my brother-in-law) graduation ceremony at High Point University.  I didn’t expect it to be such a miserable day, or that we would be sitting on folding chairs on the lawn.  Needless to say, wet grass and perfectly white cloth shoes do not mix in a positive fashion.  The shoes are now grass stained, and no longer white.  I did enjoy Scott’s graduation, and the fun of listening to the arguing African-American family that sat directly in front of us for the better part of the ceremony, and listening to Bill Cosby give the graduation address without having planned a speech (we think).  All in all, it was an ok day.  I go to the doctor on Monday to see how my foot is doing, and exactly what is wrong with it.  I’ll keep you posted on the foot and shoe fronts as the week progresses.

Last week we went to visit Stephanie’s older sister Emily and her family, including our seven-month-old niece, in Tampa, Florida.  A few things to mention:

Riley loves the ukulele!  She was completely fascinated by it.  She would just stare at it when I played, looking back and forth trying to figure out which hand she wanted to look at.  I tried to let her play, and she would kind of strum, but she mainly wanted to grab the strings and pull on them.  Fortunately this was a ukulele, which has nylon strings, so she can’t really hurt herself doing that.  If it were a guitar, I’d be afraid she’d cut her hands pulling like that on the smaller strings.

We went to Busch Gardens, where we rode The Sheikra.  I’ve built this type of roller coaster in Roller Coaster Tycoon, but I had never been to a real park that had one until this weekend.  This has to be one of the coolest rides I’ve ever ridden.  At the top of that hill they stop the car, facing nearly straight down.  Then you drop on the track that is straight down.  It was the most intense feeling I’ve ever felt on a roller coaster.  Later on there is another hill like that, although it’s not as tall and they don’t bring you to a complete stop before dropping you.  I would highly recommend this ride to anyone who likes roller coasters.

I put up a collection of photos from our trip, if you’re interested.

We spent Thanksgiving in Williamsburg, Virginia with Stephanie’s family, and I just put some pictures up.  Most are either our new niece, Riley, or some kinda artsy pictures from Colonial Williamsburg like the one that can be seen to your left.