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.

Bill Cosby has shown conclusively that kids say funny things.  But if you’re not convinced, here is further proof...  A few months ago we had some friends over, and they had their kids with them: Julia, going on 3 at the time, and Ethan, about 5 and a half years old.  When the kids got bored (very shortly after they arrived), they began looking for things to do.  Ethan very quickly found our DVD/video game rack.  He started looking through our games, with no regards to alphabetical order.  I suppose the fact that he can barely read at this point makes alphabetizing difficult, and it also makes identifying the game from the binder side nearly impossible.  He was drawn to the robot/cyborg looking character on the cover of the Metroid Prime 2 box, and asked to play that.  I thought the controls for a console first-person-shooter would be a little complicated for a five year old, but we let him try any way (sorry ESRB, I know you rated the game “T for Teen”).  I was surprised when he managed to pull off a screw attack, one of the harder things to do in that game.  He could have just gotten lucky with the timing while mashing the B button repeatedly, but I saw him do it more than once.

He ran around for a while, shooting stuff and turning into the morph ball and back, but he didn’t really know what he was supposed to be doing so he got tired of the game and went back to the rack.  Then I heard him say “Mario Paint Cleaner!”  By which he meant, of course, Super Mario Sunshine, which involves cleaning graffiti off of walls.  This was a game he had played before, but I was nonetheless impressed by this five-year-old’s skillz.  I saw him jump on a tight-rope, then jump off of it and use the hover nozzle in mid-air in order to reach another rope.  Not too shabby for a five-year-old.

Of course, I refuse to play him in Smash Brothers.  I don’t need to risk being humiliated by someone who was still in diapers when I started playing the game.

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.