My tummy is moving!

A few nights ago before going to sleep, the baby was moving strongly enough that I could feel him from the outside. Not wanting to change position, I called to EB to ask him if he could come upstairs. I tried to sound nonchalant because I didn’t want him to think anything was wrong. But he knew exactly why I was calling him and ran up the stairs, taking 4 or 5 stairs at a time, almost breaking his toe in the process. By the time he got up there 39 seconds later, the baby wasn’t moving anymore. The next night, EB was lying next to me when the baby started moving (he likes to be active 11pm-midnight), and I took EB’s hand and put it on my belly, and sure enough he felt the baby move.  Happy daddy!  Last night and today I could see my tummy moving. It makes me laugh every time I see it. I was in a meeting at work and I felt him and looked down and saw my tummy moving and I had to keep myself from laughing (so I just had this huge grin instead). I’m sure the novelty will wear off, but it’s fun for now.

I’m not really sure what to call the baby these days, because although we have not settled on it for sure, we like the name Charlie (also the name of one of EB’s late grandfathers) and so I usually call him that because I like that better than Beanberg. But I’m afraid if I keep doing that then we’ll be locked in without having explicitly made that decision.  If he were a girl I’d probably still be calling him Jelly Bean.  I mentioned in a previous post how my dad referred to him as Smedley. My mom told me that this is what they called my oldest brother John when she was pregnant with him. I may just take to calling him that…

If you want to make an easy buck…

Don’t become a professional mover!  We hired a moving company that is a non-profit organization, employing ex-convicts, and these guys earned every nickel we paid them.  I wouldn’t say that the five guys that showed up looked or acted like ex-cons (I am not even sure what that would be), but they definitely DID look like what you want to see when you hire five guys to move everything you own and charge you by the hour.  There was one guy named Robert who they called simply “the big guy” (an understatement, if you ask me).  He wasn’t just big, he was strong.  He would take the back end of something, and the guy at the other end would say things like “OK, up…  Now rotate it to your right while flipping it top to bottom, and move the whole thing left as it clears the doorway” and he would do the required operation like a human fork-lift — now THAT’S what they should call him. 

 

I also discovered that the elliptical-machine-people have been missing out entirely on a very truthful advertising tack.  If you really want to get a workout with one of these puppies, don’t walk on it; move it!  It weighs about 200 pounds, and will not fit through a standard doorway in any orientation whatsoever.  I know for sure because I watched “the big guy” try it eleven different ways.  Ultimately, I had to remove the moldings of the door jam, and nail them back up afterward.  It is never a great feeling when you’ve been in your new home for 45 minutes and have to take a hammer to something. 

 

However, now it’s all done, and we’re in our new home.  Even though 98% of our possessions are still in boxes, it is wonderful to be here.  Today Jean had her first commute, and it was a big improvement.  (For any of you who may not know, we’ve moved 20 miles closer to her office.)  I think that we will be very happy here.

 

On a different topic, Jean has begun to feel Bean-Berg (aka Jelly-Bean) moving!  I told her the baby must take after me, and is probably fidgeting with anything he can find in there.  It is very exciting, though still not perceptible externally.  I still oscillate between feeling like sometime in my forties I’m going to have a baby and feeling like he’ll be here the day after tomorrow.  I am trying to prepare, but I don’t feel like I am succeeding, and thus worry that I will be totally overwhelmed, emotionally and practically, when the baby is born…  I’m gonna be a daddy!

 

Wait, I already AM a daddy!  Speaking of which, in other BIG news, last week I saw my 8-year old daughter Maddie for the first time in SIX YEARS!  There were some extenuating circumstances that I won’t go into, but the result was that I had very short notice of this trip and thus could only carve one day to be free from my catering schedule.  I flew to Washington DC overnight Wednesday (Maddie lives in Fairfax, about 20 miles away) and after spending Thursday afternoon with Maddie (and her grandparents, whom I’d never met), I came home Thursday night.  I was really nervous; it occurred to me on the flight out there that the last time I was so nervous to see somebody was the first time I met Jean.  Maybe I should have known the correlation was a good omen (since we know how that meeting turned out.)  Maddie and I had a nice time, and I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly and naturally I began to feel a bond to her.  That may sound odd to many people, who are thinking “How could it be anything BUT natural to feel a bond to your own 8-year old daughter?”  The answer is that, practically speaking, Maddie is a stranger to me.  I don’t know what she likes, who her friends are, what she is good at, or anything about her life’s experience so far.  And she knows even less about me.    It is tough to feel a “natural” bonding to a stranger.  Let me correct that: I thought it would be tough, but it isn’t.  I am hopeful that the feeling is mutual, and that hope was bolstered by an email from Maddie just a day later saying she had enjoyed seeing me, and hoped I could come back again to meet some of her friends and more of her family (on her mother’s side).  I will certainly be doing that, and I hope for Maddie to be getting closer to some of her family on my side.

 

NOTE: This post was written on June 23rd, but do to a lack of internet service in our new home until very recently, it has just now been posted on June 28th.

20 week ultrasound (and pictures!)

Last week we went to have a “level 2″ ultrasound, where they check for all kinds of things, and everything was normal!  He is the right size for his age, and no abnormalities were seen. It was so cool to see so many recognizable things! We saw 4 chambers in his heart.  We saw his arms and legs and fingers and toes. We saw the umbilical cord going to his belly. We saw his kidneys, and his eyes (sort of) and what were apparently his lips and nostrils. We saw confirmation that he is in fact a boy.  While we were looking at his little fists he gave a little punch. He was moving his feet a lot, but I still can’t feel anything. He opened his hand and she snapped a picture of that. We joked that he was cracking his knuckles.  Check out the pictures! On the first one you should be able to make out his head, arm, and leg. The second one is his hand.