Now that everyone knows...

I can blog about it! We're expecting a new baby on or around August 22. For now, we are calling the new baby "baby bumblebee," which is one of many names Roxanne picked out. I'm almost 13 weeks, so I'll try and start posting belly photos soon. Things are progressing much faster in that area this time around... I'm feeling pretty fine, just the usual extra tiredness and some nausea/heartburn stuff. But I'm working out between 5-7 days a week (just 30 minutes on the elliptical) and I think it's helping most of the pregnancy symptoms feel much more manageable.

I had a doctor's appointment on Friday. Well, a midwife appointment. We are going that route this time around. I love the midwife I saw Friday, but the one I saw the time before that is kind of a jerk. Oh well. Everything is going fine, and she was able to find the heartbeat right away with the doppler. Roxanne was with me, so she got to hear the heartbeat. She was very excited about it, but confused (understandably so). She said, "I don't see baby bumblebee, Mama." So I explained again we couldn't see the baby, but we could hear it's heartbeat. When I asked if she could hear it, she said, "Yeah, it sounds like the ocean!" Which really is pretty accurate... For documentation purposes, the heartbeat was 145 per minute. Which is in the girl range. So I'm convinced it's a girl. But according to the Chinese Gender Prediction Chart, it's a boy. Go figure.

Roxanne is excited about the baby, but she now asks if almost everyone she knows has a baby in their belly, too. So we're working on that issue. These are big things for a toddler to grasp... She's funny in that she decidedly says the baby is a boy or a girl depending on when you ask her, but she never waffles. Yesterday she told me it was going to be a girl because it had to be. I kept trying to explain that we didn't get to pick, but she just kept saying, "no, it's a girl baby. It's going to be a girl baby." Who knows?! Once again, we aren't finding out early. So we're thinking about boy names and girl names. We always ask Roxanne for suggestions, and although she usually lists names of kids she knows, or nonsense words that don't mean anything at all, she sometimes says fun names like "Rocket Baby" or "Blast Off Baby." That has a nice ring, right?

In all seriousness, any names that we think might be contenders we have her say to make sure she can pronounce them. Although her pronunciation is almost always cuter than how it's "supposed" to sound...