I use Strava to track my bicycle rides. Below you can see my recent activity.
Today, Natalie and I took Jacqueline to the park down the street to get outside a bit. We stuck her in the swing and let her play in the grass.
The swing just kind of exists for her, she can’t really do much except sit there and hold on! Here’s a video of some of that excitement.
The grass was much more entertaining for her, she has never experienced grass before, and she found it useful to hold on to while trying to maintain her balance.
Today was our first ultrasound, we got the see our baby's heartbeat for the first time. HOLY CRIKEY this just got really real, in a good way. Natalie was brought to tears, I realized this as my cue to get up from my chair and hold her hand!
Based on the ultrasound we are now told our due date is 10/1/2010, not near as cool as 10/10/10, but it will have to do! My buddy Jim will be pulling for us to delay a day and go 10/2/10 in honor of his birthday. Dude will be 34 by then, crikey he’s old :)
So we are getting more and more excited about the coming baby. In the doctor’s office today I picked up a flyer for a cord-blood bank, something I had never heard of before this morning. I read through the flyer and the basic gist is they will take your baby’s umbilical cord blood and cryogenically store it for an amount of time in case you need it. They say the stem cells in cord blood can be used to cure all sorts of diseases. I thought this sounded like a cool idea, and figured I would check out the pricing: basically it was $150 for the kit to collect and ship the blood back to the cord-blood bank.
Then you paid something like $1800 for 18 years of storage, or $96/mo, or $65/mo for a two year term. Kind of pricey I thought. So I thought about that, and figured I would do some research over the coming months to see if this is something we wanted to do. Well, low and behold I loaded up MSN.com this evening (putting off packing for the trip to California) and saw a headline talking about cord-blood banks! Off to read it I went.
Take a read yourself, the basic gist of the article, and the feedback from the various doctors and medical societies mentioned in the article is that private cord-blood banks are pretty much a waste of money. So now I have it in my head that we don’t use a cord-blood bank, but we’ve got another 7 months or so to decide, we’ll see what happens in that time frame and what other research says.
Now I’m off to work on packing more, we’ve got a long road trip starting in the morning.
So what was going to be a single big announcement, that I’ve been sitting on for a number of weeks now, recently got trumped. So before I talk about the first announcement, I’ll talk about the one that trumped it!
Natalie and I are having a baby! So far we’re only about 5 or 6 weeks in, with a tentative due date of 10/16/2010, though I am really hoping we can pop that kid out on 10/10/10! We are most definitely excited about this, though it wasn’t exactly planned, it definitely is something we look forward to. I keep telling her I want twin boys, and my good buddy Leigh over the pond suggest that if we do we name them Jack and Daniel, I love it!
Now, for the original announcement ;) We are moving to California! Years ago I left home. I went to Missouri. I went to school. I got a job. I changed jobs (a few times). I lived in Missouri for 14 years, my parents even lived there for a while, but to be honest, I never really considered it home, it was just where I was in life. Just over 6 months ago we moved to Colorado. We purchased our first home. We love it, but even Colorado still doesn’t quite feel like home, it does more so than Missouri ever did, but there is still something missing here. (We actually love Parker Colorado, and have the best neighbors ever, they are some of our closest friends.)
I’ve always thought of home as California. I went to high school (3 of 4 years anyways) in California. I left for college, and I always said I would go back if I could make things work out. Well things are working out. Natalie and I put the house on the market two weeks ago and we are moving to California! I won’t torture everyone in the way I did with our move to Colorado (think goingtocolorado.com) but I will try to keep friends and family who are interested up to date as things progress.
I can’t go into other details just yet, what I’ll be doing there, who I will be working for, but I can tell you that I start working in California on March 1st. I look forward to catching up with friends from high school and ages past, and Natalie looks forward to winters that don’t get below freezing constantly :)
If you are interested in purchasing a great house in Parker Colorado be sure to check out ours, it is for sale!
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