TuttleTree.com

The reason I didn't post on Friday was because I was working my tooshy off. Both Thursday and Friday I went straight from work to Sue & Ed's house to help load and then unload their moving trucks. Then Saturday DadR and I installed their new dishwasher, fixed (maybe?) a sump pump, and I replaced a dryer power cable while DadR worked on something else, and then we ran some coax cable to various places for TV and internet access, and hooked up their computer and Vonage… before I went home to help feed dinner to my niece and nephew — whom Megan had spent the day tending to.

I also competed in a Madden 09 tournament on Friday afternoon (placed 2nd), and a Rock Band tournament on Monday evening (placed 2nd); and somewhere inbetween we managed to visit my family (Sunday) and do some shopping and more baby prep. We picked up about 200 paint sample cards from Lowes and went straight to Target, where we sat down on the floor and unpackaged the crib set we registered for to match colors from it and plan the paint color for the room. We also checked out "travel systems" (stroller, baby carrier / car seat, and base) because ours was no longer being sold in stores and was now online-only, and picked a replacement that can be bought in-store.

And speaking of Nublet, I actually had a dream about him somewhere over the weekend. Sort of. I just dreamt that I could see the shape of his foot pressing out against Megan's stomach as he kicked and held it there. That's about all that I remember from the dream. I'm sure it was because of some of the things my parents said about watching a lump move across the belly as baby shifts…

Tomorrow marks his 28th week, so we're in the 3rd trimester depending on who you ask or what book you're reading. By now he's got fully functional taste-buds and as Megan pointed out to me in the car over the weekend, could technically survive if he were to be born. (Megan has a friend who gave birth ~3 months early and her daughter is a few years old now.) I guess you could call this the home stretch, but it's really feeling like it's just the beginning. We still have to find a Pediatrician, paint his room, baby-proof, and so on.

85 days and counting.

Whew. Let me tell you. You'll never get more hate mail than when you ignore your blog for more than a month. You miss the blog, you still check it every day, you'll murder me in my sleep, blah blah blah. Yeah Mom, I get it.

Did I mention we're having a baby? And making significant modification to our house? These things take time. Lots of it. (Oh crap, what have I gotten myself into?) So let me bring you up to speed on a few things.

Having a baby is exciting. Really exciting. And I would know what qualifies as exciting… I've jumped out of air planes before. Here are a few of the fun baby things we've been doing:

• Baby Names: My strategy for choosing a name is to walk around the house screaming the full name (first, middle, last) at the top of my lungs. It lets you know what you're going to sound like in line at Walmart years in advance, and really lets you get a feel for how the name rolls off your tongue.
  
  
• Getting kicked in the head: Only acceptable in-utero; but hot-damn is it cool to feel your baby kick or punch you in the head for the first 200 times. Megan may be getting tired of me resting my head on her belly while we watch TV, but she really should have thought of that before going and getting knocked up, now shouldn't she?
  
  
• Registering: And I thought registering for our wedding was tedious! It probably didn't help that the Baby's R Us computer system was down and I had to hand-write every SKU number down for some old lady to later transcribe. And let me tell you: she's not perfect. There's no way I wrote down the SKU for that special sun screen. Now we're paranoid about what it was we DID write down, that is now missing. Thanks, Baby's R Us / old lady!
  
  
• Not lying to Megan: Like I would assume many first time fathers do, I had this lingering fear that my wife would turn into a whale, and I would have to lie through my teeth and tell her that she was carrying it gracefully and never looked better in her life. (I even practiced lines like this in my head: "You look so good, we should have another one right away so you can get back this way!") But the fact of the matter is she is carrying it nicely and she does look stunning. (But I don't think we'll be rushing #2) So I was prepared to lie, but so far, so good.

And not to be outdone by a fetus, Megan has had me busting my butt on these shelves/cabinets/whatever they are (we should really decide what to call them) whenever we have a free day. That's not to say she isn't helping and doing her share, but she is certainly more motivated than I am. Oh, looky here: pictures of the progress. Careful, you might start to think we were good at this or something.

The only other thing of note, that comes to mind at least, is that we went camping… oh, I don't know, like 3+ weeks ago? And there are, like, pictures and stuff.

And lastly, here's some technobabble that 90% of you won't understand.

I've moved servers again, which I would like to say is at least partially to blame for the lack of posts, but who am I kidding? And with the move to a new server, I also switched blogging platforms, from WordPress to Mango. In general, that doesn't mean much as far as you, Joe Reader, are concerned, with one tiny exception. I've just noticed that comment dates weren't correctly preserved when I exported and imported all my old posts. I'm not going to stress over it anyway, because I don't think you would have even noticed if I hadn't mentioned it.

So there you have it, TuttleTree is back. At least for today…

I am going to be a father! Megan is Preggers! Of course you don't just tell everyone as soon as you find out, so while we were keeping this secret for some time I was writing some thoughts down; and I thought you might enjoy them in their original diary-ish format. Here's a teaser. I haven't decided if I'll post the rest at once or in chunks…

March 31 A few days ago, we found out that Megan is pregnant! We've been trying for months now and to be honest, we were just starting to get discouraged. We even considered intentionally "blocking" for a month or two to avoid a Christmas baby. She was probably pregnant when we had those discussions. How's that for irony? It's funny how you feel when you find out. When we got married, people asked if we felt different. "Not really," we'd reply, "we're still the same people, living the same life. It's just a piece of paper." This time, it's not just a piece of paper, but it still feels kind of surreal. I think part of me is trying not to get my hopes too high, or set myself up for disappointment (miscarriage), which at this point is still a possibility, however remote. I'm actually so worried about this that whenever we're apart (like when I'm at work) and my phone rings, my heart races a little bit. And if I see that it's Megan calling? Can you say miniature panic attack? But so far, we've been lucky and haven't had any negative signs or symptoms. The hardest part so far has been keeping the secret. This isn't news we plan on spreading via the phone or — obviously, the blog — so right now we're in the process of organizing times to get together with the people we want to tell in person. Mom thinks she's really busy with school work? Trust me Mom, you really want us to come down to celebrate our birthdays this weekend. Most of all, we're just happy. We've got our first doctor appointment booked, and it's all downhill from here. Here we go!