Baby Belly UPDATE v2.0!!!
Nikki and I shot a few new pictures tonight. Hopefully I’ll have some more time to go through them tonight and get them up, but don’t hold your breath. Nikki is exhausted and watching idol. I made dinner (grilled cheese, weird we both wanted it for some reason and it was delicious). If Nikki hasn’t gone into labor by tomorrow she wants to shoot more shots now after breifly seeing these on the back of the camera. She’s just so tired at the time it seems like a lot of work to stand around cold and naked for something so trivial… but she also knows they’ll be fun to have years down the road and it’s the best way to keep anyone reading this up to date (hint; want more shots? leave comments to encourage her!)… We have another doctors appt tomorrow. Then a Vet appt in the evening. I’ll be sure to post an update at some point tomorrow. Hopefully with pictures but with 2 doctors appointments and the full moon I doubt we’ll feel up to it tomorrow night.
Baby/Nursery Update:
I know some of my family can only get update via the blog right now, so I’m trying to post a bit more often, especially when it comes to baby updates… (Hi Jess, your shots from Korea are awesome!)… The shot to the left is an updated shot of what the nursery looks like. I posted one on my PAD a few days ago, but I had converted it to B+W because of some color issues (geeky photo reason: we’re using CFLs in the nursery because they slowly get brighter and they’re new lights, the closet/hallway lights are incandescents because that’s what was there when we moved in and they haven’t burned out yet. When both are in a picture they each turn that section of a shot a funny color… So it’s almost impossible to make the image look right.) Anyway, we’re getting pretty closed to done with the nursery. If he doesn’t come by this weekend I’m sure we’ll add/change something, but it’s ready for a baby either way…
The 3 big additions to the room are: 1) a pet gate for the top of the stairs, 2) hanging some curtains because our cats can jump said gate!, and 3) hanging an awesome family heirloom from the ceiling. Items #1 and #2 were a giant PITA. The gate is great and will be needed anyway. But it was difficult to hang because nothing in our house is really square. Combine that with the fact I used pine blocks to screw it into and they split in half, and I had to hang it twice… That was Saturday. Saturday night Sterling and Kobe both jumped over it (we had a pretty good idea they would). We had already bought the curtains, but Sunday was spend getting them up, and getting a system to get them tight enough to keep the cats out (they snap to the wall).
We also hung the quilt on the ceiling. This was made by my mother’s, father’s, mother (so my great grandmother). It’s handmade and it’s something my Nanoo gave to us for Nikki’s birthday for the babies room. We were both honored to be given such an important piece of my family’s history… we just had to figure out how to show it off w/o risking any sort of damage to it by the pets or the baby when he gets here. Living in a small house and being a bit of a photographer our walls are pretty full…. So I though of the ceiling! It took a little bit of work to figure it out, but with some help (thanks Mom for stitching the second and third rod holders & David for helping with the end pieces!) we got it sorted out. M&D came over Sunday and helped with the install with this and the curtains, and I must admit it looks even better than I imagined! The quilt is really the cherry on top that finishes the room.
I also received a 20″ x 30″ canvas of one of my shots this week. I hadn’t had time to hang it or even sort out where to hang it yet but I wanted to show it off to M&D (it’s of the boat). Once they saw it they insisted on helping to figure out where to put it and helping to get it up (they know it would sit in the box for a few weeks if they didn’t). We ended up hanging it at the bottom of the stairs. We’ll see how it handles the traffic on the stairs but it’s looking good.
The next thing we need to hang is the awesome Boston Marathon posters my sister got Nikki for her birthday. I hate marathons and anything related but even I’ll admit they’re cool. We just need to finish matting them and then find the perfect place in the house for them.
2nd heart rate clip…
Apparently youtube clips embedded on the site don’t work well. I can’t put 2 you tube videos into one post…. and it seems one alone causes issues too, so here are links to the 2 clips:
Baby update!
OK, I know a bunch of people are following the baby’s progress through the blog, so we’re going to update it even more often now if we can. I’ve been working on a PAD project (Photo A Day) and I’m going to try to make them as baby specific as possible. I’ll also be including more updates from the weekly doctors visits as we have them now. The picture to the left is an updated view of the nursery. We still have a few more things to add, but it’s getting closer all the time.
We just went to the doctors’ office for what seemed like all day today. We had a 11:30am appt, but they were running late (as always) and had a doctor out with a back injury. Plus they wanted to get a 10 minute listen to the baby’s heart rate. That mean we had to wait for our turn on the machine. While Nikki was hooked up, the baby was going crazy… He was moving all over the place and you could watch his heart rate change accordingly. We also saw a knee (or something similar) poke waaaaay out further than normal.
I also took the time to record the process so everyone else could hear his heartbeat for the first time. Hopefully those work as they were shot with my P&S camera and they are hosted on youtube…As for everything else, we’ve finished labor 101, 102, and 103 as well as breast feeding class. They have been a lot of fun. We have grandparents class tonight with Nikki’s parents (my parents fly in tonight, but too late to go). We also have the car seat bases in our cars as well as my Mom’s and will get Debbie’s base in tonight before class. That’s about it on the baby front. We’re both very excited for him to be here.
NSOP “Group” meet.
A few of us from my photo forum got together to go have some fun in Newport Sunday. It was Matt, Leah, Eric and Leah’s sister Abby. We had a great time dodging a bit of rain and a snow squall. We managed to hit up Ft. Adams, Castle Hill, Brenton Point, Ruggles, Second Beach, then to Brick Alley Pub for lunch. After lunch we headed to Seal Point and saw about 10 seals. All in all it was a great day with friends playing with new gear and trying to get some worth while shots. Well worth it and can’t wait to have more time to shoot as a group.
