Pictures

I thought I would put up some pictures to satisfy everyone’s queries about whether Candice still has a baby in her tummy.

Here we are at 39 weeks :)

And here she is today, 40 weeks + 1 day pregnant:

So, as you can see… there’s definitely still a baby in there. And he’s taking his sweet little time, too… maybe he likes keeping everyone in suspense.

Speaking of… everyone has been really sweet… texting and emailing us asking how Candice is doing (one person even asked how I was doing!). We feel like you’re all waiting with us :). One small note, however, about my facebook post a few days ago when I said that we were “ready whenever he was ready”… just to clarify, I was NOT saying that Candice was in labor. I was just saying we were ready and waiting. After I had said that, I realized that I had just ordered some ribs and was really looking forward to eating them, which made me think, “maybe we’re not ready just yet, but in 30 minutes after I finish my ribs, then we’ll be ready”… sorry for the confusion.

40 weeks!

Well, today Candice is 40 weeks pregnant… and still no action. In fact, the percentage of women who give birth on the exact due date is quite low (so I’ve learned). But I’ve also learned that 80% of women give birth within 10 days of the due date, and, to be honest, this means absolutely nothing to me because it still tells us nothing.

Then again, I quite like the fact that they can’t really predict things like this… it makes it exciting, and, in some way, might be nature’s way of getting you to really want it before it happens. The only statistic that really matters is this: we are 100% having a baby in the imminent, very near future.

I have found myself checking my phone more often when I’m away from Candice, just making sure I haven’t missed any calls… or texts maybe? That would be funny, though, wouldn’t it? I can imagine the autocorrect on the phone making some pretty humorous mistakes with a text message. 

Unfortunately, Candice’s phone has been acting up lately, and it won’t keep a signal! If you’re thinking to yourself, “Hmm, this sounds like just the sort of situation where Collin would have a backup phone in the drawer for just such an occasion.” You are correct :). Sadly, Candice is not very happy with her £5 phone. There was a time when we all lived very contented lives without iPhones, but now is not that time. Once you’re able to access email, facebook, skype, and everything else on your phone… it’s hard to go back to the standard Nokia where all you’ve got is the “Snake” game. This may sound like a trivial thing to have to go without (and it is, in the big scheme of things), but right now we are really missing our families and friends, and somehow having facebook and email in your pocket helps a little. Also, Candice would like me to mention to anybody looking to get rid of an old iPhone 3GS: you have her personal assurance that it will have a good home and will NOT be accidentally dropped in the toilet. IPhone 4’s are also welcome. :)

This week’s highlights

Tomorrow is the supposed, guestimated, calculated-by-the-percentages, day you should have your baby. It’s the day we’ve been planning for and waiting on… but whether that means we’ll see any action from the little guy tomorrow or not, nobody knows. Here are some highlights from the past week:

1. Last weekend we decided we needed to get out of the house so that we could take our minds off the sitting around and waiting. I think there was a small part of us that thought the “watched pot never boils” axiom might just hold true for pregnancy… though I’m not sure what the literal translation would be (a watched belly never pops?). This thinking was probably influenced by Hollywood, where the rule is that as soon as you act like you’re not going to have a baby and drive an hour away from the hospital… that’s when you’ll go into labor. Regardless of what we thought, it obviously had no effect… but that doesn’t mean we didn’t have a nice day out. We went to a place I like to call ‘Little America’… I call it this because there’s a TGI Fridays with unlimited drink refills, free parking everywhere, a Gap outlet, and a Best Buy. This specific combination of things that are thoroughly un-British is refreshing.

We ate ribs and shrimp, bought some shirts on sale at the Gap, and went to the mall where we discovered another little bit of American culture: the mix-it-up-on-a-cold stone/marble slab ice cream store. I had to try it… and, as I suspected, it was a bust. The guy totally didn’t know what he was doing. I asked for a relatively simple combination (so I thought): vanilla ice cream with Oreo mixed in. After ten minutes of waiting on the guy to carefully scoop out the ice cream, flatten the scoop into a perfectly round disc on the marble slab, and carefully place a single Oreo cookie precisely in the center of the ice cream circle, we both just start laughing. The caution exercised by this very British guy was just too typical not to be funny. “Be careful, man! You don’t want to be reckless, someone could get hurt!” <sigh> You just have to go for it. Let it get sloppy. That’s why it’s fun!

2. I learned how to use a Moby wrap! I have to be honest, I was not optimistic about rolling out a piece of fabric that could run the length of my house, and then trying to figure out how to tie my baby to my chest with it. Nonetheless, I gave it a shot.

There was also another aspect of the whole thing that I wasn’t too thrilled about… namely, the “baby wrap vibe” is decidedly feminine. I think that the companies that make these things have picked up on that, which means that they eagerly and blatantly want to convince you that CARRYING YOUR BABY IN A WRAP IS MANLY.

 

 

Exhibit A:

Can you get more manly than this? It’s the kind of outfit that looks like it was purchased entirely at Tractor Supply or Orscheln’s. Camo hunting cap, tight(!) wrangler jeans, a sporty wristwatch, work boots, and white t-shirt that says, “My other shirts clash with my rifle.” The moustache, of course, tells a story all on it’s own: “Anyone who thinks that carrying your baby in a wrap isn’t manly, meet Butch. He’s a former marine who loves to go hunting Bears with his newborn son. Also, as an added bonus, the fabric folds across the back to form a perfect sheath handy for carrying any large hunting knife, finally solving that age-old problem: what do I do with my machete when I’m carrying my rifle and my compound bow?”

In any case, I learned how to use it, but didn’t feel any more manly… maybe I was using it wrong? Or maybe I need the moustache to complete the look?

Well, this post is long enough for now… I’ll post some pictures tomorrow.

10 days and counting

Our laziness in blogging might be related to our increasing focus on eating, sleeping, cleaning, and nesting… in any case, here are a few thoughts for the home stretch:

1. Only 10 days until the due date! That’s craziness people! It could really be any day now, and judging by Candice’s discomfort, it seems as though she would like it to be sooner rather than later. Any guesses as to the day? Any attachments to a particular date? I thought being born on the solstice would be cool (that’s also Tiffani’s birthday, which would be cool for Tiffani, but less cool for the rest of you). Candice doesn’t really have a preference, but if anyone suggests that she’ll be two weeks late, you might get a punch in the gut next time you see her (just kidding, but she’s ready to get this baby out).

2. Last Monday we went to a breastfeeding class at the hospital. The lady who was running the class was a little bit out of control… she fit right into the mold of “midwife-who-is-judging-you-because-you-aren’t-parenting-her-way.” Literally, she told a story of going to someone’s house a few days after they had given birth and seeing magazine’s fanned out neatly on the coffee table. She said, “Hmm, seems like we’ve been spending a little too much time cleaning the house, haven’t we?” In other words, a clean house equals parental neglect. The class wasn’t a total bust, however, they did show two videos that were quite informative… a couple of times, I made sound effects to go along with the breastfeeding video… I’m so not grown up enough to have a kid :)!

3. We took a few pictures the other day… thought you might be interested to see what 38 weeks is looking like:

4. I also took a picture of this:

This is Collin’s famous chopped BBQ… I felt a little uneasy about the possibility of a food shortage after having the baby. We got some great foil containers (the kind with the little cardboard top), and I went to the butcher and got six pounds of beef roast! 14 hours later, we had a crock pot full of BBQ… and this picture is just the part that we decided to freeze for later. The real genius of the whole system is that you can take the container directly from the freezer and put it in the oven, then an hour or so later you can have chopped BBQ but you don’t have to wash any dishes, no tupperware to store it and no casserole dish to cook it! Genius! That is, of course, if I understand how all this works… can anyone comment on how to reheat frozen stuff? Is it okay to take it directly from the freezer to the oven?

That’s all for now, folks. Not sure what the update plan is for baby Bullard’s arrival, but it will be something between the extremes of a live video feed from the birth centre and a Facebook status update a week later. :)

3 weeks and counting!

Friday marked 37 weeks for Candice carrying our baby, which means that we have less than 3 weeks to go until the due date! What’s even more freaky is that people keep telling us, “Well, it could be anytime now, couldn’t it?” First of all, that’s so British to end a statement with a question- stop it. Second of all, that is the last thing you should say to someone who is trying not to be stressed… now I’m just gonna be on the edge of my seat for the next 3 weeks! If Candice  sneezes, I’m googling, “Can sneezing cause labor?” It’s just not healthy to be that high-strung for so long.

Of course, some of the above is for comic effect, and I don’t feel super anxious just yet, mostly because statistically Candice is much more likely to go past her due date rather than deliver early. But still, knowing that it could be any time is a little unnerving.

People have told us that we need to eat out more often since it will be more rare for us to go out after we have the baby. We’ve really taken that bit of advice to heart, I think, and have been giving ourselves permission to eat out just a little more. We went out to a nice place on our anniversary this week, and yesterday we went to pizza hut, which was the polar opposite of the nice place. I think we were the only ones in the restaurant who didn’t have three screaming kids; there was crying, running, yelling… and that was just the parents trying to corral their kids. It was like we were being shown the reality of what our life will be like soon. All in all, I think we’re fine with it… after all, if having kids means you take them to pizza hut on Saturday, we feel like we could handle a little more pizza in our lives.

We’ve also been ‘nesting’ a little bit… but I’ve realized that my nesting is very different from Candice’s. Candice wants to get all the laundry done, while I’m more concerned about having all of my camera and camcorder batteries fully charged, memory cards cleared off, and picture organizing and backup protocols set up and ready to go. All of which, let’s be honest, is just as important as laundry :).

The other humorous part of my ‘nesting’ instinct is, big surprise, related to food. I’ve been really eager to make a giant crock pot full of chopped barbeque and freeze it all. Apparently, I don’t feel prepared to bring this baby home unless I can, at any given moment, have a chopped barbeque sandwich at the ready.

I’d better go, I’ve got a lot of restaurant dining, computer organizing, and chopped barbeque making to do before we have this baby!