Pregnancy Journal

Well, this is daddy's first post (for a second I thought I'd write Daddy, with a capital "D", but that would be weird!)  I'm so excited our baby boy is on the way, and I hope to capture some of the fun, anxiety, fear and exhileration of having a little booking cooking in the oven on this blog!

This weekend, we went shopping for a crib. Olga and I don't like shopping, but looking for stuff for our baby is definitely different. We read up a little bit about cribs on the Internet, so we knew that we were interested in the Pali brand. We had to drive half an hour out of the city to find the only place that sells this kind of crib. We absoutely loved a model thta was on display, and as luck would have it, that floor model was on sale! I picked up the crib the next day and can't wait to assemble it.

I'm also really excited about decorating the baby's room. There are so many fun "boy" themes we can do -- rockets, sports, jungle animals, stars! I'm usually not a very handy guy, but I'm really excited about decorating our kid's room. I should probably get started before it gets too hot -- I wouldn't want to expose Olga to the heat *and* fumes!

We have also started narrowing down a name for the boy. We're thinking of picking Mikhail - it's a name that means "he who resembles God" in Hebrew. Mikhail (aka Michael, Mikail and Misha for short in Russian!) is the patron saint of soldiers and the arch-angel. I really like the name because of its historical and religious connotations. I also like that it's versatile - our families can pronounce it easily on all three continents

While baby Misha is still cooking (i'm just about to enter y 24th week of pregnancy!), he had a beautiful little sister-cousin, Zara, born yesterday May 2nd. This year, my husband's family is being very productive (or shall i say reproductive) - what a happy happy time!!! God willing we're having 3 babies just in his immediate family (sister just had Zara + sister in law is also expecting).  His mom is going to be quite busy hehehe :)
As a side note, i don't appreciate that english word cousin doesn't allow one to specify if it's  sister or a brother cousin like most other languages ;)  In russian it's much simpler and we usually end up calling our cousins sisters and brohers anyways!

Well, we're hopefully going on our first baby shopping trip today - woo hoo!! Going to look at some cribs and get some presents for baby Zara (and somth for her big sister Minnah!). I'm very excited to go and start spending money haha! The only new thing we got so far for our boy, is a onesie that our friends bought last weekend that says "automatic sprinkler" hehehe!  Indeed!

We have to also start preparing the nursery soon now - don't want to wait until it's summer and too hot to move around + i will probably be huge by then! My belly is growing faster than ever and the kicks are gettng brazenly strong :)  I hope there are growth spurts and times of slow weight gain cuz at this rate (2lbs/week), i'll gain another 16*2 = 32 lbs at least (ouch!).  Gosh - my whole belly just moved like a wave - guess Misha did a flip or something :)  I've also noticed darker skin + more hair growing on my belly - eeew! hope this phenomena doesn't stay for life ;)  ok - off to shopping!

PS: lets see if daddy decided to take initiative and blog as well (like i noticed someone's husband did!!)

I am currently 22 weeks pregnant - middle of second semester and feeling pretty well (not too big yet and all the fatigue of 1st semester is all gone).  Seems like a good time period in pregnancy, however, for some reason i am still impatient to get through it and get into my last trimester.  It always seems that other people's pregnancy goes by so quickly (e.g. few other women in the family are having babies and it seems that it went by so fast for them - i guess just like it seems that other people's kids grow very quickly...).

I have read so many books, diaries, websites on pregnancy now that i am having a hard time finding new things to learn about!  Hopefully, we can soon take that labor class at our hospital too. I stil have 4 months to go and it just seems so long right now (esp. i'm dreading the hot summer and no A/C!!).

At the same time, i'm pretty sure i will look back on this experience and wonder where the time went. Bilal commented yesterday on how i like to rush through things and then look back on them... I can't believe it's been 3 years since we graduated college already - time does fly when you look back on it, but i am still impatient!! hehe :)