No news yet!

No news yet. We have a scheduled induction for Tuesday Feb 5th - so unless the baby decides to come before then, that is the date. Wei Yan says there is wifi at the hospital, so we'll be able to post some updates here when the baby arrives. I'll have my last check up with the OB on Monday and that is when they'll make the decision to have me go in Monday night or Tuesday morning.

Today is the baby's due date

Yup, today, Jan 28th is our baby's official due date, and yes, there is no baby yet. We'll see the OB tomorrow and see what she says. He's still moving around in there and I don't feel much different. I'm supposed to be sick of being pregnant by now, but I don't think I'd say that I am. I might start getting sick of being asked if we've had the baby yet or folks saying, "so when is he coming?" (as if I know this.) I guess I must be used to being so big & clumsy & tired, cuz I am not really sick of being pregnant yet. I may get sick of wondering when he's going to decide to come out and what I'm going to do with myself as we wait....

Oh, and yes, we must just be wasting time because we went to go see Rambo yesterday evening. Talk about violent...terrible movie, but if you just want to see some gore, and violence for violence's sake then yes, this is the movie to see.

Movie Reviews

I'll keep the spoilers to a min, but just some thoughts on the few movies we've watched recently.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail
We got this from Netflix since it's a movie it seems we should watch. So now I get a few more movie references that I wouldn't have gotten before, but I think the references are more funny than the actual movie. I guess I just don't get British humor. It was pretty much a waste of time for me...I laughed out loud maybe once? Totally not my type of humor.

No Country for Old Men
Wei Yan's pick here. I went in with no expectations. Interesting, weird, a bit disturbing. Not your run of the mill Hollywood crime/suspense movie. Gotta pay attention here and only watch this if you like the off the beaten path/different movies.

27 Dresses
My pick this time. Tired from the pregnancy and ready to just turn my brain off for 1.5 hours, so this movie delivered. I'm impressed with Katherine Heigel's ability to pull off comedy (Knocked Up was funny too) - not that the movie was as much of a comedy as Knocked Up, but it's just harder to pull off funny than you would think. Don't expect much from plot or predictability, but it got the whole theater laughing more than a few times and satisfied my need to just turn off my brain for a few & relax.

27-12???

So, I have to admit that I haven't actually watched a Laker's game in forever. We watched a special on a new NBA TV channel that we got recently (it just made me really depressed). I really miss the days of Kareem, Magic, all those guys...

But is anyone else amazed that the Lakers are 27-12??? Crazy. I mean the line up the Lakers faced last night - Mello, Iverson, Camby, Kenyon Martin??? Not to diss on my own team, but the Lakers - the all the injuries...I hadn't checked the stats in awhile, partially because I figured out "playing great" would eventually fade, but it just blew my mind.

Shoyu Weenies!

We have 1 more week to go, and I can't remember the last time I had a hot dog (pregnant women are supposed to be careful that they get heated up enough to kill any lysteria and also the nitrates are not supposed to be so great for babies/kids). But after reading this story, I'm craving some shoyu weenies!

Anyway, if you've ever wondered why Japanese Americans love hot dogs and ketchup, read that article! I can't eat eggs without a LOT of ketchup...I mean, no ketchup = I'll pass on the eggs. Pretty interesting story and I guess I never wondered why other asian americans or americans seems so snobby when it comes to spam, hot dogs and canned corned beef. I guess I've got no qualms because I grew up eating it and it's all because of the forced introduction of such foods in the internment camps.

Snowy Saturday

We finally got snow, but it was a bit of a bust in my opinion. Just a little accumulation on the grass, but nothing on the roads or sidewalks - so I think our neighbor's kids are having a tough time gathering up enough snow to make a snowball. We should get some freezing overnight for the next few nights, but that's about it. At least we got a little precipitation to help with the drought.

Sadly, Carolina couldn't get it together to beat Maryland on their own home court. My hopes that Duke & State would lose to make our loss feel a little better were not fulfilled and I see that even the Bruins lost today as well. Carolina just didn't bring enough heart to the game in my opinion. And the look of surprise on Syndey Lowe's face when State won in overtime was really kind of funny - you aren't supposed to look that surprised when your team wins. :-P Really, I'm just bitter we lost. Although, I don't like for Carolina to go unbeaten too long, since I think they have needed a wake up call to bring their A-game when they play.

12 days to go

 

I was measuring a little on the big side, so the doctors decided to do an ultrasound to make sure everything was ok. Everything looks fine, and they concluded that I'm measuring big because the baby is big. The ultrasound is not exact (they give estimates plus or minus a pound) - but the machine calculated that the baby is 7 lbs 8 oz and about the 61% percentile. That lines up with the 30 week ultrasound that said he was in the 60th percentile. Course they also said his head is measuring in the 86th percentile - so I told Wei Yan that was his fault. But, yeah, could be any day now. The ultrasound lady was nice enough to switch it over to the 3D ultrasound and print out a few pictures - the quality is not that great, but you can see that he's got some very chubby cheek and we could even see his poutty lips in the profile.

They said next week that they will go ahead and schedule an induction for sometime in the 41th week just to have the appointment booked, but that a lot of women go into labor by then. So at the very least, we'll be having an avergage to larger than average baby - if he comes out at 8 lbs, I guess that means that all the newborn clothes will be packed away right from the start!

Holiday Party

 

Our company had it's annual holiday party. Oddly enough, the 2007 party is in January of 2008 - it's like 60% savings to do it after the new year, and frankly it's nice to be done with all the holiday stuff before going to the party. Probably our last night out with the whole dressing up & going out thing for a while. I made it to 11:30pm! (OK, I did sleep until 11am and then took a nap after the State game).

UNC vs. State: Round 1

The most entertaining 1st half I've watched - EVER! 'Nuff said! It was so bad, it's like you can't even talk smack - ESPN did it all for me and anything past that is, as my college friends liked to say, "like kicking a puppy". No tinge of guilt as I laughed throughout the 1st half though. The 2nd half got a little boring...don't know why Carolina didn't keep running the ball other than they had no motivation.

names

We're still deciding on names and yup, feeling the pressure. Some of the Japanese names that are in the running for middle name are:
* Tsukasa - My maternal grandfathers name. I was pretty close to him, and everyone called him "Tiger" which is kind of a cool nickname. Course everyone called him Tiger because no one could say his name. It would be kind of cool to keep this in the family, but I'm not sure I want to give our kid such a hard name to say/pronouce/spell. Course I guess on the last name he is getting off pretty easy - but this is NC, so he's gonna have to spell his last name all the time anyway...
* Takahiro (or something with Taka in it like Takashi, Takaharu) - I like Tak and Taka. Wei Yan likes Tak and maybe the Heroes series is having a subconscious effect.
* Yutaka - I think this is my paternal gradfather's brother's name. We always just called him Uncle Taka and he had a shop called Tak's automotive (still exists today). But I think this was actually his formal name. Might be a good option in case T ends up not being a good middle initial depending on what we pick for a first.

Sadly I have no idea what any of those names mean. And if I find a website with meanings - I'm reading whatever characters I recognize in chinese. If any family members are reading this or friends that have some knowledge of japanese to share or family history to share, please do. Course, like I said, we may end up just going with what sounds the best with the 1st name we decide on....whenever that happens! ;-)

latest pic

Me a month ago:


Me today with almost the same outfit on:

 

hehe...i look more tired in today's picture for sure.

Week 37

Today (Monday) the baby is officially full term. So if the baby come before the official January 28 due date, he will be considered full term (not premature) even though it would be early. This also means that the baby's due date is exactly 3 weeks from today! Our furniture is probably going to come after the baby is due, but we've got the pack 'n play set up and plenty of clothes and diapers. A lot of folks ask me if I'm ready to have the baby, but I'm still feeling like we need more time to get ready for the baby, it would be nice to do a few more things to clean up the house and wrap things up at work. It's a big relief to know that the baby is now full term and still elbowing and kneeing me vigorously. My hip was hurting a bit the last 2 days, but nothing too bad or uncomfortable - just tired these days. I'm sure I'll get to that point though, because folks tell me all the time that the last few weeks you get to the point where you are ready to just be done with the whole pregnancy thing.

locked & loaded

just got back from the OB. he was pretty sure the baby was head down, but after I mentioned that the last 2 weeks that the other docs were unsure, he went ahead and did an ultrasound to confirm. dr. henderson is a pretty funny guy - real dry sense of humor. overall everyone that i've met at the practice is pretty cool, they all seem pretty laid back. but, yup, he's turned around. funny though, i don't think that it feels any different - although the last 2 days I've felt slightly more pressure and the baby isn't as active as he was before, but didn't seem significant enough to mention. so no scheduled c-section at least.

18 degrees this morning

Woke up at 6:30am this morning. Maybe my body is preparing for motherhood. Eating breakfast this AM, the news said it was 18 degrees outside. Then when driving to work at 8am (yes, that's early for me) I see a guy is khaki shorts getting out of a car in front of the apartments by my house. It was early, so I had to do a double take just to make sure I wasn't seeing things! Yup, shorts.

what a day!

*sigh* today has been pretty frustrating. I got a call from our neighbor at 11:30 this morning that water was spraying out of a pipe on the side of our house. We rush home and discover that we forgot to winterize the irrigation system - the drought along with no watering for months and the slow growing lawn messed up our usual declaration that all watering & mowing shall cease & get ready for winter. So Wei Yan got the water from flowing down the grass and into the sewer. Thankfully our neighbors driveway is close to this side of the house & she could actually see the pipe & hear the water going down the storm drain. Had we come home that evening when it was dark, we would not have seen a think from our driveway.

my laptop is still now working quite right. printer won't install correctly. well, correction, it was and then I was trying to install hp's full software so that i could get the scanning and all the other bells and whistles to work and now it won't do a darn thing. *sigh* and had to reboot our cable modem & router this evening since that was acting up. this is after spending a few hours over the christmas break trying to get a vpn dialer working so that i can log into work. well, i might just have to give up before i throw the laptop across the room. i hate software sometimes.

Hilarious!

Back to work today. I woke up at 4am this morning - decided to eat something and try to go back to bed. Luckily I was able to get back to sleep, but I am resigned to just having to sleep when I am sleepy and get stuff done when I am feeling productive for the next few weeks. Anyway, I was scared about how work was going to go when I was falling asleep over Christmas break after only being awake for a few hours, but today wasn't too bad. Since most of our company has off the last week and a half, there weren't too many emails. So I got to read the daily Dilberts and for some reason I really got a kick out of this one. Enjoy!

My co-worker brought in this comic for me as well. He crossed out "Customer Service" and put "HR" instead and posted it on my cube (for those of you who heard that story.)

Oh, also today during lunch we got a few minutes of snow! :-) Not enough to stick anywhere, but it was kinda cool - or at least a perk of it being SOOOOO cold today! It just looked like there was some pollen in the air for the most part, but then there was a few minutes where it actually looked like it was really snowing. 1st snow of the year.