Happy New Year!

It's been a month since my last post, I know. Sorry about that, but December was a busy time. Shortly after we learned that my wife was expecting, we began planning a bunch of home improvements. I mentioned the bathroom project before, but also on the list was hiring a contractor to fix some drywall and paint most of the house. It took some time to get there, but the contractor began work in mid-December, a few days after I was supposed to complete an Operational Readiness Review for a project I'd been working on for close to three years at work. Oh yeah, and we were going to host Christmas Eve dinner this year too... Well, because of some old leaky roof problems, it took closer to two weeks than one for the contractor to finish painting the house...and the rooms that were supposed to be painted first had to be painted last...and my ORR got pushed back by 12 days...and we decided to replace most of the window treatments in the house, seeing as the contractor had to pull the old ones down while he painted. To make a long story short, rather than having a full week to clean up, hang blinds, and prepare a Christmas Eve dinner for 20+, we basically had 48 hours. It was 48 hours of moving furniture, hanging blinds and pictures, cleaning drywall dust and old paint, re-installing cover plates over electrical outlets, buying food, cooking food, putting up Christmas decorations and a tree, etc. Whew! We crashed on Christmas Day, but everything turned out well. My project passed ORR, the house looks terrific, and dinner went about as good as anyone could have hoped for. Hopefully January won't be quite so crazy. On the actual baby front, we had an ultrasound and monthly appointment over the holiday break. There's a new baby picture here that looks pretty much like you'd expect a baby to look. The heartbeat was strong, and everything looks to be in the right place. Although I thought you could see all four chambers of the baby's heart pretty well in one of the other pictures, the radiologist didn't agree, so we go back in a few weeks for what will probably be the last ultrasound we get. Yes, we'll have more pictures. On a related note, it's amazing sometimes what we perceive as real, and what makes events, objects, and concepts real to us. I had one of those experiences right before Christmas. In the midst of the "48 Hours of Chaos", my wife and our neighbor took a couple of hours to get a manicure and pedicure. I used that time to wrap the remainder of the Christmas presents I had bought for my wife. Rarely do I put our names on the little adhesive tags on her presents. They usually have names like Rudolph, Frosty, Dasher, and Blitzen on them. This year I wrote "To: Mama From: Daddy" on one of the labels, and that was it. An odd chill ran through me as I looked at what I'd written. I was going to be a dad. Forget the lines on the little pink stick, the ultrasound pictures, my wife's nausea, her growing belly, and the fully-stocked nursery in our sitting room. Simply reading a couple of words on a sticker made it more real for me than anything else so far. Why? I have absolutely no idea; I guess it's just how I am. If I wrote it, it must be true. The rest is up for debate. Well that's all for this post. Hopefully it won't be the only one this month, but you never know...