Hayley and Kate Minter

Hayley’s kicks are becoming stronger every day. She’s doing more, though. There are now two kinds of activity that I can feel from the outside.

The first is your garden-variety “kick”. The brief, kung-fu thrust of an arm or a leg that gives your hand a little jolt. That’s the most common kind of movement that we feel.

She’s thrown us a new twist lately, though. The “roll”. That’s when I’ll have my hand over her, and I’ll feel an arm or leg or something pushing outward, and moving and turning. It’s a constant pressure for a few seconds, and reminds me more that there’s an actual person in there wiggling around. I guess she’s getting a little cramped in there, but she’s still got a couple more months to cook.

January can’t get here fast enough - I want to see my little girl!

We actually got two comments on the Ultrasound entry. So “big ups” to Holly’s sister Jenny and my former co-worker Mark (who, coincidentally, also keeps a baby journal for his little girl. Great minds think alike.

It’s Halloween tonight, and if last year is any indication, we’ll get about five people coming by the house. We live in a little subdivision, and I think most people in our area pass ours by in favor of the two larger subdivisions on either side of us. I either need to make our yard so cool that people will have to come by, or resign myself to the fact that I’ll have to eat most of the candy that we get to hand out.

On second thought, maybe I _am_ getting the better end of the deal here…

We went for our third and probably final ultrasound this morning. Our little girl has grown in the past ten weeks! She wasn’t moving around a lot, but we did get to see her opening her mouth. She’s quite adorable. We even got a double-check that she is, indeed, a she. (She is)

Everything with Hayley looks fine - all her major organs looked normal, her weight is right in the middle of “normal”, and the ultrasound tech even saw a little wisp of hair on the back of her head. Her heart’s beating and she’s drinking the amniotic fluid like a good little girl.

Other than that, not much new on the baby front. Daddy’s getting over the flu, which has beaten him down all week. Holly’s putting on weight like she should, the nursery is mostly done, now we just have to hang out until January.

Holly’s work threw us a shower today. It was nice - big buffet line of food and lots of fun stuff for the baby. Of course, I knew about three people there, but they were three nice people, so that’s cool.

There was one stuffed dalmatian that I really liked, so I had to fight to keep other people away from it. Kids today have the nicest stuff. Almost everything we got was in pink, though, so if the ultrasounds are wrong, we’re in a world of hurt.

We went for our monthly checkup today. Pretty routine. Holly had her glucose test, so she started the morning with an icy glass of glucola. She said it didn’t taste too bad.

We do, however, get another ultrasound next week. Just a routine check to make sure everything’s going ok - there have been no signs of anything wrong so far in the pregnancy. I didn’t argue with them - I’m not going to turn down another chance to watch BabyTV!

I had to change the link to the Target baby registry at the top of the page. Apparently, they change the registry number every night or something, so the link was breaking. So now the link takes you to the main “Search for a registry” page, and you can just pull it up the old-fashioned way. In other website news, I’ve been playing around with the layout of the whole site, and changed the baby pages to have more of a pink color scheme, instead of the standard blue one of the rest of the site.

Yesterday marked three months until the due date, and tomorrow will be 90 days until the due date. It’s getting closer all the time! Interesting note - if she’s born on her due date, Hayley’s birthday will fall exactly three months after my nephew (October 16) and exactly three months before my sister (April 16).

A busy couple of weekends coming up for us. This weekend, we’re in Richmond for my stepsister’s wedding. Next weekend, it’s off to Williamsburg for my 5th college homecoming. Then, hopefully, we get to rest until Thanksgiving.

We’ve passed another milestone - there are fewer than 100 days until the estimated due date!

Aside from that, not much new on the baby front. I think we’ve got a dresser lined up for the baby’s room, courtesy of one of Holly’s coworkers. That’s the last big piece on our list, aside from a stroller.

The nursery is coming closer to a finished state - we picked up the crib last night.

We went to “USA Baby” first, but we couldn’t even afford to breathe the air in that place. So we went back to the old standby of Babies ‘R’ Us and got a nice crib for about a quarter of the cost of the cheapest one at USA Baby.

We also picked up a mattress for the crib. They had ones in prices ranging from around $150 down to $40. We figured “The kid doesn’t know the difference - we’ll get the $40 one.” So we go to get our order together, and the employee tells us “Oh, you don’t want to get that mattress. It’s too soft, and might increase the risk of SIDS.”

Then why are you selling it?!?!?

(Holly, the logical one, guesses that the cheap mattress might be ok for a toddler bed, and not a crib, but the story is funnier if you don’t think about that. )

So we ended up getting a $60 one, and I put everything together this morning. The room’s actually starting to look like a nursery now, and will look even more like one once I get the two old computers out of the floor.