Pregnancy Pictures Take II

Just about the coolest job in the world has to be that of a sonographer, the person who runs the ultrasound machine. The sonographer who took these pictures was so nice to us. She spent extra time with us because Koichi and I really wanted to know the baby's gender, and the baby was being a little on the modest side at the time. However, she gave us a 90% guestimate that we are having a baby girl! I was flabbergasted. I really thought we were going to have a boy. I had 2 previous dreams that our baby was a boy, so it took me a little while to get my mind around the thought of having a little girl. But now I am all girl-power and super excited to meet little Miss T in a few short months. It's hard to believe, but she is over half baked. As of tomorrow I will be 22 weeks pregnant and in the beginning of my 6th month. Just 4 more months before her big arrival.

(Here's the butt shot! Imagine you're holding her over your head, her legs swing up, and oops, no panties! Her feet are at the top, and she's giving you the full moon.)

Koichi and I went through scores of names before we got the top 10 list. And I mean literally scores of names! We each made our own list of names we liked and Koichi's was about 500 names long (for both boys and girls). It was pretty agonizing for him to cut some of them out, but at last, we narrowed it down. The front-runner right now, and I think probably the winner if our baby is indeed a girl, is Lily. We haven't figured out a middle name for her yet. We're still working on that. She's going to get a Japanese middle name and we have a few that we like, but we're still searching for that one perfect name.

The coolest thing to date, well, the second coolest thing because the absolute coolest was seeing her on the sonogram monitor. That was spectacular! But the second coolest thing about being pregnant is feeling her move. For the last 6 weeks I have been somewhat obsessed about feeling something, anything happen in there. Finally, on Thanksgiving night I am positive that I felt her give me a good kick. It was pretty cool. For the last week or so I thought I had maybe felt some movement in there, but I wasn't sure if it was her or just me being gassy, but the other night it was definitely not the gas. So now I am really starting to feel pregnant with the baby moving, and having a name picked out, not to mention the backaches and sore feet that I'm getting everytime I stand up for more than 15 minutes.

Here's some more picks of our little rice ball cooking away!

This is a really good one! You can really see her head, her right arm and fingers, and her torso. She has her mouth open (that big dark spot next to the word "mouth") and it looks like she's saying Konnichiwa!

Here's another pretty good one. She has her arm up by her head like she's waving Hello to us!

Halloween Fun

Every year the school I teach at has an afternoon of Halloween fun for the kids. They get to bring their costumes to school and we have a parade, and then a big party in the classroom. This year the other 1st grade teachers and I decided to dress up. We were "Girls Who Just Wanna Have Fun" and dressed in 80's style clothes and makeup. It was a lot of fun to get my bangs to stand up 6 inches tall and wear blue eyeliner again. Koichi came to watch and help out in the classroom and ended up holding baby Jacob, one of my coworkers' kids. He was dressed up as a pea in a pod. Koichi said he was practicing for next year when he gets to dress up and carry around his own kid. I think this was the first time he's ever carried around a baby. He did pretty good, but was all too willing to hand him off when the first offer came to take the baby. He's going to make a great dad someday soon.