Blog of Bermanism

It has, once again, been a really long time since I’ve written in my blog. I keep meaning to write, but I’m either too busy or too tired to get everything put in here. Perhaps, one day, I’ll learn that if I write short posts that have bits of information in them, I won’t have to set aside an hour to write a feature-length novella in order to update everyone on the going’s on around the Berman household. However, I have yet to learn that lesson and will attempt to condense the events of the last two months into a less than epic blog post. This should be fun.

Well, a lot has happened in the last couple months. The news that everyone is probably most concerned with is that we’re HAVING A GIRL!!! (probably) The doctor said he is 85% sure that we’re having a girl, and from what he showed me on the ultrasound, I think he’s right. But, we could always get to the delivery room and find out that we had a boy all along. This the part where we have this magically divined name all picked out that is perfect and we can’t imagine naming our child anything else. Except, that isn’t the case. We’re having a hard time with the name. We had a great boy’s name all picked out, but couldn’t come up with anything for a girl. So, we’ve decided to chill out on coming up with the name and see if anything comes to us. So far, the moment of inspiration hasn’t happened. We’re trying to name the baby for either my grandmother Estelle, my great grandmother Sadie, or my other great grandmother, Sarah. Since we’re not really fans of the original names, we’re going with the first initials of the names, E or S. Ellen or Ellie are the front running ‘E’ names and Sasha (which is the current favorite) is the only ‘S’ name we’ve come up with so far. The truth is that we’ll probably not know what the name is until we’re holding our new baby in our arms and can see which one fits the best. It is a stressful proposition to come up with a name that someone will carry and (hopefully) like for the rest of their lives. We’ll see what happens.

Along the lines of Rachel’s pregnancy, she is now over SIX MONTHS PREGNANT!! How crazy is that? Things are moving along very quickly, Rachel is getting bigger, and the baby is moving a lot!! My books tell me that I should bend down and talk to the baby periodically, so I started doing that. I did it for the first time the other week and the instant that I said something, the baby kicked me in the head, literallly! Rachel said that it was a really hard kick and that she doesn’t trust me to talk to the baby anymore. It was pretty funny, but also pretty impressive. So, I don’t know whether that means that the baby likes the sound of my voice and is excited by it, or whether she hates me and wants to kick me in the head until I shut up. Hopefully, it is the former, but I guess I’ll know for sure when she is 2 or 3 and can literally kick me in the head.

Another bit of new news is that we bought a new car for Rach, a pretty cool mommy mobile. Her old Saturn was starting to have a lot of problems, and those cars don’t really hold up much past 100,000 miles, which Rachel had already passed. Besides bad longevity, Rachel had mostly driven the Saturn into the ground, since her job is to drive around all day long. So, we ended up buying a 2008 L.L. Bean Edition Subaru Forester. It is a very cool car. Guess what color it is. Come on, just guess. If you know Rachel at all, you know it is as red as it can possibly be. It actually looks really cool. We’ve been meaning to take a picture of her with the new car for quite some time, but it has been raining or dark every chance we’ve had to take a picture, and we want a good one. So, check back here on the next sunny day to see a pic of her with her new ride.

The last bit of news that I want to post before I give up and stop trying to catch up on blog posts, is that we have been going through some serious spring cleaning lately. Apparently, Rachel manifests her nesting instinct in a manner that denies the pack-rat side of her personality the light of day. You heard it correctly folks, Rachel is in hyper-cleaning mode! Shocking, I know! We went through the closet in our office, which defied the laws of physics with how much crap was inside of it (dimensionally transcendental?). We threw out or gave away more than half of it, which freed up a ton of space for baby stuff. Then, we got rid of our old, beat up couch and moved the futon out into the main room (we’ll be buying a new couch and rearranging the main room, but the futon will work in place of the old couch for now). Then, we went through our storage closet downstairs and got rid of 3/4 of the clutter in there, then moved the remaining clutter that we kept from the upstairs purge into the storage closet. I’m not inherently a pack-rat, so this was a great thing for me. We still have some work to do, like go through the hallway closet, the kitchen, and our clothes, but we’re making a lot of progress.

Once we managed to clear out the office/baby room, we put up this really cool mural that Rachel had found online (with the very kind help of Ken and Kelly). It is an artists rendering of an underwater scene of a coral reef, complete with dolphins, turtles, and lots of fish and coral. It is really cool and really pretty. It was a SERIOUS pain to put up, but the end result is pretty amazing. I sit there for minutes at a time just staring at it. I took a picture of it, but have yet to download it off of my camera. Once I do, I’ll post it here in an update to this blog post.

Ok, I think that’s enough. I’m going to go relax for a while. I have many more blog post ideas, so I’m hoping that I actually get to them. But, everyone who knows me probably also knows that I probably won’t. Once can dream though. Hope everyone is doing well and is loving life. I am.

Peace.