Oct 18 2007
The Big To-do
Hello everyone. It has been almost exactly two months since I’ve written in this blog. I know that you all miss my writings terribly since you’ve all stopped coming here to see if I’ve written anything, since I never do. 
Ok, now that I’m done prostrating myself, on to what’s been going on.
Many, many things have happened in the last two months. Two of my dearest friends, Dave and Kerrie, came out to visit us and we had a wonderful time cruising around San Francisco and spending time with each other, my sister moved to Bilbao, Spain for six months to expand her consciousness as much as possible (since she is at a unique point in her life that allows her to do that), my brother-in-law, Dave, got married to his long-time girlfriend and perfect universal compliment (welcome to the family Shelly), one of my other closest friends, Chris, got a job in Portland after riding his bicycle from Austin, Tx to Anchorage, AK and moved there on Monday, and my best friend Chris came to visit us and tour around San Francisco last weekend and we had a total blast. Yes, it has been insanely busy. It has been made even busier with the quickly approaching Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego on November 2, in which, I’ll be presenting the data that I’ve been working on for the last 1.5 years, and I’m now scrambling to try to get the final bit of data put into that poster. In addition, my life has been made even busier by our insane rowing schedule. We’ve had a regatta every weekend for the last three weeks, and we have one of the biggest ones coming up in two days, the Head of the Charles Regatta in Boston, MA. This is kind of the Superbowl of rowing. Thousands of boats, tens of thousands of competitors, and 200,000 or so spectators make this event one of the largest and most prestigious in the rowing world. I have the honor of being able to race in it this Saturday. You can watch the race live on NESports.TV. My race is event number 15, the Men’s Club Eights, starting at 12:49pm EDT, and we are boat number 54 (out of 72!!), the Marin Rowing Association. You can recognize us by the shortest 7 seat you’ve ever seen (that would be me).
All of this is well and good, and busy as hell. But, it all pales in comparison to the biggest announcement of my life to date. That’s right, this announcement superscedes my 21st birthday, my marriage, the receipt of my Ph.D., any announcement to date. This announcement is so big, that I just can’t say it any other way:
RACHEL IS PREGNANT!!!
That’s right, you read that correctly. Rachel and I are going to be parents. How scary is that? We’re both terrified, but excited at the same time. Rachel is about three months pregnant, 13 weeks, 1 day as of yesterday, and our baby’s due date is April 24, 2008. The pregnancy has been quite an ordeal so far. Poor Rachel has been so sick and tired all the way through the first trimester that I’ve had to do just about everything around the house, which I’m fine with since there is an incredible mismatch of biological responsibility during a pregnancy between men and women. So unfair! The least I can do is try to take care of everything that I can around the house.
Anyway, I’m sorry if you were hoping to hear this directly from me, but trying to verbally inform everyone we know was just too much of a task. We notified our families about three weeks ago at Dave and Shelly’s wedding and it quickly became public knowledge from there.
Everything with the baby seems to be going well so far (knock on wood). We had our first round of genetic counseling yesterday, which included a blood test and a high-resolution ultrasound to determine the probability of Down’s Syndrome, hydrocephalous and other unfortunate developmental diseases. There are still more tests to run, but the doctor didn’t seem unsettled by everything and made some comments as to the lack of evidence supporting the presence of those diseases (that’s a good thing). Below is a snapshot from the ultrasound yesterday:
Isn’t that incredible? You can actually make out the face and the arms and the hands waving around above its head. To answer your question, we don’t know the sex yet. It is still two months too early to figure that out. But, to answer your next question, we will be finding out the sex. That way, we can limit the influx of suggested names to a gender specific name.
So, I’m going to be a Dad, and Rachel a Mom. That is just as crazy as the day I was allowed to drive away from my parents alone, probably crazier. We’ll keep you posted as to the progress of the pregnancy and will (hopefully) keep posting updates here. So, start checking back again. It can only get more interesting from here on out.
Post a comment to tell us what you think of this insanity!
2 Responses to “The Big To-do”
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Cool! Thanks for finally posting a picture of the ultrasound. It’s so amazing!! You know what’s sad is that one of the first things I noticed about the picture is that they misspelled Rachel’s name. Of course, this is coming from someone who has her name misspelled 99% of the time, so I guess I’m sensitive to that kind of stuff
Anyway, congrats again and GOOD LUCK this weekend!! Love, K
[...] (which she loves, NOT!). The tests included a high resolution ultrasound (which was shown on the first post about Rachel’s pregnancy) and a series of blood tests. The ultrasound test looked for something called nuchal translucency, [...]