Since that last depressing post, the bleeding’s stopped and the baby has been going WILD with somersaulting in my belly- so I’m pretty encouraged that my SCH is most likely resolved.  We will know more at our big ultrasound on the 28th (9 more days!!!) and we will also find out the GENDER!  I’m 19 weeks today, and since 17 weeks I’ve been feeling more and more movement.  It is so reassuring to know the baby is alive and well.  So the SCH symptoms are gone now, but now that I’m more active I think my body is falling apart at the hips. I literally hobble around bowlegged all day long =)

We just got back from Cincinnati where I had my first academic conference presentation– talk about nerves! But things went rather well, if uneventfully, and we also got a chance to visit the zoo and the Creation Museum in Kentucky (which should be called the Creation and Fall of Mankind Museum, but that, my friends, is another post entirely).  It was also Dru’s birthday while we were in Cincy (my new favorite word), so we pretended that the whole trip was in his honor and ate lots of ice cream to celebrate =)  Happy 35th birthday, Dru!!!

On another note, our two 10 hour car trips to and from Cincy gave me ample opportunity to learn this valuable life lesson: discussing baby names with Dru is hard work.  He has weird theories about names…. I think he believes there is only one right name out there and we must find it or the baby will be doomed to an unhappy life (kind of a romantic theory, but talk about pressure!).   He also seems to believe in love-at-first-hearing… if it doesn’t make his heart sing when he first hears it, he crosses it off the list.  And nothing seems to make his heart sing (there’s one name we both like, but I’m not sure if he LOVES it– anyway I’m keeping it secret for now).  But Ruby’s full of good ideas: first she recommended Goon and/or Goo-Goo, then she started calling  the baby Wern.  She also likes Rexy (after a dinosaur toy on the tv show Caillou), C-A-T (pronounced kuh-ah-tuh)– I have no idea where that one came from, but she’s said it on several different occasions- and she also likes random nouns like Spider, Airplane, etc. I think this is because I mentioned names like Lily and Daisy and she thought it was a game to just name random things… but then again maybe she gets it from her daddy, because he does the same thing.  Stream Avance, anyone? (You know I love you, Dru.)

Ruby has been informing strangers that there’s a baby in my belly and its going to get bigger and bigger and then come out and she’ll be a big sister.  She went through this whole spiel on a crowded elevator the other day, but thankfully I don’t think anyone else understood a word of it =)  I’m happy to see she’s getting excited about it, but frankly I don’t think she has any idea what’s in store for her!