What we've been up to...

So everything's been "ultrasound" this and "checkup" that and "prenatal vitamins" this and "doctor" that. Reading this blog, you'd swear we did nothing but go to doctors every day. While that's partially true, it's not completely true. Here are a few other baby-related things we've been up to lately:

Picking a Name

We just started getting serious about this one last night. I'm taking my next door neighbor's advice and not sharing any ideas or whatever actual name we pick until after it's safely on the birth certificate. Suffice to say, there are a TON of baby names we don't like out there. We went partway through the 2004 edition of the baby name book last night, writing down names we liked as we came across them. I think we made it halfway through the "R" section before going to bed last night and had written down only four potential names. This may be easier than we thought!

There were more "good" names than that, of course, but several factors prevented us from using them:

- Someone else we know just named their baby that.
- Someone we don't like is named that.
- Name doesn't sound good with our last name.
- Name is easily rhymed with or morphed into something mean.

So, if S-Z goes the same way A-R did, we may be down to less than ten names right out of the gate!

Shopping for Baby Stuff

We haven't really started this yet. We've walked the baby aisles at Target twice, staking things out, and we've started reading this book, which we just received in the mail from a friend.

We read the "Bridal Bargains" book by these people pretty extensively before our own wedding, and if we hadn't run off to plan our ceremony in 72 hours, it would have been very useful. This one will come in incredibly handy this time, since we won't have the option of picking out all our baby supplies at Michael's for less than $100 the night before the birth.

Anywho, we should be registered at one or more places once we figure out what we need and want. We're trying to get this figured out quickly, so it's not a massive rush for us to procure everything we need at the last minute.

Based on what we've seen so far, though, Target will be one of our principal baby suppliers.

Getting the Baby's Room Ready

Our "nursery" was, up until about a month ago, the de-facto place to store unopened moving boxes and miscellaneous crap we had no good place for. You could get the door open, but traversing the room from one end to the other, you might as well have been trying to climb Everest. We've spent the past several weekends going through boxes, sorting stuff and finding places for it (or getting ready to give it to Goodwill).

Once we get the room cleaned up, the next two steps will be to prime the walls white (they're currently this disgusting shade of cat-barf-pinkish-brown at the moment [every room in the house was some shade of brown when we moved in, with about two exceptions... who were these people?]) so we can get a better idea of the space we're dealing with, and moving our old bedroom furniture in. I have about four IKEA boxes leaning against the wall in our bedroom, begging me to put them together and replace our current bedroom set, but one step at a time.

So, generally speaking, life's about getting the mundane stuff out of the way so we can get to the fun stuff in a couple of weeks or so. We're more excited than ever for our daughter, and there's so much to do, but it seems like we're getting closer every day, in more ways than one.

Thanks for reading... it's especially fun to see the hit counter at the bottom of this thing keep rising. I hope you're having half as much fun reading about our adventures as we are having them.