Howdy strangers. It's been a while, hey? You know if you roll your mouse cursor over the little boxes below the picture up there stuff happens, right? I wonder if, after 3 months off, it really makes sense to come back and try and catch up. Maybe I should just plow ahead without even acknowledging the time off. Ok, that's what I'll do. The baby is kicking away in Erin's enormous belly, an alarm clock tick tock ticking, getting ready to wake us up in a universe where we no longer occupy the center. The first 7 months of the pregnancy were, all things considered, a breeze. But this past month has been reasonably stressful. Erin was prescribed bedrest (she has preeclampsia, which can be very dangerous but is pretty easy to keep in check with bedrest) and she is just NOT a person who does well when unable to do anything. So she is getting a little bit ringy. I am getting a little bit ringy too. I've had to miss a bunch of work to take care of her, which is a bummer in the financial sense, great in the sense that I like being with her and not going to work, and a bummer in the sense that the kids at school are having to deal with a parade of subs. Actually everyone at school has been extremely supportive, and we are very lucky that both of us have jobs that are able to handle us not being around. The baby is a boy, so far as we can tell. There is some small percentage of babies who look like one or the other when in the womb and viewed through that flurry of stuff that you see during ultrasounds, but come out the other flavor. He was pretty clearly a he, but you never know. Also, mostly babies by this time have turned around so that they are facing headfirst out the door. Our kid has decided that he'd rather stay upside down, what they call breach. Just like his old man - ass-backwards from the get go. It's a bit of a drag though, because the combination of him being breach and Erin's pre-eclampsia complicates delivery significantly. There is not an OB in the city of Austin who will deliver a breach baby (it's complicated and somewhat risky, so people don't do it, consequently there aren't many OB's who have recent experience doing it, so no-one does it). If he was turned she could have a regular delivery. If he was breach but she was not preeclampsic we could try to have midwife do a breach delivery, or go to Dallas to do it in a hospital, or simply try various exercises to try and get him to flip, but nope. We are pretty sure that, unless he decides to come sooner or to flip, we are going to have a c-section. Not the way we would have done it if we were given a real choice, but the prospect of everyone staying healthy trumps everything else. Interestingly the date we have for the C-section is March 16th. Which, as you may or may not know, is the birthdate of TWO very good friends of mine - Andy and Zack. Neat. I wonder if he'll be like them? Which is a funny question, astrologically, insomuch as they aren't really that much like each other. Also, I guess this is the Chinese year of the Golden Pig, which is extremely good luck. So we've got that going for us. More soon? Certainly by the 16th...