the corner of wall st. and sesame st.

Because its never too early to start thinking of the high cost of college, the folks over at oneshare.com offer real framed stock certificates for babies. This got me curious, so i did some checking: One share of johnson and johnson,  purchased on my birthday, august of 1974 would have cost $99.12. That 1 share would now be 46 shares due to stock splits and dividends over the years and be worth approx. $3046.47 today. Not too bad. I can just imagine our child playing with its friends at school: “Want to play house?” “Nah, how about we play flip this house instead, and use the profits to buy other undervalued imaginary houses in this area?”

DNA evidence exonerates video, mp3 taken into custody

So i was thinking today of random things that our baby will never know, things like:

MTV used to play nothing but music videos.

BetaMax was better than VHS, even though VHS won the format war.

Cassette tapes were good only if you were old enough to compare them to 8 tracks.

Dial up internet.

Pac Man fever.

That after spending 20 years in prison for killing the radio star, new DNA evidence shows  that Video was innocent. it was its cousin, Mp3.

hip to be square

Being a huge fan of the band Wilco, how happy was i to find that they have a couple of items for babies in their online store? There is the Wilco Penguin Onesie, and the Wilco “shapes” bib. This is great news for us. Maybe we can have a baby and still be a little hip at the same time. I doubt it. But hey check it out, my baby has a Wilco Onesie on!

sweet themes are made of these.

So we have been (and i am embarrassed to even say this) trying to decide on a theme for our babys room.  And why not? Weve got a Windows desktop theme, my cell phone has a theme, why wouldnt our babies room have a theme also. Its hard enough when i think about it, but writing about it here and now really allows for just how silly it is. Will the baby care? not even on a good day, im guessing. My very earliest memories about my room start maybe around 3 years of age. We could probably wallpaper the room with old newspapers and the baby would never know. And since we arent finding out the sex of the baby until birth, whatever theme we go with now will almost certainly be different in 3 years. Probably long before that, im guessing.

That being said, right now we are kicking around 3 theme ideas for the nursery: Dr Suess, the jungle, or Noahs Ark. All 3 are great ideas, but its not as much a theme for the babys room but a theme for mom and dad. “Hey the Dr Suess theme sounds great, but what if we went with a vintage guitar theme instead? Or how about a plasma TV theme?” Its funny what having a baby on the way does to you. And for the record, Jen is fond of the jungle theme, so take a guess what direction i bet we end up going.

parenting: the 2nd oldest pyramid scheme

When we were trying to have kids, our friends who already had them were elated, telling us what great parents we would be, how much we would enjoy it, how our children would play together, how much having a baby enriched their lives and brought them closer together, etc, etc. Now that we are expecting, when we talk to those same friends and we hear their children screaming in the background, all they can say is “This is what you have to look forward to. Good luck.” I cant help but feel that someone got one over on us. I imagine we feel the same way people did when they got their first Amway sales kit in the mail. And just like our friends with kids, the Amway people probably went on and on, telling them what great sales people they would be, how much they would enjoy it, and how selling Amway enriched their lives and brought them closer together. But instead of 4 cases of shampoo sitting our closet, we will soon have a baby. We cant wait to be parents,  but im still savvy enough to know that the sales pitch has changed.

baby girls and presidents- who knew?

why is that presidents make such GREAT names for girls? i could go on and on about this, jen hates this whole series of names:

Reagan

Kennedy

Nixon

Carter

We ran some of these by the family this weekend, and didnt seem to have any winners. Weve also been on a big country kick lately, with jen liking the name Britton for a boy, and me liking the name Ireland for a girl.

these people must have 2 dogs and a baby

For those of you following along at home, youve probably noticed that so far our baby blog has been mostly about 2 things: Jen is sick, or Jen is eating. Well, i hate to jinx our good fortune, but today was the 3rd day in a row that Jen was feeling “pretty good.” So good in fact, she was able to ride in the car for an hour to visit our parents for the weekend. They were glad to see us, and we were of course very happy to see them. I cant imagine what its going to be like to travel after we have the baby. Even now, when we spend the nite out of town we have my clothes, her clothes, 2 dog taxis, 2 dogs, and all the trinkets and supplies that go along with having a dog. Mini van? maybe… charter bus? more than likely.

baby steps

So we had a HUGE milestone tonight. Jen actually felt good enough to go out for a little while after i got home from work. This was literally like the 2nd time we have gotten to do that in the last 2 months. And we went to……. the mall. Hey, its not much, but we felt like a couple of foreign exchange students at a shopping mall for the first time.

Its crazy how pregnant women and people with kids really seem to stick out when you are expecting. And when you look up and see a happy little storybook family walking towards you, all color coordinated and such, you start to think to yourself, “wow thats how we will be.” Then you look over and see another set of parents with a kid that has all the energy of a spider monkey on PCP, and you think to yourself, “what have we gotten ourselves into?”  When we got home, i Googled “happy parents‘ and got 31.5 million hits, then i Googled ‘tired parents‘ and only got about 2.5 million hits, so it looks like we are going to be happy more than we are going to be tired. Numbers dont lie. I can live with that.

pregnancy has its perks…

So because Jen has been so ill lately, the Dr. wrote a note to her work saying that for the time being, she can work no more than 30 hours a week. This has seemed to help a little, she is only working 6 hour days now. I tried to get him to write a similar note for me, but he wouldnt do it. I guess thats one of the perks of being pregnant.

food: its whats for dinner

Jen has had 2 pretty good days in a row now. Shes not feeling great, but better than she has in quite a while. She tells me the secret to her success is that she always eats. Lord knows she doesnt want to, that nothing sounds good to her, but as long as she has something in her tum-tum, she seems to feel a little better. Tonight it was cashew chicken. It was actually invented here in Springfield, which blows my mind every time i think about it. It seemed to help her, it made me feel not so good. Apparently i got a bad batch or something. Other than that, shes really tired still. Hopefully she will not be so tired soon and we can go out and shop for baby furniture and do some of the fun things that go along with starting a family.