from across the Atlantic…

Your baby’s sensory development is exploding!

Her brain is designating specialized areas for smell, taste, hearing, vision, and touch.

Some research suggests that she may be able to hear your voice now, so don’t be shy about reading aloud, talking to her, or singing a happy tune if the mood strikes you.

Your baby weighs about 8 1/2 ounces and measures 6 inches, head to bottom — about the size of a large heirloom tomato. Her arms and legs are in the right proportions to each other and the rest of her body now. Her kidneys continue to make urine and the hair on her scalp is sprouting. A waxy protective coating called the vernix caseosa is forming on her skin to prevent it from pickling in the amniotic fluid.

(this picture is the "size" of baby this week next to a quarter…thanks again to babycenter.com)

So here are the pictures of the baby-belly-debut!

Assuming that we’re at 19 weeks pregnant, so almost 5 months!  Baby belly is really starting to poke out now…but keep in mind, these pictures were taken right after dinner…with my tight clothes on!  Ha, ha!

Here is the links to the two pics so far:
baby belly 1
baby belly 2

Happy soon to be weekend!

This weekend my thoughts will be with my brother Kristian and his girlfriend Katrina, who post weekend will be MARRIED!

They are having a very intimate wedding ceremony tomorrow afternoon with just immediate family.  Unfortunately Lars and I were not able to make the trip, but Kristian and Katrina will be in our thoughts and prayers the entire day.  I’m sure the ceremony will be beautiful and magical…they are just beautiful people, themselves.

I can’t wait to see pictures and to hear all about the glorious event…

Best of luck you two!  I can’t imagine two people who were better molded for each other…I love you both dearly!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Want to wish you all the best today…what a wonderful holiday that brings families together!  I will especially be thinking of my own this year, as I am millions of miles away!

I have such fantastic memories of all the years of Thanksgivings growing up…my mom has 2 sisters and they split up the holidays…so Auntie Sharon did the 4th of July, we did Thanksgiving, and Auntie Darlene did Christmas.  I guess Thanksgiving felt extra special since it was at our house and I was a part of the entire day (make that week!) of preparations.  The whole family would come to our house for dinner and we’d all crowd around the table!  We must have been like 16-20 people every year…it was so much fun to see everyone!  And then the family from out of town would sleep over and we’d have leftovers the next day for lunch and then we’d hit Molbaks, as they put out all their Christmas galore the day after Thanksgiving.

With so many years of celebrating together, there are just so many fun memories!  One year the power went out and my parents were just freaking out…try cooking a turkey for 20 people then!  One year we had snow the day of Thanksgiving…which does NOT happen often in Seattle!  And one year mom and I both ended up coming down with the chickenpox…so I spent the day running around naked (at about 6 years old) with calamine on all my spots!

Anyway, I wish you and yours a wonderful Thanksgiving together!  As much as I will miss my family in Washington this year, I feel so lucky to have such incredible family and friends in Norway with whom I am starting new traditions!

Yipee!  We finally bought a new car!  We sold our Toyota Corolla in September while my folks were here, so we’ve been relying on Lars work car for the past couple of months.

We found out we were preggo during our search for a car…which altered what we were looking for, just slightly.  So we settled on the Volkswagen Touran which you can check out on this Volkswagen site if your’re interested.  It looks a lot like a mini-van in these pictures…but its more of a little-big car.  A really nice size for a family of 3!  And it has a lot of options as to taking out and/or moving around seats.  Oh, and we bought a 7-seater!  FUN!  I can’t wait to pick it up tomorrow night!

Just wanted to apologize for the lack of blogging lately too.  I’ve been absolutely swamped at work since I started again after my cold…its taken a LONG time to get caught up!  The past couple of days I’ve worked until about 1730 and haven’t been home until 2000!  Too many late nights!  Although the plus side of working so late is that I sleep like a baby!  Luckily I get to work from home tomorrow…so it’ll be nice to sleep a little late in the morning!

We’ve been invited to the Randall’s for Thanksgiving tomorrow night and I’ll be making my dad’s stuffing and my mom’s spinach salad!  For those of you who have tasted them, you know why I’m asked to bring them everywhere I go…they are fantastic!  It’ll be really fun to see all the kids too…and I haven’t seen the Randall’s in forever since I’ve just been so busy lately!  It’ll be fun to celebrate the holiday with friends!

Head to rump, your baby is about 5 1/2 inches long (about the length of a bell pepper) and he weighs almost 7 ounces.

He’s busy flexing his arms and legs — movements that you’ll start noticing more and more in the weeks ahead. His blood vessels are visible through his thin skin, and his ears are now in their final position, although they’re still standing out from his head a bit. A protective covering of myelin is beginning to form around his nerves, a process that will continue for a year after he’s born.

Happy Thanksgiving week!

I am attending a Thanksgiving dinner with the American Chamber of Commerce in Norway tonight…and then we were invited to Marit and Scott next week on Thursday to celebrate with their family!  I hadn’t been planning on really celebrating Thanksgiving this year, but these last minute invitations are SO appreciated, and I’m looking forward to them more than I had thought I would!

As for pregnancy updates…I have noticed a couple of funny things that I thought I would share, just for fun!  You can leave me comments if its "fun" that you also experience or if you have more "fun" experiences that I might have to look forward to before long!

The first thing…and the most bizarre that I have found so far is this.  Underwear drives me absolutely insane these days!  Hence the underwear picture in my blog today…and no, I am not exactly trying to sqeeze myself into tiny, red, lacey, thongs!  But here’s the dilemma.  1) I hate having things across my belly lately, so I find that I need to roll the elastic down a bit under my stomach; 2) then the elastic feels too tight across my lower stomach when I sit for long periods (at work); 3) when I roll the elastic down, then its super low in the back too and that has started bothering me; 4) and finally, when I have the elastic rolled down…my maternity pants pull the undies even further down when I walk!  Phew, I’m telling you…this underwear scenario is just exhausting!  Not really sure what the solution is, but I’m thinking of trying low-cut undie-shorties to see if they stay up…but not to far up…better than the ones I have now.

My second thing is mustard.  Yes, mustard.  I swear, I could squeeze the bottle straight into my mouth with nothing else and just love every second of it.  I have restrained myself from doing that…but Lars just sits with his mouth gaping open every morning while I lather my bread with mustard before I throw cheese and turkey on there.  This weeks addition to my turkey (but mostly mustard) sandwich is pickles.  This shouldn’t surprise my parents…as a kid I would come home from school and for an after-school snack my mom would wrap a huge dill pickle in a napkin and I would munch happily away.  Its been awhile though since I’ve been on a pickle kick…and I’ve heard that its a totally normal/common craving during pregnancy.

My last and newest craving is for icecream.  Also, probably not a huge shocker for any of you reading.  But I’ve never been a huge icecream fan in the past.  I’ve always been a salt-craver, so I’m a little surprised at this sudden urge for sweet.  Doesn’t seem to matter what kind of icecream either…although right now a fruity sorbet sounds pretty darn tempting.

Anyway, just wanted to give you the peanut-update…I’ll try to get some belly-bump pics up soon!

Ha, ha!  Check out this article on cnn.com about who got written in as a candidate for presidency in the election!

The results are from Florida, and Tiger Woods (along with many others) got written in on ballots!

Some other fun ones were Homer Simpson and Willie Nelson!  Hillary Clinton got the most write ins, with Jesus coming in second with 23 votes!

So we had the ultrasound last night…and little baby-peanut was just not ready to show us the goods!

The jordmor (nurse) who did the ultrasound didn’t get to check everything in baby’s legs that she wanted to see either, so we are going back december 11th to have yet another ultrasound and to see if we can determine the sex then!  I don’t think I’d have another ultrasound just to determine the gender, but since the nurse didn’t get through her checklist anyway…we’re going back.

So we’re in suspense a little longer!

The ultrasound was fun though…the baby had its hands up by its face and was waving them around.  And it gave one good kick with its legs (as you can see in the picture) and it was really fun to see how long the legs are!  You can also see the shoulder, elbow, arm and hand in the same pic.  We also got a good peek at baby’s face straight on, and that was really something.  Of course you can’t make out features, but its just so bizarre to see someone deep in there!

Here are all of the ultrasound pictures from yesterday, but the one in the posting is my favorite!

strip of three

baby’s head

baby’s head (closer)

baby’s legs

So today is the big day…at 1400 we have our next ultrasound and will hopefully be able to determine the gender of the baby!  I have been counting down the days just to see the baby again…I can’t wait!

Last night Lars and I sat on the sofa for a couple hours and browsed baby names lists online…let me tell you, it was hysterical!  I went to mostly nordic sites since there are a lot of "American" names that just don’t quite convert to Norwegian.  I must have read at least 1.000 boy and 1.000 girl names, and let me tell you…there aren’t too many that I’m crazy about!

We have had "baby" names agreed on for many years…but that was before we were pregnant.  Now that we’re pregnant I’m looking at whats most commonly used in Norway, and some of our names are on that list.  So its made me reconsider…but like I said, its hard to find replacements!

Plus Lars and I are both pretty sure we’ll need to see the baby first to choose a name thats suits it…so we’ll see!

Anyway, check back tonight or tomorrow for the gender update!  YIPEE! 

Well, according to the scientists at the University of Calgary…the egg came first.

Well, it’s still unclear whether chicken eggs or chickens came first (the intended question in the original riddle), said Darla Zelenitsky, a paleontologist of the University of Calgary in Alberta who was the first scientist to closely analyze the dinosaur nest.