No, we are NOT naming our kid Bao Bei!

YES! Baby Lanford is due on Halloween 2010. Seriously, our due date is 10/31/2010. It leaves a lot of room for some really great costumes! Think pregnant nun with a priest dad?? Ok, maybe that's a little disrespectful, but it's so tempting!! Please share any costume ideas you have for me; I will likely be late... as were most of my friends and my mother when she had me.

Anyway, back to Bao Bei!

Bao Bei is actually chinese, and it's a sort of an affectionate way to say baby. It's meaning is 'valuable treasure.' We want our child to have a chinese middle name (Jon is 1/2 chinese, in case you don't know), but it's likely not going to be Bao, Bei or the combination.

Speaking of names... we are not planning to find out the gender, so we won't know our kid's name until they come out. I'm leaning towards Julia for a girl and Julius for a boy. :-P

Our picture above was taken on Feb. 22, 2010, the day that we had a positive pregnancy test. We seriously didn't expect things to progress so quickly, so we felt a little (or a LOT) unprepared. As the tag line suggests, we are trying to slowly get ready for what this is going to mean for our lives. We know things are going to change.... a lot... and we're also looking forward to bringing this child along with us in our lives.

Our status as of this week is 13 weeks. The 2nd tri-mester officially starts next week (Sunday, May 2nd). And no, you can't really tell I'm pregnant until late in the day after I've had a large meal. Oh yeah, and I ran a 5k this past weekend and got 3rd in my age group, which I was pretty proud of :). I do have a medal for it, maybe that should go in the baby book, haha!

Jon's update: I feel like somehow I did cause this and I have some place in this, but I have yet to discover what it is. I guess making food for Julie when she wasn't feeling well and trying to make the dogs behave while Julie sleeps for 10 hours is where I've started. Oh yeah and comforting her when she cries at the snuggy bear commercial. Just kidding, she would never do that. And besides, we haven't had a TV since before lent.

Like a good engineer, I've been reading all the manuals for the gestation process. So far, it sounds like a piece of cake.... for me. Apparently, most of my job is done. Oh yeah, except for coaching Julie through severe amounts of pain. She's always appreciated me as a coach in the past. With years of experience coaching Julie I've always been succesful. I'm sure she'll appreciate my coaching for this event as well. HA!

Stay tuned for future updates!