Baby pool almost closed

Two more days to enter the baby pool... Wednesday is your last day to enter, then we're shutting it down! We're hoping for at least three more entries in that time, to set an all-time Broadland baby pool high of 50 entries. We really should have been charging the big bucks to enter, we could have a decent start on a college fund by now... :)

Baby pool entries are flooding in!

Wow! What a response! We're up to 32 entries, a mere day after sending out the invitation. Odds are pretty strong that someone will guess the correct birthday, and we'll have to think up some kind of prize. Besides getting to name the baby, obviously. That prize goes without saying. ;)

I'm also very impressed with the variety of names (both real and silly) that have been suggested so far. I think the front-runner so far, at least in my mind, is "Dynamite Danger Broadland the 1st". Right on!

If you haven't cast your ballot yet, don't be late! The prize we'll think up will be so good that you won't want to miss your chance at it!

Oh, and if you want to see who has entered and what they guessed, check out the pool. (You can click people's names in the calendar at the bottom to get details.) Also, we'll be putting together some bar graphs and pie charts, just as soon as I remember what exactly a standard deviation is.

Enter the baby pool!

When do you think our little one will arrive? Dean has put together an online baby pool so you can guess the birth date. As of tomorrow, we're only three weeks away from the estimated due date of March 28th, 2007! Head over to www.immaturity.ca/baby to cast your vote before March 14th.

Trial run

We were out at a birth information session tonight and on our way home decided to time the drive between our place and the hospital. It was 9pm and traffic was light and we made the trip in a very quick 10 minutes! Good to know!

Other trial runs lately have included setting up the car seat in our parents' vehicles, putting a cloth diaper on a stuffed animal and trying out the baby carrier with said stuffed animal in it.

Due dates

I'm starting to get the idea that this baby is going to be here very soon. I'm 34 weeks and 3 days pregnant and the baby's March 28th due date is less than six weeks away. This really sunk in today when I was paying some bills and realized that our next VISA bill will be due on March 28th! We're one payment cycle from being parents! Better get back to ordering Dean around as he rearranges our home in preparation for Slipper's arrival.

Update on Slipper

Things continue to progress nicely. All signs point to the baby being healthy, Holly continues to get rounder and more prone to waddling, and the kicks have started to settle down into a more sedate rolling/stretching kind of motion. Very good. At the last midwives' appointment, I was able to hear Slipper's heartbeat via a wooden thingamawhatsis that might be called a fetuscope. No electronic gadgetry required! Hooray! Also, the midwives said that Slipper has his/her head down now, which is a good thing, as I understand things. As Slipper gets bigger, Slipper's accomodations get smaller, so turning around is less and less of an option, so the sooner we can get the baby pointed the right direction, the better.

I just took a few moments out from writing this to go watch Slipper's stretching antics. And now it looks like Slipper has the hiccups - possibly because I'm playing the Peter Gunn theme, and Slipper got so excited that hiccups were the result. This kid gets the hiccups fairly often - takes after Mommy, I guess.

That's all for now. Stay tuned!

Silly names for babies

So we're thinking about baby names, and looking through the vital statistics webpage on the most popular baby names for each year from 1997-2005. It shows the top 20, and then goes on to show all the names where there were more than five babies named that name during the year.

(Note: We only got through boys' names, A-M, and no, we don't know/think it's a boy. It might be. "Only your ultrasound technician knows for sure.")

It's a pretty good resource for gauging:

1. the lengths people will go to (spelling mistake-wise) to give their child a unique name (and fail, because in all the cases we saw, at least 4 other people had done the same thing):
   
   e.g. Cristian, Dakoda, Danial, Deklan, Karson, Micheal
   
   
2. the lack of understanding about nicknames in today's society:
   
   e.g. Billy, Danny, Jimmy, Joey, Johnny, Kenny
   
   Not that these aren't fine nicknames, but the people in question would actually be named: William, Daniel, Joseph, John (or Jonathan), and Kenneth. If you're going to put any of the above names on the kid's birth certificate, why not just put Sport? Or Gomer? Or Four-Eyes?
   
   
3. the (small) number of gutsy but cool parents out there:
   
   e.g. Axel, Holden, Julius, Lance

Okay, so I may have given away our top choice (Gomer), but don't let on. Hopefully, we'll be able to at least spell our child's name properly...