Elijah Joseph

Elijah - "My God is Jehovah" - my paternal grandfather's middle name
Joseph - "He will enlarge" - Ann's paternal grandfather's first name

We talked about waiting until the baby is born before sharing the name with anyone. I have heard other parents reason that people are less likely to make comments or express "opinions" about the name once the kid has actually arrived.

However, when you're at the stage of life where you and all your friends are all having babies at the same time, you have this nagging fear that someone else will "steal" the name you've chosen and then you won't be able to use it. Also, once we knew for sure it was a boy we really started wondering, "Why wait?"

Therefore, we are introducing our baby boy now as "Elijah Joseph Parsell" - "Eli" for short - so as to "lock it in."

Now we can rest easy for the next five months without worrying that we will receive that dreaded phone call in the middle of the night, "So-and-so just had a healthy baby boy and they named him Elijah!"

"Noooooooooo!"

Halfway to Parentdom

A picture of Ann showing off her belly. She is 20 weeks now, so we are rounding second and heading home! Or are we crossing the 50-yard line? Maybe we are just completing lap 250 (for the NASCAR fans) with no caution flags so far! Yee-haw!

As you can see, we still have some work to do with getting the cats not to blink during the red-eye-reduction pre-flash flash.

Basement Finishing Project - Demolition

The first phase of actual work in any home improvement project is demolition, as anyone who watches Extreme Makeover: Home Edition would know. So I got out my bull horn, donned a hard hat, safety glasses, and dust mask, grabbed a wonder bar, and charged screaming into the basement with my demo crew (me). It was pretty exciting.

I removed all the foil paper from the walls in the portion of the basement I was planning to finish, then rolled up the fiberglass blankets. Then I wrapped the rolls in the foil paper and stuck them in my garage, where they would occupy my parking space for a good 6 months. Finally, I used the wonder bar to remove as many of the nails as possible from the concrete walls. There were two that absolutely would not budge, so I left them in place.

That's it. I guess I also spent some time moving all the junk that we were storing throughout the basement into the furnace room area and stacking it carefully. Not really demolition, but necessary before actual work could begin.

Son of an only son of an only son

We had another ultrasound today, at the beginning of Ann's 19th week. We are excited to announce that we are having a boy! Now I can rest easy, knowing I have assured my father and grandfather that the family name will live on for at least one more generation, and the empire will not fall into the hands of some distant second cousin. Errr, something...

I was thinking, the internet will probably be around forever. So my wife's Flickr page, with ultrasound pictures of our son's wee-wee, will probably still be publicly accessible in about 10 years or so when he is old enough to be embarrassed by such things. For that matter, so will this blog post.

I hope you can forgive us, son. I mean, it's such low resolution. You can barely tell what you're looking at. It's not like we posted a 3D movie of it on YouTube.

-Dad

Christmas Cards

Well, December and 2006 are now history. We didn't manage to get any Christmas cards out this year. So to any of our friends who may have been thinking they got snubbed: "Quit whining! You got the same thing everyone else got! Nothing!" Oh, and also, "Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Thank You for the card, picture, and/or letter you sent. That was very thoughtful of you."

In case you are still interested in hearing about our year, here is a quick recap of 2006 for the family Parsell:

February: To celebrate our 3-year anniversary, we took a dinner cruise on the Potomac. Food, music and dancing was all good, but "Dinner Cruise on the Potomac" joins "Sightseeing in New York City" on our list of "Things NOT to do in February." It was bitterly cold (just like NYC!) which precluded going out on the outer deck. Also, the sun had gone down by the time we got there, and they changed our planned course and didn't even take us near the monuments (which are well-lit at night.) We sailed down towards Mount Vernon, I think. We couldn't see anything but small lights on the shore. We didn't even see a good sunset. But it was fun! I highly recommend it, in the summer.

May: I got my building permits and began work on finishing my basement. Little did Ann or I know how long it would end up taking... *sigh* Read all about it by clicking on the "Basement" category here on my blog.

June: My older sister in Florida had her fourth child and first daughter, Kailey, bringing my parents' grandchild tally to six. With my younger sister due around the end of the year, they would soon reach seven...

October: We found out that Ann was pregnant! She is due June 10. Also, Ann's brother and sister-in-law in Denver had their first child, Madox, who is the first grandchild on that side of the family.

November: We went to the Outer Banks in North Carolina after the "peak" season was over. Hotels are much cheaper, and even though it was the second weekend of November, temperatures were in the 70's! Praise God for how that worked out. :) We saw Kitty Hawk, Kill Devil Hill, and the Wright Brothers Memorial, walked on the sand dunes at Jockey's Ridge, and drove down to the Cape Hatteras lighthouse. Good times, no crowds.

December: Ann's parents came to town with tickets to see the White House. We walked through on December 22 and saw all the Christmas decorations. Unfortunately we missed George and Laura by about an hour. As usual, we spent the week between Christmas and New Year's Day in Ohio with our families in Findlay and Cincinnati. A day after we left Findlay to drive down to Cincinnati, my younger sister went into labor and had her third daughter, Camryn.

Happy 2007 to all!

Second visit

We had our second visit to the OB office just before Christmas. Ann's parents, Howard and Judy, were in town so they were able to come in and listen to the heartbeat. Ann has been tracking along with the NFL season so she is 17 weeks right now. Since the Bengals failed to make the playoffs it's going to be much harder for me to remember how far along she is in the coming weeks.

Our third appointment is scheduled for January 15th. We'll be having another ultrasound and should be able to find out if it's a boy or girl!