It's amazing.

Just a few little things that wow me.

1) Obviously, this little man. And his dimples. I love how you can see all four of his dimples in this picture.One in each cheek, one in his chin ("Dimple on the chin, devil within", right?") and the one I like to call his "thinking dimple" right along his hairline in the middle of his forehead.  He was actually quite crabby this day, but at least I got one good, big dimple-y smile out of him.

2) Finn's rate of learning. It more than wows me. It blows me away. He quickly learned his whole alphabet by sight, upper and lowercase. And his numbers 1 through 10. His sentences get longer and longer by the day. He can have pretty full conversations with people and loves to tell stories about his day. We just recently started going over the sounds that each letter makes. Today while waiting in the car for Nana, Finn pointed at a sign and said "Look up there! It's a 'D'! What does 'D' say? Da-da-da-da!" I was speechless. We spent the rest of the car ride with him yelling out letters and their sounds.

3) Also, with Finn's sentences growing longer, he's taken to telling people all about his baby brother. It goes something like this: "There's tiny baby in mommy's tummy. So tiny. Is my baby brudder. Calloway! He's sleepin' *insert snoring noise* He's warm. He has a blankie."  The first time Steve heard Finn say "Calloway" I think he nearly cried. Adorable.

4) Though we see him only for a short time at night, Steve is also pretty awesome. He works so hard for our little family and I can't express how much I appreciate it. Because of him I get to stay at home and see my kids grow up and teach them to be good, hardworking boys too.

5) I'm happily amazed that I'm about halfway through this pregnancy. 

6) I'm in love with the fact that the baby's tiny jabs have become full on kicks and headbutts. Steve felt him for the first time last night, which is always neat. I'm fairly certain he was perfecting his Charleston in there.

Meet Calloway

Hooray for the awesomeness of ultrasound. I could never be one of those folks who wait until the baby is born to find out whether it's a boy or a girl or a t-rex. Plus I think it's super neato to finally see what's been growing inside of me. And today confirmed what I was worried about, it's not a kraken or a walrus. Just a normal, healthy human baby. And a boy baby at that. (And there was much rejoicing in the exam room.) The tech had some trouble at first because I had drank the prescribed 20 ounces of fluid beforehand, which ended up squishing the baby into a little ball instead of making things easier to see. She managed to get all the needed measurements on the heart, the brain, arms and torso. But the legs were tucked up under the bottom to the point that she couldn't get a measure on them at all, let alone see what was in between them. I got shooshed off to the bathroom and got rid of some of the water (quite possibly the best bathroom break ever. Making a pregnant lady drink copious amounts of fluid and then forbidding her to pee for an hour is on par with torture.) Baby had some room to stretch then and ta-da! Boy bits.  We got a lovely shot of his little bum, his long legs and his teeny boy parts. And of course his little hand groping the bits. The one thing the tech was unable to see was his spine, so I'll be going back again for another scan in hopes that he'll be more cooperative.

As for his name, originally we were settled on Bixby for either a boy or a girl. Then Steve decided it sounded to girly. I decided Steve is crazy. But I made up an alternate list, consisting mainly of traditional Irish names. Not that either of us is Irish, mind you. But Polish names are fairly awful, German names aren't any better and Italian names sound like the names of bizarre internal organs. So, since we obviously have one child with an Irish name, I stuck with that. We narrowed it down to a small handful of choices and figured we'd wait. And then we were putting laundry away one night, listening to a jazz and big band mix, and Steve blurted out "What about Calloway?" I immediately thought it was a genius idea. I've loved Cab Calloway since I was a little girl and he was on Sesame Street. I'm not big on the nickname "Cal" so we'll be calling him Cab for short. Perfect. The middle name has yet to be picked but I have a few in mind.

So, yay for new boys!