5 Days Until Its a Boy or Its a Girl!!!

First, your baby update. The baby's skeleton has made great strides in its transition from soft cartilage to solid bone and the umbilical is growing noticeably longer and thicker to accommodate the intense growth spurt over the next couple weeks. Sweat glands have begun development and the baby's joints are enjoying increased flexibility. Sucking and swallowing reflexes are being perfected and finger and toe nails have begun bedding and early growth. They will need to be trimmed within hours of birth. Inside of the ear canal, the baby's inner ear bones have begun to harden and for the first time, the baby can hear its Mommy's voice. And so has begun a lifetime of Mother/Child bonding. Most doctors strongly recommend "pooch rubbing" or the Mother's caressing of her belly as the baby can feel comforted by this even in this early stage.

As for Antoinette's update, as you can tell in her picture, her belly is clearly noticeable now for all of you following along. Unless her belly is exposed or she's wearing a form fitting shirt, its still difficult for those who don't know to tell she's with child. Baby fluttering is still occurring every couple days and we're pretty sure this is actually the little one and not just gas, but you can never be positive until we get a good jab in the ribs, I suppose. Antoinette's moods are good with the occasional, but rare, outburst of hormone related emotion. She gets shortness of breath and an accelerated pulse from time to time, but this is all perfectly normal due to hormone imbalance and blood volume increase. All in all, she's done very well with that. I promise you all I received permission for this info, but through today, Antoinette is up 5 pounds from her starting weight. Her uterus is clearly able to be felt and its expansion can be tracked from here on out.

Finally, from a lifestyle change, we spent a good portion of this weekend rearranging the house (nesting, I suppose). Antoinette was dead set on shifting our weight room to our game room, then moving all of the existing furniture out of the nursery (which was the guest room) and relocating it all to the former weight room. Then we moved a huge, cushy chair into the baby room for late night feedings, etc. We still have closets to rearrange to create space, etc., and we now have a nursery that is unpainted and relatively empty as we await the announcement of the new arrival's gender on Friday. This upcoming weekend, we'll begin "construction" of a suitable nursery, as well as beginning to narrow down a list of potential names, which is a process I anticipate will take about 4 months.