Mike and Music

Buying baby stuff is tricky.  You have to figure out what you really need and which brands to buy.  It’s also expensive and sometimes generous family and friends give you things, meaning it can be more cost effective to hold off a little bit.  Personally, I want to hold off on buying anything with fabric/print until we know the sex of the little one, too.  Add those things together and you get a couple (Mike and I) who have done a lot of window shopping, but not a lot of buying.  (Note: we have definitely done a ton of research.  We’ve been to Babies ‘R Us, to USA Baby, to indie stores, to resale stores.  We’ve looked on craigslist and on other online sites.  We’ve talked to friends and read books and scoured blog posts and online rating sites.)

Well, our not buying things streak ended today, when Mike picked up a car seat base and a swing frame.  We’ve decided what type of car seat we want to get (just not what pattern), so when Mike was on craigslist and saw a good deal on these two pieces of equipment, he went into Deal mode.  Sent an email (”I’ll pay you in cash and I’ll come right now”), eventually heard back from the woman selling the stuff, and headed off to pick it up today.

Without further ado, these are our first two purchases:

(For those without babies, or for those who had babies some time ago, the thing on the right is the swing frame.  You just pop the car seat into it and there’s a battery-operated mechanism that will gently rock the baby.  Hopefully our little one will find that soothing.  And the best part is, the whole thing folds flat for easy portability!)

In case you were wondering, this is what the baby looked like about a month ago.

Mike and I are finally able to share our exciting news: we’re having a baby!  That’s right, come January 2010, we’ll join the world of people who can’t go out on a whim anymore parenthood.   We’re very excited!

The story

For a number of reasons that I won’t bore you with here, I always thought I’d have difficulty getting pregnant– if I could at all.  Mike and I have been married for more than six months now and began talking about starting a family a while ago, so when I had a couple of missed periods after going off the pill (because of my high blood pressure), I thought I should go to the doctor to get the fertility ball rolling.

They had me start with a pregnancy test, which I thought was absolutely ridiculous.  I thought to myself, “I’m infertile, why are we wasting our time?!?”

I peed in a cup, the nurse ran the test.  It came back with one line right away, and there was a faint light gray line next to it.  The nurse showed it to me and expected me to be excited.  I, of course, had no idea what I was looking at.  Apparently I didn’t look impressed because she then explained the test to me.  Two lines = pregnant, one line = not.

She said she couldn’t tell if the test was positive or not, and took it to confer with another nurse.  Meanwhile, I was in the exam room freaking out.  “What does this mean?  How is this possible?  Is this a joke?  Are you kidding me?  Should I call Mike?  Text him?  This must be some sort of mistake.”

Meanwhile, I heard the other nurse say, “just tell her it’s positive.”

I was pretty  much in shock.  You know, because I’d gone into the doctor expecting to be told I’m barren and left having been told I’m expecting.

After leaving the doctor’s office, I texted Mike to see if he wanted to meet me for lunch.  I didn’t want to tell him over the phone, so that seemed like a good plan.  But he’d eaten just a little bit before and wasn’t hungry, so when he asked how the appointment went, I was vague.  I planned to tell him in he evening when he was home from work, but Kaiser threw a wrench into those plans.

Each of us has our medical stuff set up so that when one of us goes to the doctor, the other one is notified of the test results.  That’s why Mike got an email shortly after my appointment that said “Diagnosis: Pregnancy.”  And that’s why he called me a few minutes after that and asked, “Are you pregnant?!?!?”  So I ended up telling him over the phone after all.

The aftermath

That was on April 29.  We’ve known the news for a while now and have had a chance to adjust.  My shock turned into morning (and noon and evening) sickness, and now that’s turned into excitement.  We had an ultrasound at an appointment about a month ago, and today we had an appointment and got to hear the baby’s heartbeat.

We’re due on January 9, 2010.  In the meantime, check back for updates!

In a mammoth cleaning of the office last night, I’ve got boxes of crap that I’m trying to get rid of. It’s FREE, all free, and you should come save it before I drag it all down to the Salvation Army.

Srsly, get ahold of me TODAY if you want any of this stuff:

Brother MFC 6800 Laser Printer: It is a laser printer/scanner/copier/fax, it is in great condition and works well except for the fact that when it heats up (after printing a couple of pages), it puts a light colored band down the middle of the page. I’d say you can go 2-3 pages with no band at all, and another 10 pages with a band light enough to not be particularly noticeable. After that, you need to give it a few minutes to cool off (or learn to read through the grey band, totally doable.)

D-Link DCM-200 Cable Modem - works like a dream, was my cable modem of choice for years until Cox dropped a new Motorola on my doorstep.

A box full of landline phone crap, including two phones, some splitters, some phone line, various coiley cables, an answering machine

V-Tech 2451 Cordless phone, 2.4 Ghz. We gave up landline phones 5 years ago, I’m not sure what I’m holding onto this for.

A couple of slinkeys (fun alone or in pairs)

Nerf Football

Soccer Ball

3 Juggling bean-balls, never opened

a sudoku book

Internal DSL modem (for PC) labeled only “Intel”

A bunch of misc computer crap, including a couple of TV tuner cards (one with an MPEG encoder that was pretty expensive at one time), an IDE controller, an old motherboard (Pentium III?) Ram of misc origin, a 10/100 ethernet card,

Several (many) sticks of 512MB RAM to fit early iMacs - they only have two slots, so if you have less than 1GB RAM, I’m here to help!

Electric Stapler

13″ Sony TV. Tuner doesn’t work (which doesn’t matter since we’re not broadcasting NTSC anymore anyhow) but A/V inputs still work - a good gaming TV.

27″ Zenith TV that is currently for sale on Craigslist for $35, but I would probably give it to a blog reader for less than that, perhaps for free if there was beer involved.

There’s more than this… come root through the boxes, if you like.

My computer has been down for the last week (ugh!), and that means no updates to the blog as I’m the main poster to MikeandMusic.com.   I’m happy to report that my computer is now working again and I’ll be posting new, exciting entries soon.