Lakeview Crew

The little one has grown to the size of a lime!  Wow, it seems like it was just yesterday it was the size of a shrimp.  🙂  Things have been pretty uneventful this week.  Today marks the last day of working in my current position downtown and Tuesday I will begin my new duties at the company in Buckhead.  I’m excited about the move and the new opportunity but I will miss my coworkers, family, and most of all my wife.  The new position will definitely take some getting used to, but it really couldn’t have come at a better time.  This weekend Kayla and I are headed up to West Virginia for the Whorley family reunion.  Hopefully the weather will cooperate and we’ll have a full day on Sunday of eating, drinking, and being marry with a great bunch of folks we haven’t seen in a while.  On the way home from work tonight we stopped at Old Navy so Kayla could pick up some more “comfortable” clothes to take on the trip.  She isn’t showing yet, but her clothes are a little more…snug.  🙂

During a quick visit to parenting.com , Kayla decided to take their Ancient Chinese Gender Predictor Test.  Because, you know, anything ancient, Chinese, and accessible via the interwebs is totally legit!  Haha, I’ll probably eat those words in about 8 weeks when we find out the gender though.  Doh!

Week 11 down!  Woo hoo!  This has been a pretty exciting week.  The baby is approximately the size of a fig, we had our first ultrasound, and the end of the first trimester is in site.  Kayla continues to rock this pregnancy like a champ.  Still no morning sickness and she’s even had a little more energy than last week.  The doctor’s visit on Wednesday went really well.  As a matter of fact, we weren’t even scheduled to have an ultrasound.  The doctor told us that we would only get one if we didn’t hear a heartbeat from the Doppler test.  Well, we were floored when we heard the rapid, rythmic beat of the little one’s ticker coming from the Doppler wand.  But, we just HAD to go home with a picture of our baby!  🙂  Poor Dr. Thompson was no match for our tag-team puppy eye action and in a… heartbeat… we were off to another room to get the ultrasound.

🙂 Meet the rest of the crew:

Our little bun-in-the-oven is now the size of a cocktail shrimp, according to our weekly email update from parenting.com.  Kayla is still doing well.  She hasn’t got the belly buldge (<– Uncle Cam’s term) and no crazy cravings yet.  But her chest is still very sore and she’s pretty tired most of the time.  Next week is a big week for us.  On Wednesday we have our first ultrasound!  We’re both SUPER EXCITED!  We can’t wait to see the first picture of our little shrimp.  I imagine it will look something like this:

Notes about the image: Kayla dropped shrimp into a small aquarium while I tried to time the capture.  Created the ultrasound display and effects in Photoshop.  You can see the unedited shrimp picture here.

So our weekly email, from parents.com, says our baby is nearly an inch long — about the size of a cherry and weighs just a fraction of an ounce.  Hmmm…I guess I still can’t use the baby as an excuse for the weight I’ve gained.   Yet.  🙂 So far, Kayla is doing well.  This is her ninth week of being prego.  She hasn’t experienced any morning sickness and the only discomfort she’s endured so far is an immensely sore chest.   Kayla does seem more tired than usual but between being pregnant and the dramatic cut back of caffeine it’s certainly understandable. We’re super excited about getting our house in order before the baby arrives.  Our first room of attack is our bedroom!  Two interior designers from Lazyboy, Sally and Regina, stopped by yesterday to take measurements and talk about some options.  Their presentation is this Sunday and we can’t wait to see what they’ve come up with.

notes about the image: taken around 9pm on our kitchen table, 60mm macro, two off camera flashes used (key and background)

Cameron, unfortunately, had to work on Saturday when we had the cookout and surprised the pants off the family. So, we had to come up with some way to surprise him. We told Cam that we had a short family video from the get together for him to see. Watch his reaction to everyone else’s….reaction… 🙂

So we decided to surprise everyone with the big news by inviting them over for a cookout on Saturday (July 30th 2011). During the festivities, we wrangled everyone in front of the fireplace for a group photo. After everyone was in position, I then asked my lovely assistant to grab my “reflector” because we just weren’t getting enough light on our subjects. Unbeknownst to them, this was no ordinary reflector. This was actually a poster board Kayla and I had decorated the night before with the word BABY pasted in big bold letters. You can see the reflect…er poster board at the end of the movie, during the credits. Once Kayla had the reflector in place, I told the group that we were going to take a test shot. It was then that Kayla and I counted to three and she turned around the board to reveal the hidden surprise and we yelled “WE’RE PREGNANT!” Well, you can see everyone’s reaction below. It was priceless. I will cherish this memory forever.