John and Dash at the Red Sox game…

Dash sporting his new hat… forgive my appearance, I was the hot pregnant girl at the game…

John and Dash enjoying themselves in the pool. If Dash’s lips look blue, it’s not because my camera was off. Poor kid was freezing but wouldn’t give it up…

1. I’ll be 20 weeks this week (tomorrow!). Yay for halfway there!

2. Our little girl’s name is Kate. We’re not sure about a middle name. Kate Elizabeth, more than likely.

3. My work took a downward turn Monday. We all still have jobs, we’re taking a salary cut for the next three months to keep the company afloat. Boo. Just when I was getting ready to buy all sorts of girl clothes…

4. I’m a skittle eating fool today.

5. We’re going to Florida in two days! After the news of Monday, I could use a bigass break.

6. We watched two interesting movies lately (yay netflix). Religulous and My Best Friend’s Girl. Religulous would probably piss a bunch of people off and My Best Friend’s Girl might offend a lot of people. I learned a lot from Religulous and I laughed out loud at My Best Friend’s Girl.

My favorite part is at the end of this clip. If you can’t handle the vulgarity, skip to 2:17. It’s worth it.

7. A certain little girl’s birthday is coming up and I’m super excited…

8. This is going to have to be an 8 on Tuesday. Even though we took a paycut our workload increased. Yay! Gotta love the economy…

From the bottom side looking up…

GIRL baby! She’s perfectly healthy and measuring only 3 days ahead, shocking considering how big Dash was measuring at this point… We’re super excited around these parts!

Yay! I’m leaving work in 3 hours and baby will be on the screen in 6. Hooray!! I can’t wait to see that little nose. Something about the oh-so-common profile pic.

So after much poking and prodding… (kidding) here’s my 19 week pic. Excuse the blurriness. I took it myself.

And here I am with Dash at 19 weeks.

So I’ve heard several things so far. One that it’s a boy because I’m carrying him the exact same and two, it’s a girl because I’m carrying her totally different. (Excuse the frame around the smilies. I don’t know how to make that stop.) Just to clarify, what you’re looking at in that first picture (from the top down) is several internal organs crammed up under my ribs, a whole lot of residual baby blubber, and maybe a baby in there. Somewhere. Seriously, the baby is still super low. I can feel him/her moving around below my belly button. So I think the only thing similar between these two pictures is my internal organs have shifted the same. I haven’t seen anything listed on google about what THAT indicates. Whatever, I’ll let you decide. I’ll be back around 7 or 8 this evening with some results. Hopefully. Show us the goods, baby!

It’s a beaut. Is that how you spell beaut?

So I took this picture around 7 AM the other day. Manual mode, autofocus, no flash. ISO 640, SS freaking 25 and f/3.5. It’s not crystal clear, but I would have never gotten this shot with my old lens. A shutter speed of 25 would have been ultra blurry with my kit lens. It’s about as big as that lens, heavier, and the zoom his 65mm higher. So in summary, vibration reduction gets a GIANT thumbs up from me. I think my next lens will be an 85mm with VR, but that will be a while. Right now, I’m pretty happy with this one. And hell, I’ve got to pay it off first.

1. 3 days and counting until we find out what BDV2.0 is.

2. I dropped my camera lens and need to replace it. I’m thinking about the Nikon 18mm-105mm lens with vibration reduction (it’s the D90 kit lens but I like the vibration reduction) or the Nikon 18mm-200mm lens with vibration reduction. The 200mm is twice as much as the 105mm and the 105mm isn’t cheap. But the 200mm gets reviews like “replaces every lens in my bag”. Sigh. I need to decide by today so it has a chance to get here by the time we go to Florida next weekend.

3. I really want the 18mm-200mm.

4. We had an interesting day yesterday. Manny was going to the vet to get fixed and turns out the poor dog has heartworms! Apparently, it isn’t too bad and it’s treatable, but it’s $450. And then we still have to get him fixed. Good thing our refund is on it’s way. I hate to use it for freaking heartworms though.

5. Manny stayed at the vet overnight to see if he had any reactions to the shot for treatment, and then has to stay IN THE HOUSE for the next 30 days. I have no idea how that’s going to work.

6. Also yesterday, my mom’s good knee gave out on her at work and Dad had to take her to the emergency room. She said she was just standing up and all of a sudden it felt like it broke or slipped out of place. The emergency room did an xray and said nothing looked out of place except for some arthritis (which she knew she had) and gave her an anti-inflammatory shot and a pain shot. She said the pain shot hadn’t helped at all by the time she got home, which I thought was odd, usually emergency room pain shots are pretty strong. She’s supposed to go see our family doctor today. I’ll let you know when I hear anything…

7. In lighter news, Mr. Dash had a fantastic time in the snow for like 5 minutes until he got cold and wanted to come in.

If you didn’t witness the snow you probably don’t realize all of it was gone by noon. I mean, dried up and gone like it had never happened. Alabama weather is crazy.

8. We put shelves up in the garage to move some boxes out of the baby’s room and I went through some of them to see what was baby stuff and what needed to go in the garage. Dash had a particularly good time with the rings from my bachelorette party and the bottles.

9. Excuse the focus in that last one. That’s why I need a new lens. Dropping it made the focus not work and it doesn’t recognize the external flash any more for some reason. I guess it’s just all wonky inside. Boo.

10. My belly has finally popped and I look exactly like I did in the 19 week picture from Dash. One of these days I’ll take a picture, I promise.