21 Weeks Worth of Belly

The belly pictures are finally here. I hadn't taken any like these until now primarily because I wanted a more dramatic reveal. However, now that we're beyond the halfway mark, I thought I better get some images of Brandi posted before the babies arrive.

These were actually taken last week. That puts us somewhere around 22-23 weeks at the moment. Brandi has her first visit with the perinatologist next week, and I think we'll be scheduling weekly appointments with one doctor or another from here on out.

I've still got some more sonogram images to post, but they're from a few weeks back. I'll get around to those a little later this week. For now, enjoy these belly pics, and send us a message if you have any name suggestions (see last post).

It's a Boy! And Another Boy!

Yeah, that's right. Both boys. We're both excited, but more for the simple fact that now we know than because we were hoping for them to be one gender over another.

The idea of having both a boy and a girl had crossed our minds. It would have been a quick, neat route to a well-rounded family: both a son and a daughter while only having to endure the trials of a single pregnancy. But now we're excited by the possibility that they could turn out to be identical. I guess we'll continually find new things to get excited about.

This means we can start on the nursery now. And start picking out clothes and toys and accessories. And names! For a month now, we've been working off the assumption (based on the slightly-too-early assessment of a well-meaning sonogram tech) that one of them was a girl. So all the names we've been considering were female. Now we have to start over from scratch with names for boys. And we have to come up with first and middle names for two. Four names in all, and they all need to sound good together.

We only know that we don't want anything matchy-matchy: no same first letters and no rhyming pairs. But they can't be too different either. I can't really see calling out, "Keegan! Bob! Come here!" We're considering Irish names, since both our families have roots in Ireland. Brandi's grandfather was a first-generation Irish immigrant. My grandfather was Irish and Native American (there's more to it than that, but those are the two that always stuck out to me). But we're also considering names with Swedish, Germanic, and English origins.

Actually, I've even jokingly considered selling their names on eBay for their first year. I'm just now sure how well that would go over. I would really be disappointed (and certainly ridiculed) if we only got $500 to name them Doctor Stupido and Captain Buttwipe. I'm not sure how many bids we would get if we put too many stipulations on the deal.

Anyway, we'd be happy to hear suggestions from any of our friends and family that are keeping up with this. I'll be posting some other pictures later this week, and I hope to have an update with some of the names we're tossing around. The ultrasound images in this post are the most recent. There's even a 3D image here somewhere. The next post will include some images from earlier ultrasounds that I never got around to scanning until this weekend. And I also have some maternity pictures of Brandi, in case anyone has been dying to see belly-photos. But I'll save those for later, too. That gives me incentive to not wait so long between posts.