As many of you may already know, we are expecting our first child in August.  Kelsey’s due date is August 6th.  We have had our first two appointments, including our first ultrasound.  Four of the ultrasound pictures are at the bottom of this post.  To answer many questions we have been receiving in one place:

• No, we are not going to find out the sex of the child before it is born.  There are few surprises in life, so we’re going to hang on to this one.  We are going to be doing the nursery in orange with green highlights, so much of the clothes we will be buying will be in the orange and green area.
• Yes, we are going to be using cloth diapers, many of which will be sewn by Kelsey.  My sewing skills aren’t as good, so I will be on diaper washing duty, which will likely be a daily task for the first few months.
• We are working on names, and don’t plan on releasing them into the wild.  Rest assured, we will be shouting the news of the sex and name of the baby from the digital rooftops very shortly after she or he is born.

Kelsey is now in her fifteenth week, and is progressing nicely.  She has been hungry often, feeling sick often, and sleeping a lot.  These symptoms are decreasing with time, however.  We have been spending our weekends looking at baby gear (moreso than before we conceived).

We also bought a new car in preparation for having a new member of our family.  We got a Mazda5, which is a sort of mini-minivan.  It has six seats, and the rear seats fold flat for storage.  It will allow us to store 45 cubic feet of stuff behind the second row of seats.  What that translates into is we can go camping, rafting, snowboarding, to the beach, etc. with a baby.  When we did these things in the Jetta, we needed to utilize the entire trunk and the entire backseat.  We kept the Jetta, though, because we really need two cars, especially with me commuting four days a week down to Troy for school.

When the baby arrives, Kelsey will be taking some time off, and I will still be on summer break for a while.  I’m currently weighing my options in terms of whether I will be taking classes, hopefully some of them via Skype from home, or taking paternity leave for a semester and working on my dissertation proposal while taking care of our baby.  Kels will be going back to work in probably mid-September, so I will be the primary caregiver through the end of January of 2011.

I think that’s all the news for now.  We will try to be better about posting updates here.

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Kels and I went with a few friends from my department (Logan, Anna, and Gareth) to Saratoga Apple last weekend to pick apples.  We got two bushels there, plus another half bushel or so that I picked with Jess the week before at Bowman Orchards.  We have been making applesauce ever since.  We are both so busy that we can only do about a half bushel at a time (which is one 20 quart stock pot full of apples, which cooks down to about 8 quarts of sauce).  We posted a bunch of pictures of this process if you are interested.

We’ve been blasting away on the house, and have been able to make some degree of progress.  The bedroom is nearly complete, and we are hoping to have the section of the upstairs hallway where the bookshelves will go done by the end of the weekend.  If we can manage to get our seven bookshelves and twenty boxes of books into that hallway, it will give us a lot of room for maneuvering.

Our bed arrived today, which was a housewarming gift from my parents.  It is awesome.  However, we need a box spring for it to work properly, and the box spring we had delivered won’t fit up the stairs.  We have a split box on order, but it won’t get here for another two weeks or so.  Hopefully by that time we will be done with our bedroom renovations.

In other news, Kelsey has been busy with transitioning over to surveying full time.  Her training is winding down, so she will hopefully be able to be working somewhat of a normal schedule again soon.  I have been busy with classes, IT work, preparing a paper and presentation for the 4S conference in DC at the end of the month, and working on two papers for publication with one of my professors.  We’ve just been incredibly busy.  On the plus side, we have been unpacking a lot of our wedding gifts that we didn’t have space for in the last apartment.  Over that period of time we’ve forgotten a lot of what we received, so we get that Christmas morning feeling all over again.

We had a very productive weekend this weekend. We worked in the yard a bit, and we put the second coat of paint on the bedroom. We are planning on doing the trim tomorrow and then we can move in for real. On Sunday we had Jess over and husked, cooked, stripped, and froze 200 ears of corn. You can see photos of the corn process in our photo album.