Eden has adjusted nicely to having a baby brother. She loves walking up to him and saying “Baby”. (We’re still trying to get her to say “Andy.”) We take this as a win because she sees pictures/videos of herself and also says Baby!

Her sleeping hasn’t taken any hits with the addition of Andy. We knew she could sleep through anything before but now we know she can also sleep through a crying baby. Luckily Andy can also sleep in the same room when Eden is crying, I guess he heard it enough while in the womb to be used it by now! As a second stroke of luck, I (Ben) can also sleep through Andy’s cries in our room at night. This comes in handy when Andy is asking to be fed at 2 and 5 in the morning! (Don’t worry, I can’t sleep through Meghan poking me and telling me to go get Andy a change of clothes though…)

I’m taking one more week off of work to help set up some sort of schedule with Eden and Andy and to let Meghan rest up during the day. The following week Donna and Lauren are coming to stay for a few days. Hopefully by then Andy is sleeping through the night! (One can dream at least, right??)

The end of the pregnancy has been going so quickly. I am now 35 weeks pregnant and I still feel pretty good. I have occasional discomfort and spend about an hour awake each night waiting for Andy to go back to sleep after I go to the bathroom. I have almost decided to make my permanent residence in the bathroom. It feels like my bladder is always full although this is clearly not the case since most of the time hardly anything comes out (too much info??? ). I haven’t really gotten used to my big belly and find that I am often ramming Andy into doors, Ben and anything else that I try to squeeze past. Andy is definitely running out of space and I can feel him kicking and punching all the time. He had the hiccups for the first time last week and it was funny to see my entire stomach jump.

We have now taken our hospital tour, our childbirth preparation classes and our breastfeeding class. I think we know the material pretty well, but can you really be prepared for childbirth? We’re getting very excited as we get closer and closer. We have started to make plans for decorating Andy’s room and hopefully we will be ready for him when he decides to come!

I am meeting with my OB here in Kenya over the weekend to discuss our travel plans and wrap things up before we head home, then I have an appointment on the 4th with my OB in the US. We are hoping that we will get a clearer ultrasound picture and confirm 100% that Andy is a boy.

We had our second ultrasound of Baby Andy yesterday.  We had the same bed-side ultrasound machine as last time, so I took our video camera and recorded the entire thing.   You can watch it here or find one of the HD versions over on the http://wolfes.blip.tv site.

Ben was finally able to feel Andy on Oct. 25. He was very excited and says that it seems a lot more real now.

I had my first OB visit here a couple weeks ago and Sierra said that everything looked great and she was very happy with me until the end of my appointment when she weighed me. I had lost a couple of pounds since my last check-up in Indianapolis and that got me in trouble. She told me to make sure that I am eating enough and trying to get 6 smaller meals in instead of just 3 big ones. It’s hard because we’re so busy and the food options are pretty limited here, but I have gained 3 pounds since my appointment, so I think I’m doing pretty well.

You can see that my stomach has really grown these last four weeks. I’ve had lots of comments recently about how big I am getting and I’ve even found my clothes are fitting differently. My shirts suddenly seem much shorter in the front. We bumped the ultrasound back to my next appointment so we will just do everything on November 13. We will be sure to take pictures of the ultrasound for everyone to see!

Power outages here are actually rare. Pamela says that that was the first one in the year she has been there. Apparently they were repairing a transformer on a main power line that was coming out of town. Not sure why they chose a Sunday night to do that…

Sierra had no concerns; movement was good, size was good, heart was beating as expected, etc.

We have an appointment in 4 weeks to get another ultrasound to hopefully reduce that last 10% to zero!

I’m due February 18, 2010 which seems very far away but we know it will go quickly, especially because we will spend my second trimester in South Africa and Kenya. We will keep you updated on the pregnancy and our travels! This is the picture from our first ultrasound at 9 weeks.