It's not all fun and games

The sad truth about pregnancy, is that it involves a lot of totally gross stuff -- vomiting being at the top of the list. MorningSicknessHelp.com reports that up to 80 percent of women suffer from nausea during their first trimester of pregnancy. Clare's morning sickness seems to be mostly travel-related. Read on:

"This morning was full of projectile OJ all over the sidewalk. Boooo, hiss! I am not fond of this reaction to traveling (and I thought I was in the clear because our return from Seattle didn't lead to any immediate problems). If I'm correct in my predictions of this trend, I will have one more morning of vomiting fun and then things will get back to normal. The interesting thing is that I never throw up my prenatal vitamin, which is great and also strange. At least it was just orange juice this morning, since I hadn't yet gotten to my bagel. Yesterday it was Honeynut Cheerios and blueberries. That was not fun!"
--Clare, 7/27/05

Grandparents-to-be get the big news

Here's how Clare described telling her mom and Jim, her mom's husband, about Bucky:

"Mom and Jim arrived a few hours after we had landed in Michigan, so we were trying to relax a bit before heading to bed. Their late arrival was because Mom had been waiting for word from Grandmommy's doctors... it turned out everything was just fine.

Talk was winding down and Ross kicked me under the table to let me know he thought we should break the news before everyone went to bed. I ran upstairs to get the ultrasound and, with my heart pounding loud enough to hear, I slid the picture face down across the table to Mom.

'Is this for me?' she asked.

'You'll see,' I told her.

She turned it over and adjusted her eyes to the tiny picture. "Oh!" She chuckled and smiled, and then just beamed. She handed it to Jim to see.

'What is this?' he asked not understanding the blurry arch of white lines and black background. 'Am I supposed to see something?'

'It's an ultrasound, Jim.' Mom encouraged.

'What does it mean?' he asked, confused.

I jumped in with the big news, 'It means you're going to be a grandparent!'

Then we all hugged and Ross and I got talk more in-depth about everything before we all turned in for the night. It was fun! Mom is very excited."

Clare's thoughts on the first ultrasound

"The coolest thing about the ultrasound, was that we could see the little heart beating. It was so tiny. The background of the whole thing was black and any mass or matter, like my bladder, intestines, and the little baby, were a grayish-white. Bucky was a little bean-shaped mass in a black orb (the uterus). Inside that little bean was a bright white, very small, ring-like thing that would quiver, and that was Bucky's heart beating. It was so electrifying! And it's so strange to think, 'That's inside me? We created that?'"
-- Clare, 6/22/05

Baby basics

Clare and Ross are expecting their first child. The baby is due in January 2006. So far, the couple has decided to hold off on finding out whether the baby is a girl or a boy. In lieu of a gender-specific pronoun, the baby has been dubbed "Bucky." Clare says we're not allowed to call it that after it's born, though.



Here's a recent shot of Clare and Ross, the excited parents-to-be. Yes, Ross looks thrilled indeed.