On This Grand New Adventure...

"On this grand new adventure I could never have picked a more wonderful companion to go traveling with."  -Unknown (actually, it was part of the poem Amit wrote for Marinda for Mother's Day)

For Mother's Day we celebrated the mother-to-be by starting out with breakfast in bed.  Amit made pancakes and eggs and brought it to her on a silver-colored platter with the card.  Later that morning we went to a nearby park for a bit.  It was nice, and it was actually was sunny enough that Marinda felt like she was getting burnt!  Also at church today all the women got gourmet chocolates.  Why?  Just because they earned it.

Beautiful flowers Amit got for Marinda!

Another crazy belly shot... It just keeps getting BIGGER!

A surprise came yesterday!  Marinda's parents had sent her chocolate
dipped strawberries for her first real Mother's Day!
Don't worry, she's letting Amit have a bite... or two...

We have a few new additions to our family this week - Baby Hippo, Baby Tiger and Baby Elephant!  We went to the zoo on Friday to pick out a little stuffed animal for Luke to have in his bassinet.  Apparently if the Mommy-to-be sleeps with a little stuff animal to go into the bassinet so it starts smelling like her the baby will sleep better - hence the mission to get one.  We got there and started poking around the gift store, when the great schism between Amit and Marinda occurred.  They both instantly were gravitated towards the cutest little stuffed animals ever - the only problem was that they were different stuffed animals.  And then there was the fact that neither one of them was particularly fond of the other's choice.  So they decided to compromise and get the second cutest stuff animal ever.  But then Amit decided that Luke's life would be incomplete without his choice of stuffed animal, so Marinda had to stand up for her choice as well.  In the end we ended up with all three - but hey, we're newly expectant parents and we're allowed to be crazy and get our baby three stuffed animals!

Can you guess which stuffed animal was who's favorite?

Other grand events for this week inclued the demise of Amit Misra.  Well, he's still technically alive, but he got his general exam topic on Friday!  For those of you curious it is "using remote-sensing observations of Venus, Earth and Mars to determine planetary environmental properties."  He was at work until 6 on Friday, and then worked some more, and then most of yesterday.  He is exempted from all other household and emotional responsibilities this week, but we at the Heb have to say that after a full day of working yesterday he looked a bit scruffled.  "His hair was all sticking out weird, and his eyes had this 'too many reserach papers' look to them - it was kind of haunting."  We'll see how well he fairs this week - and how well Marinda handles being an academic widow for a week.

You might have noticed that we mentioned above that Amit did not work all of Saturday.  Why was this? Is he actually a bum?  NO!  He's a good husband.

Marinda has had a slight cough the past few days, and Saturday morning she coughed up a tiny bit of blood.  She wasn't that worried, because she was feeling great otherwise.  But she called the nurse hotline anyways (because Amit thought coughing up blood was a baaaad thing) who transferred her to the labor and delivery unit nurse, who strongly suggested that she come in to get checked out - even though the other suggestion was to just take cough syrup.  So throwing all their morning plans out the window they went in and got to get hooked up to the fetal monitor and everything - for a slight cough.  The nurse said you could come in with a hang nail and they'll still hook you up.  It turns out that everything was just fine, it is just that during pregnancy you have 5 pounds of extra blood flowing through your system that makes all your blood vessels a little more sensitive - so all that happened was she burst a few of them while coughing.  Useful fact to know.  They said it was the right decision to come in (because coughing up blood is never a good thing), but it turned out to be nothing, so Amit and Marinda both got to be right!

The nice thing is that we now know what is going to happen when we go in for the real thing and how all the fetal monitoring works.  It was fun listening to Luke's little heart beat and seeing how much Marinda was NOT having contractions.  When the nurse went to record Luke's activity level, she put not just "active" but "very active".  So it isn't just in Marinda's head that she is being beat up more than her friends!

Other important things for Steven to know when Ashley summarizes the blog for him Monday:
1. We are officially 6 weeks away from the due date!  So Luke Kumar Misra will be arriving in 6±2 weeks or thereabouts.  Yes, they're extremely good at predicting due dates...
2.  Also Marinda's harp concert is this Saturday.  Just one more week of teaching and then she'll be free, free from teaching lessons (mostly) until the fall!  Free from sitting on a bench for hours straight and killing her back!  "Wait, why don't you just sit on a normal chair, like my office chair that has wheels?" asks Amit.  Because then she couldn't be free from teaching harp lessons and having it be so amazing!  Anyways, Ashley, Steven should text Marinda at some point after Saturday afternoon and ask how the concert went.
3.  We plan on seeing the Avengers Saturday night and having a nice romantic dinner to celebrate our conquests.  Steven could potentially send Marinda a text before bed Saturday being like 'how did you like the Avengers?' or something similar.

Hope you all have a good week!