Say Hello to Pumpkin!

This is Pumpkin:

He should be leaving the patch sometime at the end of October.  If he wants to make his parent's lives easier, he'll wait until early November to get here, but so far he has not proven to be a very cooperative fetus, so don't be surprised if he shows up well before we're ready for him.


We're told he's a he, and even though his "purple thing" didn't look very purple at the ultrasound, who am I to argue with an experienced ultrasound technician?  (I'm not going to post pictures of that because someday he'll grow up and it would be mighty embarrassing for him to have that sort of thing plastered on the internet for the world to see.  It may also hurt his chances of getting a date to prom, and although we don't want him to be a player, we also don't want him to grow up to be all emo all the time because the girls don't like him.)


We were also told that he has "unusually long fingers" and will probably be tall, as far as babies go.

That's his hand up top, and two little feet below that.  Again, we're just going to have to trust the technician on this.  I'm not sure how those two body parts ended up in the same picture.  Apparently he's quite a limber little fetus.


Besides what these pictures have told us, we also know that he dislikes seafood (because his mommy pukes almost every time she eats it) and he likes football (because he bounces around a lot whenever it's on TV).


Until Pumpkin actually gets here, there won't be much to blog about.  So ya'll can amuse yourselves by playing the "Guess Pumpkin's Birth Stats" game.  To get in on this action, go to www.expectnet.com, and then at the top where it asks for the game name type "pumpkinashcraft" and make your guesses.  The rules for how the winner is determined are on the website somewhere.  Basically, you win if your guesses are the closest, and if you aren't the winner then you lose.  Whoever wins will get absolutely nothing except the glory of knowing they were the best at guessing.  Do not guess that he will weigh more than ten pounds, or you will be disqualified for being so mean.


You can also amuse yourselves by reading this week's TIME magazine, because there's an article in there talking about all the ways you can screw up your baby for life by being stressed or malnourished during pregnancy.  It's sort of Pumpkin-related, because we're part of a study run by Duke and MD Anderson called NEST (or something like that) that will look at how a pregnant woman's diet and environment can alter gene expression in babies.  We'll get paid cold hard cash for each part of the study we complete.  So far all I've had to do is fill out some surveys and give a blood sample and we've gotten a cool $50.