14th week

I'm officially into my second trimester, thank goodness! No more continuous nausea, and I feel like I'm definitely starting to show. I'm still really tired all the time, but that should end soon. Now that my nausea is over, I'm feeling well enough to miss some of the food I used to be able to eat - sushi, coffee, a nice medium-rare steak with a glass of red wine... I guess the nausea helped me not even miss those foods for the first three months.

I'm now a couple days into my 14th week, and the baby is supposed to be about the size of a peach. Holy cow! It's huge. Here's a picture of me starting to show a little.We're starting to think about daycare. There is a daycare at Bryan's work, but that's way over on the opposite side of Denver from where I'll be. Likewise, anything in Boulder will be very far away from Bryan. So we're trying to find an option near Westminster so either of us can bring baby to daycare or pick baby up after work. Not having daycare is really not an option - I'll need to get back to work and finish up my PhD, and Bryan has no option to stay home. It's just knowing how to pick one out, and finding one near us with space, that'll be the trick.

Here are some pics from our San Diego trip last weekend.

Announcements galore

Monica and I went to San Diego last weekend for an event with Connie and the collective. It was pretty nuts, connie announced her previously completed engagement and wedding, and her upcoming baby! The small connie offspring is due only a week before ours! We are all getting so domestic...

I personally am excited but also scared about all this, I can't even remember to do the cat's litter boxes. But the thought grows on me more and more every day and I am pretty psyched now. The whole name thing is hard, we have some good girls names but boys names are harder. Any suggestions?

Bryan

The Hoke name is famous in the planetary science community

Well, maybe not exactly famous. But with the publication of my first paper, it's a teeny tiny step in that direction. Woo hoo! My paper is a fascinating (if you ask me), great bed-time read titled "Roaming zones of precipitation on ancient Mars as recorded in valley networks" and was published earlier this month in the Journal of Geophysical Research in their Planets section. It only took a couple of years to write and get out... hopefully this won't be the norm and I'll be able to get my papers published a lot more quickly in the future. People tell me this isn't so unusual for a first paper, though - I suppose that provides some comfort.

You can check it out at this website: https://webfiles.colorado.edu/hokem/papers/publications.html. It's the first one listed, my only real paper so far. I'm having some difficulty with Firefox letting me open the pdf I've linked to the website, so it might be better to open it with another internet browser.

One paper down, only 2 more to go before I graduate...

It is a small homosapien

Ultrasound pictures

This is an ultrasound image of the baby on its back with it's head on the left, little leg/feet blobs on the right, and the umbilical cord in the middle.

This shows the baby sort of face-on, with its head at the top, a little arm blob on the left side, and the butt and leg blobs at the bottom.

Guess what?

We're pregnant! I am nearly 11 weeks, and most of my nausea is over, thank goodness. We've been pretty secretive about the pregnancy so far, telling only our families and a very few friends. But now that the first trimester is mostly over and things are looking good, we're starting to spread the good news.

We went in for my first ultrasound this past Monday - what a terrifying and wonderful experience. My emotions were at both extremes that day - all morning and afternoon I was incredibly nervous and afraid something would show up wrong, preparing myself for the worst. Then about 5 minutes after walking into the examination room my emotion switched immediately to relief and absolute joy as we saw the heart beating and watched the baby move and squirm around. What a wonderful thing. Based on the ultrasound, we're due sometime around March 7th. This will be better approximated later in the pregnancy, but for now that's the due date.

So that's our big exciting news. We'll add pictures from the ultrasound and other updates later.