The second trimester starts today, or is that technically at the end of this week? Having just recently seen the baby doctor we know that the heartbeat is fine. Looking in What to Expect When You’re Expecting we find that sweet little Pistachio is about two and a half inches, about the size of a large plum. Most of the baby’s systems are now formed, which is amazing to me, and the digestive system is starting to contraction movements to develop so the baby can eat once it’s in the world. It’s also making white blood cells and the pituitary gland is making hormones. That part could be trouble in fifteen years or so.
Amanda and I went to Port City Community Church this morning, wherein we revisited the ideas of faith and the church’s mission, which is to reach people and help them walk with God. The messages over the past month or so have been particularly good.
After that we helped out with Grow Zone. We didn’t have any problems, although there’s one kid who started crying and didn’t want to be consoled. Other than that it was fun but pretty uneventful. Particularly cute today was prayer time. After the kids are read a story it’s snack time, so the kids are always asked if they want to say a blessing before eating. Usually a couple of them do, but today it seemed like half the kids wanted to do it. It’s so cute, because they’ll either put their hands together right in front of their faces and squeeze their eyes shut or put their faces on the ground then either mumble almost inaudibly or go completely silent for a minute. After a number of kids had already prayed, one girl was really ready to go eat her Goldfish, so as the last kid was going (it was a face to the ground with silence for so long we had to peek to make sure the kid was still praying type of prayer), the one girl announced “Amen” about halfway through the kid’s prayer and started to get up to go eat before we told her to hold on. We all got a kick out of it.
After church we went out and bought our fake Christmas tree. You can’t see it, but I’m hanging my head in shame and self-loathing. We got it from K-Mart because Amanda looked online and saw they had some for some good prices. I refused to even take it out of the box yet though. Not before Thanksgiving.
We got home and watched the Duke Blue Devils play the Montana Grizzlies. The final score was 78-58. I think Duke could have played better, but it was their fourth game in eight days so they had to be a little worn. As a fan, it’s been great to have so much Duke basketball to watch, but they deserve the break they get until this coming Friday. I think just about every player got some time though, and the freshmen got a lot more burn than usual. Coach K employed a lot of different line ups too, and that’s one thing I really like about the current team: there are so many good players that you can mix and match in there at any given time that it’ll be hard for an opponent to really plan thoroughly for this Duke squad. I’m not fooling myself into thinking they’re going to go undefeated, but they’re a tough team with some attitude.
After the game we watched a little TV. There was something on Discovery Health about free birthing, wherein women choose to deliver their babies with no doctors or midwives at all. I suppose there’s an argument to be made for it, but I think overall it’s a pretty irresponsible thing to do. They followed several women who had made this decision, but none of them had any real troubles or complications. I think they should have included someone who did have some trouble just to show that it’s not always a good thing to do. I mean, there’s a reason why mother and infant mortality during birth is lower now than when we didn’t have modern hospitals, right?
We decided it was time to watch Sweeny Todd finally, but the HBO On Demand wasn’t working. We tried other On Demand channels and they weren’t working either. Amanda called Time Warner Cable while I flipped through the TV stations and aside from the network stations, none of our HD channels were working either. They remotely reset our cable box, but that didn’t solve it. I really hope I don’t miss any games because of this.
Nick and Amy Warkentien invited us over a little later to have dinner and a movie with them. We went over there and had pasta then watched National Treasure 2, which was about what I expected it to be.
Zach Dotsey