Yes, that’s right, Amanda and I are having a baby!

Yes, I know this is old news to a lot of people.  We found out after taking a pregnancy test on October 1, four weeks ago tomorrow.  We suspected it several days leading up to that.  Anyway, while we weren’t keeping it a big secret we weren’t telling quite everybody or making any public forum announcements like on Facebook or MySpace.  The main thing was that Amanda wanted to wait until we got confirmation from a doctor.  After having the cyst a few months ago she wanted to make absolutely sure there was a baby and not something else.

We went to the doctor today and sure enough, there’s a little baby in there.  It’s half an inch and has arm and leg buds.  You can see the head and where the brain goes, and in the sonogram machine you could see its tiny little heart fluttering away at 177 beats per minute.  I was able to keep myself from crying, but as much as I was beaming at the sonogram pictures and welling up over those, I know I’m pretty likely to lose it when the baby finally makes it out into the world.

Amanda’s doing fine.  As you may have read leading up to this she’s been feeling pretty icky and drained and got sick for the first time last night.  We’re about eight weeks and two days into it, which would put conception at about August 31.  (Let’s think about that… hee hee!)  The funny thing is that Amanda had a period after that, so we’ve had the baby growing there in her for longer than we realized.

We’ve been calling the baby Pistachio.  Amanda called it Peanut one time, but I think a lot of people call their brewing babies Peanut, so I just picked a different nut.

At any rate, the due date is expected to be June 7th.  Assuming we go to Kentucky like we do every year for the 4th of July, that means my kid will be less than a month old for its first road trip.  That should be interesting.  Baba and Pap will have a house full of kids.  Jackson will be four, Andra’s soon-to-be-born baby, tentatively named Lila, will be eight months, and our baby will be three weeks.  I don’t think we’ll be riding in one van all together this coming year.

So, we’re having a baby and we’re super-excited about it!  We’d been trying for about a year and a half, and we count this pregnancy as such a blessing from God.  It wasn’t until I was finally able to surrender my frustration about it to him that we started to realize that we might be pregnant, and I don’t count that as a coincidence.

Zach Dotsey
(is gonna be a daddy)