Best of Luck Contestants!

 

Name	Date of Arrival	Gender	Weight
Vanessa Aja-Sigmon	Sept 23	female	6 lbs 2 oz
James Nelson	Sept 28	female	7 lbs 8 oz
Aunt Alice	Sept 29	female	7 lbs 11 oz
Kelly Brouwer & Sandy VanLeeuwen	Sept 17	male	7 lbs 2oz
Marylen Marty-Gentile	Sept 25	male	7 lbs 7 oz
Emily Hendel	Sept 22	female	6 lbs 7 oz
Laura Cheifetz	Sept 15	female	6 lbs 11 oz
Leanne Masters	Sept 23	male	7 lbs 8 oz
Beth Dammers	Sept 23	female	6 lbs 12 oz
Jessica Vasquez Torres	Sept 17	male	7 lbs 2.5 oz
Laura McCavit	Oct 1/Sep 27	female	8 lbs
Todd McCavit	October 2	male	7 lbs 8 oz
Margaret Williams	Sept 26	male	7 lbs 3 oz
Bob Williams	Sept 14	male	7 lbs
Richard Williams (aka Dad)	Sept 13	female	6 lbs 8 oz
Mamie Broadhurst (aka Mom)	Sept 25	no guess	6 lbs 5 oz

   For contest guidelines, click here.  

Laying Bets

Okay, we are now close enough to B-day, or P-day, or whatever, to really lay down some odds.  When we first told our families about Peanut back in March, the first thing Richard's sister Laura did was to jump up and get some paper to record the family predictions.  I am not sure what the prize is for the winner, but rest assured the cut-throat Williams competition lives on.

Margaret, Richard's mom, sent us those predictions the other day as a reminder, and I thought I would open up the field a little bit...make this more interesting.  

So, if you want in, here is your chance.

Due date according to medical science: Sept 21 

(to be fair, the due date in March at aforementioned prediction time was said to be Sept 25 - do with that information what you will.  All entries will be judged by actual reality.)

Entry requirements:

• You must be of legal age, or at least know how to leave a comment on a blog.  Only blog comments will be registered as official entries.  No separate email messages accepted.

• You may enter only once.  (I mean really, it's not a drawing people.)

• Winner(s) will receive some sort of prize that no one has yet determined.  This will not be anything gross.

•  Final entries must be received by Sept 8.

You must provide the following information:  

(We'll see how savvy I am after I have a newborn as to whether each field will be judged separately or whether some system for figuring out the closest person all the way around suddenly occurs to me.)

1. Name (YOURS, not one you are picking for the Peanut.  That is NOT the prize...)
2. Baby's Gender
3. Birth Weight
4. Birth Date

A later post will provide you with information on your competition, and, of course, an even later one with the winner(s).

All the best.

Tenacity

We have mentioned this before, but it truly bears repeating.  Folks here are REALLY used to knowing whether an upcoming baby will be a boy or girl.  We get asked by everyone (often several times having forgotten that we don't know), but none more than Maria José, the daughter of the Presbytery secretary, Doris.  Maria José is terribly cute, about 7 years old, and nothing if not tenacious.  

At first she did not actually believe I was pregnant.  Her mom told her, but since I didn't show for quite a while, she was simply not convinced.  I had noticed her looking at me awfully hard, her mom mentioned that she had double checked to see if there was some joke being pulled on her, and once she finally screwed up the courage to come up to me and ask herself.  "Are you really pregnant she asked me?  Are you sure?"  I have mentioned here before that I had this question my own self on occasion after the morning sickness stopped but the showing and kicking had not yet begun, but I answered very confidently that I was quite certain.  No worries, no tricks here.

Well now that I am showing Maria José fairly runs up to me and greets Peanut, offering a little rub and even a kiss on the belly.  Then she looks up at me and says, "Ahora sí se ve, ¿verdad?" (Now you can tell, ya know?).  However, though she is now completely confident that a baby really is in there, she is dying to know whether it is a boy or a girl.  I have told her any number of times that we are waiting to find out, but she never fails to ask...just in case we are holding out on her.  We see her several times a week, and she asks every single time.  Finally last week I changed it up a little...

MJ:  "¿Es niño o niña?"  (Is it a boy or a girl?)

Me:  "Sí."  (Yes.)

MJ:  (gasp of surprise and hope...)  "¡¿Es niña?!"  (It is a girl?!)

Me:  "O niño."  (Or a boy.)

MJ:  (gasp of surprise and hope...)  "¡¿Es niño?!"  (It is a boy?!)

Me:  "O niña."  (Or a girl.)

MJ:  (sigh of frustration and furrowing of brow)  "Pfff...entonces, ¿es niño o niña?"  (ACK...so is it a boy or a girl?)

Me:  "Sí, es niño o niña."  (Yes, it is a boy or a girl.")

MJ:  "Aaaaaaaaahhhhh!"  

She might be tenacious, but ain't nobody saying I'm not either...  :)

¿Niño o Niña?

So Mamie has mentioned that it is strange, very strange, to not want to know the sex of our baby here.  I'm currently back in Bogotá, and with the great chance to see folks from the church up here, everyone dutifully asks about Mamie, and the bebé.  I think five people just today asked me if we now knew if we were having a boy or girl. Still, alas, we don't.

But that doesn't stop the guessing.  So for your viewing pleasure, here is one way to determine if we are having a ¿Niño o Niña? - boy or a girl.  In less than two months, we'll be able to tell you its accuracy...

Nino o Nina from Richard Williams on Vimeo.

The Better to See You with my Dear...

For Richard's birthday we gave him an ultrasound so that that Peanut could send greetings on Papi's special day.  We went to a different place than we have gone before, and it turned out to be a 3D sonogram - and we didn't even have to wear the glasses!  Dang but those things are amazing.  We could count fingers and toes, see eyes, ears, nose, all sorts of stuff  (though we tried very hard not to see some stuff as we are waiting to find out whether Peanut is a boy or a girl until her/his birthday.  I figure, gotta have some reason to keep pushing...).  

It is not common here to wait to find out the sex of your child.  Not only do folks here ask us all the time, the doctor himself could not believe we didn't want to know.  He would stop the Doppler wand in places he seemed to think very telling, but I think we did a mix of not looking and of not actually knowing what was going on.  It turns out that even with clear pictures it is not always evident what you are looking at if you are not trained to see it.  Still, he had to have asked us minimally 5 times if we were sure we wanted to wait to find out, and of course he was kind enough to add how very strange it was that we didn't want to know.  Thanks...  

Given the nature of the Spanish language, it is also challenging to keep the secret because all adjectives have a male and female form.  If the baby is "pretty" it is either "lind-O" for a boy or "lind-A" for a girl.  If fat, "gord-O" or "gord-A."  To complicate things at least a bit (which is helpful if you don't want the big answer), the word for baby is "el bebé" - masculine - so that even if you have a girl the doctor might say you have "un bebé muy activ-O."  I must say that with all those factors working against us, we will not be surprised if someone spills the beans ahead of time, but we are doing our best to not know.

Below are some shots/videos for your viewing pleasure.  Remember, if you feel like you have figured out, we still don't want to know.  :)  

A 3D Peanut at 21 Weeks from Richard Williams on Vimeo.

At week 21 (we think), it looks like Peanut is doing just fine - good spinal column, good cerebral blood flow, very tumbly.  Also already showing us that Dad's traits are strong because after a little while s/he started hiding from the photos.  "Enough of the paparazzi people!"  

(In case you can't tell, Peanut's head is facing left with a hand over the eyes toward the top/middle of the photo.)

So while at the end of our appointment we saw a lot of Peanut's ears, I must say, they are some good looking ears...