Halfbrown

We don’t celebrate “Christmas” per se, predominantly because we are a family of agnostics. But enjoy the holiday season, the festivity, the music, and of course the presents! I mean the traditions. Traditions like decorating a tree, which we do every year; but without any of the religious connotations.

In fact we not only get a tree, but we try to get one as soon as humanly possible. This usually means buying one on the Friday after Thanksgiving Day (known in retail circles as “Black Friday“). Some people get a tree on Christmas Eve, but we feel like that’s a perfectly good waste of a tree since you (should) only have it for another week or so after the 25th, and we tend to have ours up for about 4-5 weeks! This year was no different, except we had to wait until Saturday to get the tree instead of on Black Friday.

Well… that’s not entirely true. The other difference was that this year was the first year in quite some time that Kimberly and I both went to pick out and set up the tree. You see, we’ve found that it’s normally too stressful to deal with the $#!+ tree and the $#!+ tree stand since the $#!+ tree will never cooperate with the stand and I tend to get cranky and $#!+ swear too $#!+ much and it’s upsetting to all involved. So instead I normally do all of the tree picking, loading, unloading, and setting up $#!+ and then Kimberly comes home to a perfectly straight tree which she then beautifully decorates while I relax after several cranky hours spent with an uncooperative tree.

I must say that I’m pretty proud of myself for not even swearing once during the whole exercise. And if you know me, that’s saying a lot! The tree was finished (from purchase to set up) in about an hour, and no one got cranky, cried, or threw a tree stand on the ground, smashing it to bits. Not that it’s ever happened before to a $#!+ tree in our house.

Whew!

After a long weekend of monitoring her blood pressure, watching for headaches, and doing things in “the hat” (don’t ask) Kimberly’s Dr. has OKed her BP for now and is allowing her to work part-time until birth (barring anything else going wrong). Cross your fingers, folks!

Moe: How are you doin’?
Me: Hungry.
Moe: Can’t help you with that. But I can give you 3½ inches of love.

For the sake of clarity, the aforementioned “3½ inches of love” was a floppy disk with a code review request. Disk… not the other thing; though comments to the contrary were made.

So we headed into Kimberly’s OB/Gyn today for our usual trip to see how she and Bryce are doing and everything’s fine… until she gets her blood pressure taken. Normally Kimberly has a rock-solid BP that I, personally, am jealous of (but that’s another story) and there’s no problem.

Today, however, her BP was so high when we went into the office that her Dr. sent us right up to the birthing center to be monitored for a few hours. Of course, when we got there the nurses told us if her BP didn’t come down that she’d “be having a baby today”, which only made us more nervous since little Bryce needs to cook in her belly for another 6-8 weeks at least!

Long story short is that she is OK, her BP eventually leveled out, and she is on strict bed rest for the remainder of the week and is only supposed to work part-time (if at all) until Bryce is born… which hurts us financially right about now, but at least Kimberly and Bryce will be OK! We’ll see what the Dr. says when we go back in for our visit on Monday. Luckily I can work at home, and I plan to do so until at least Monday so I can help out when I can.

The title of this post, “Baby shower for Bryce”, is a bit misleading; this was actually the third baby shower we’ve had. The first was predominantly hosted and/or attended by the ladies from Kimberly’s job, the second was primarily with her family, and this one was our close friends and community theater chums.

In the picture below we have, from left to right, Cindy, Kimberly, and that handsome soon-to-be big brother is Evan. And just to be clear: they made Kimberly wear that pink boa.

And here’s some idiot me holding my first born by his overall straps.