baby designs

Andy has been inspired by the baby (and the dearth of cool baby clothes) to design/illustrate cute outfits for ourselves & the numerous friends who happen to be expecting around the same time (we think the government put something in the water to improve birth rates, but that deserves to be in another entry).

Here's an adorable illustration he calls "Retro-fur".




It's one out of a series of 6. I so dig it.

After priting a few baby rompers for friends and family, it seemed a good idea to spread the joy by putting his illustrations on Cafe Press.

All 6 designs are featured on http://www.cafepress.com/babyspace

busy bees

This week has been pretty manic with a whirlwhind of deadlines and a slew of fires to put out (bad Fire, down boy!)
We've both been wiped trying to juggle all these projects AND get the new office in order AND prepare for my handover. On the upside, I guess this will be good practice for when the baby comes - I imagine being sleep deprived and exhausted most of the time.

To ease my load post-delivery, we've decided to have a cleaner come in once a week and we had them over at the flat today to chat about the schedule and the cost. I confess, we actually tidied up the place before they came over. The irony was not lost on us.

When I say "them" it's actually the cleaner that we were recommended, Susan, and her mother. Susan's too busy and she's getting her mother to take over her new jobs. Yup, Andy & I only found that out today when both of them turned up at our doorstep.
Kudos for outsourcing your mother, but the catch is that Susan's mom looks older than my mother. She's this little old lady that smiles a lot, but hopefully she wields a mop as nastily as Uma and her sword.

*sigh* I just might land up cleaning up the flat before she comes over because of the guilt of getting a little old lady to do housework.

Hey, maybe that's their insidious plan: Outsource the mom, prey on people's guilt to clean FIRST, and then get paid for some cursory dusting. That would be such a great scam (headline: Mother and daughter cleaning scam busted by expectant mother!)

101 uses for a bump

use # 57
Approaching the 9th month, the bump can be used as a mini table to balance stuff on. Incidentally, it also seems to be good at catching any dropped crumbs.

28 days later

Only 28 days until our Estimated Due Date
Today we had another doc appointment... our baby-to-be is piling on the pounds and now weighs an (estimated) 2.9kg! (that's about 6.4 lb for those who like to use butter as a gauge). All is well with mother-to-be and baby-to-be. We're only a week away from full term, so are readying ourselves for the day that our lives will turn upside-down (in a good way).

I read an interesting statistic today - that 90% of fathers now attend the births of their children - the highest percentage in recorded history. A lot of things in the birth process go in and out of fashion, and yet I can't help but think that it is a tremendously positive thing that men are becoming involved in the upbringing of their chidren from the very first moment they enter the world. I once had a conversation with a taxidriver who confessed that his life's greatest regret was that he didn't attend the birth of his child. Instead, he sheepishly admitted, he felt bored so he went to watch a movie. *aiyah!*

Tomorrow will be busy - Stereotype shifts office to a nicer, more central, larger office. Everyone is quite excited, and looking forward to working in a new environment. I'll post pictures once we get the place settled and decorated.

not popping yet

so many friends have been expectanly waiting for the baby's delivery, and keep asking me if i'm going to pop soon. and the response to the 25 August (estimated) delivery date is quite often a disappointing "oh, another month?" or "thought it would be sooner" - as though i'm well past some deadline that i wasn't informed of.

i think i just underestimate how excited some people are to see the baby.
or maybe it's because physically, the bump does look freakishly inflated and off-kilter to the rest of me. sometimes i feel like succumbing to the weight and keeling over like a felled tree. perhaps it's nature's twisted way of defining the centre of gravity.

i can't help but vacillate between being terribly excited about the birth and being apprehensive because i'm so busy and i can't imagine being able to clear all my work before i deliver. (i'm too busy to have a baby! can't i reschedule the delivery? i wish i could send the baby a memo to delay his/her delivery.)

but i'm sure that in a month or so, my client servicing skills would be as obsolete as a floppy disk. 30 days to go.

The final countdown.

30 days to go - our Estimated Due Date (EDD) is on the 25th of August. Of course we don't know when baby will make its exit. If it is as early as Kate, we might deliver on National Day (August 9th). It would be so cool to be the disheveled new parents appearing in the Lianhe Zaobao! With heaps of work at the moment, and the office shift this Friday, I don't know when we will have time to deliver- (maybe in between meetings?).

The nursery is ready, and we have started to prepare the bag in readyness for the dash to the hospital. It feels so nice to be approaching the end of the pregnancy chapter and embarking on the "parenthood" one.

welcome kate tay naylor

A couple of days ago, my brother and his wife delivered little kate tay naylor! Thanks guys for making us uncles/aunties again. You guys rock!

babysteps - online

Hi, This is the first entry for our baby steps blog... we are in our 34th week of pregnancy! Not long to go...