Prebble Family Tales

That’s our delivery time.  Brandy and I will arrive at the hospital at 6:10AM for admission and prep.  We are then scheduled to produce Collin at 8:40.  If you are one of the elite few, you’ll likely receive a phone call tomorrow once everything settles down, at which point I will have to convey the obligatory height/weight statistics and say “Baby and Mother Are Doing Well”, because I didn’t get to say that to anyone last time.

I wouldn’t expect photos until late Friday night since I don’t think Brandy wants me running off to upload the snaps so soon after delivery.  I get the impression that she would like me to hang around a bit.

Okay, time to catch up!

The Miracle League baseball season has concluded.  We went to the closing picnic last weekend where Gareth was given his first ever trophy.  He didn’t want to let it go the rest of the day and was extremely proud to have it.  If you haven’t seen it yet, feel free to ask him to show it to you.

We’ve traded in Brandy’s “I don’t want to be a soccer mom” Mazda 5 for the purchase of a 2004 Toyota Sienna with an automated wheelchair ramp and kneeling system.  I think the kneeling system is incredibly cool (it lowers the right side of the van before deploying the ramp), but it doesn’t buy us much of an advantage and it increases the time waiting for the ramp to deploy, so we don’t use that feature.  And no, it can’t be wired to bounce the van up and down as though we were starring in a Dr. Dre video.

In less than two weeks, Collin will be born and will get to move into his patiently waiting nursery.  Things continue to go well, and we’re still on track to deliver in State College.  Brandy and I will be traveling to Danville on Friday to meet with yet another doctor there, just in case.  We’re struggling with the idea of experiencing a relatively normal birth and the challenges of a child without challenges.  You’d think we’d be pretty well battle worn, but we’ve spent the last nearly seven years tuned to what Gareth requires in care and are wholly unprepared for normalcy.

Anne (my mother) has moved in with us since the last blog entry.  She’s helping us with Gareth while we help her with support.  By October 26th, we’ll have six people and a cat in our house every night.  It’s starting to feel like Charlie Bucket’s house.

Those are the big items from the past month.  It has been far busier than we would have liked, but we’re just about out of it in time to have our second child.  Can we take 2009 off?

Should everything go well, Collin will be delivered on October 24th.  Happy Halloween.

Brandy and I celebrated our 9th anniversary yesterday with cards, flowers, Don Quixote art, carpet cleaning, Qdoba, and Cold Stone.

Next year, we’ll get even wilder!

Brandy and I took a trip to Danville yesterday to see their prenatal team.  The trip was for two reasons: to get a second opinion on our situation and to build a rapport with the Geisinger team in anticipation of delivering there.

We sort of got the first and didn’t get the second at all.

Second opinion is that everything is going well.  Size and weight of Collin are perfectly normal.  Things seem to be developing appropriately.  He still has a penis.

The rapport thing?  Not so hot.  The doc didn’t seem at all familiar with our history with both Gareth and Danville.  He was unaware of the big ticket items that are causing both us and our local doctor concern.  He also seemed of the opinion that there was really no reason to deliver at Danville.

Oh, and he forgot we were there for about an hour and a half.  Literally forgot.  Being the quiet, non-confrontational people that we are, we sat in a freezing cold darkened room until somebody finally remembered we were in there.  In the meantime, I played with the chair and looked through all the cabinets.  Had to do something.

But at least the ice cream we had at Friendly’s afterwards was good.  And so was the news that all was well.

Child 2 shall now be known as Collin Alexander.  You are correct, neither Collin nor Alexander were poll options.  That’s just how we roll.

So, upon his birth, we shall have one child with the initials GAP and one with CAP.  These are much more interesting than my TLP or Brandy’s BMP (though BMP is at least a popular graphics file format).

Julian, Tarkin, Eli, Seth, and Max are outta here.  So is Quinn.  We did like that name, but my cousin Emily just gave birth and named her new son that.

We need to have a talk with that whole branch of the clan.  They’re the reason Gareth wasn’t named Alex and why we were never able to consider Emily as a name should we have discovered we were gestating a female.  And now they took Quinn.

Two more possibilities have reared their meddling heads: Rhys and Colin.  We’ve been warned that going with the traditional spelling on Rhys (versus “Reese”) will cause mass confusion, but honestly, the world somehow gets by with John Rhys-Davies, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Rhys Ifans, and Rhys Fulber in existence.  If you’re not a fan of Front Line Assembly, that last one probably doesn’t seem very relevant.  If you are a fan, please explain to me why you haven’t told me sooner.  That’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of good Colins, but let’s face it - you either say it “Collin” or “Coelin”.  There’s not much variation.

The real problem here is that none of the names we’ve come across have had the same lightning strike that we had with Gareth.  Do we owe it to our second child to come up with a name that everybody can pronounce and spell?  Not really as that wouldn’t be fair to Garth Garrett Gary Gareth.

So this is it. We’re down to eight possible names for Child 2. Seven of them have been discussed between Brandy and me. One was just now added by me, and I’m hoping for good results.

In the spirit of democracy, the names are presented in poll format for your feedback. We reserve all rights to ignore the outcome of this poll.

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Make your selection, and help us get past our name block.

UPDATE: Brandy feels it is only proper that I reflect her favorites in the list, even though I’m not a fan of them. Don’t let that influence your voting, though.

… boy!

Yes, much to the dismay of all the matriarchs hoping we would produce something featuring a double X chromosome, we found out today that we will be having a boy this October.

We were also provided about 20 photos, including one that explicitly pointed out the, uh, protrusion that proves the child’s maleness.  I’ll try to get those scanned in soon.

We’ve struggled for a while now with Gareth to get him to stop kicking us when he wants attention.  He does it largely because his legs are stronger and they have longer reach.  Of course, he has also learned that he gets an immediate reaction to kicks.

So imagine the confusion when we tell him kicking is bad but then talk about how good it is that the baby is kicking.

In the future, we will be referring to the percussion of the unborn as “moving”.  As in, “the baby is moving” instead of “the baby is kicking”.  This should clear up any confusion.

And I bring all this up only because we can now externally feel the “moving” of the baby.