The next big adventure in our lives is well underway! My wife is now six months pregnant with our first child! Life has lately been revolving around nothing but preparations for our little bundle of joy. We’ve been painting, researching, registering, quizzing other parents, and eagerly awaiting early January when we our pending daughter makes the transition from physical parasite to financial parasite.

A few weeks ago we got the ultrasound, and everything seems to be quite normal; boring, as the doctor put it. He said that a boring pregnancy is a good thing. We’ll go with that. They gave us a few pictures from the ultrasound, but my favorite is this one. Say hello to our future daughter!

As a rule, ultrasound pictures seem to be rather creepy, but I think this one takes the cake. She may be pure evil, but she's our little ball of concentrated evil, and I'm ok with that. In fact, I'd be quite proud to father the Antichrist. At least I would know she'd succeed in life.

So that's the first picture we have of our cute little girl. I was hoping for more pictures - in my mind I had a whole book and video planned - but the ultrasound tech gave us only three snapshots; one other that looked similar to the above but less demonic, and another which showed her downstairs for gender verification. Aside from the scant amount of take-home pictures they gave us, watching the ultrasound first-hand was one of the most thrilling afternoons of my life.

Up until that day, we had, at most, only heard a rapid little heartbeat over a scratchy speaker. Watching the ultrasound in real life, seeing that other being inside my wife, slice by slice, was amazing. It's one thing seeing it happen anonymously on youtube. It's another thing seeing it first-hand, peering inside my partner, watching our own flesh and blood wriggle and twist around.

She seemed like she was enjoying herself in the womb. As the wand moved over different parts of the baby, we noticed that, as it settled on her upper body, you could see her little arms pumping back and forth as if she were running, or as I like to imagine it, as if she were hitting a punching bag. She sure was moving. As we zoomed to her face we saw her mouth open up in a yawn. Awesome.

That was all weeks ago. We just took our sweet time in announcing it to anyone. Pregnancies are a tricky and delicate thing. Jen has years of working in the NICU under her belt, so we'd love for all our anxiety to be for naught because if anyone knows what can go wrong in a premature birth, it's her. So far, so good. She's been amazingly fastidious, down to the minutest detail about what to do and what not to do during pregnancy. I don't think I'd have the willpower to lead the kind of life she's been living for the last six months. I sure hope our baby appreciates that someday.

With that, I wonder where this blog will go. I think I'll enjoy writing about being a dad. I'm more excited about fatherhood than anything I've ever undertaken, apart from my life with my lovely wife, of course. This is going to be amazing and terrifying at the same time. I can't wait. Er, wait - yea, I can wait. Let's plan on early January.