22 weeks and Name Brackets!

Even though this is my third pregnancy, I still have no idea how they work out what month of the pregnancy I'm in. Because it's 9 months, but 40 weeks, and the first 3 weeks there isn't even a fertilized egg... It's all very confusing to me. But I think, at 22 weeks, I'm six months pregnant. Because that's what a handy infographic on the internet said.

Kid is already a critic and will grimace if he/she doesn't like what I'm eating

My bump feels so much bigger in real life. If I stand straight and tall and look straight down I can only just barely see the tips of my toes. The camera is moving my pounds around willy-nilly, I think.

Anyway, we had the anatomy scan a couple weeks ago (April 1st, actually) and everything looks normal and great. We had a student working with the tech, so the scan took an hour because she let the student try after she did. Which was fine by me, since it was the last time we'll see the baby until they're born. And, much to the disappointment of several people, gender is still unknown! We call the baby Tiny, and I use masculine pronouns just because I don't like saying "it" and I figure since it's okay to call a group of women "guys" and a lady friend "dude," surely if it's a girl it won't mind.

Because we decided not to find out the gender, we've got lists of girl's names and boy's names going. And because when we started our lists it was late February, I thought at the time "Wouldn't a baby name bracket be awesome and hilarious!?" So we picked out 32 names of each gender (some we are in love with, some we think are ridiculous) and I built a couple brackets. Play with us!

Josh is filling out his brackets, I'm filling out mine. I'm predicting we will have less than half of the same choices by the Sweet 16, and only 1 of the Final Four the same. We won't decide for sure until the baby is born, but I want to hear your guesses early!

Some things to consider:
The names are "seeded" based on popularity according to the Social Security Administration. So the names on the left side of the bracket were more commonly given to babies in 2014 (the most recent year they had data on) than the names on the right side of the bracket.
We don't have any idea what the middle names will be, hopefully family names. But consider how it sounds with our last name at least.
I like nicknames, but only Luca goes by one so clearly that's not a had and fast rule.

Again I say, Play With Me!!

Petting Horses

Every year the park district has a "week of the young child" where they have a free activity daily geared toward younger kids. This year the only day we managed to get to was the pet a pony day at the local stables. Tessa was very, very unsure at first. Luca was so excited I was afraid he was going to spook the horse.

He pet the one that was out with her handler, and fed the one behind the electric fence (that had been temporarily turned off) handfuls of grass. Inside the building we ran into one of his buddies from preschool and made a horseshoe necklace. After chasing the barn cats around for a while, we went back out to say goodbye to the horses.

This time Tessa was willing to stand close enough I could get a picture, and even pet the horse's side while I held her. They had lots of fun!