Meet our new baby girl!

One of these days Ryan is gonna blog about Alaska like he promised, but until then, I'm gonna continue on because we've had some really amazing things going on.

So I was supposed to find out the gender of our baby at my 20 week diagnostic ultrasound, but I actually got to find out a month early! My neighbor Sharon owns a 3D/4D ultrasound company with her daughters (little plug for her: http://www.insight4dultrasound.com/), and when she found out I was going to have to wait until 20 weeks to find out about our baby, she would have none of that! She had the family all go in the very next day, where we found out we're having another little girl!!

Here she is lying on her side with her hand up by her face. It looks like she's looking at us, but she's actually looking directly away from us. That's how she was with us the whole time. Andrea (Sharon's daughter) spent an entire hour with us, and it took 30 minutes just to verify her gender. She saw her pubic bone early in the session (which only girls would have), but she wanted to verify before telling us.

Here she is in 2D and 3D. She's nestled up between my uterine wall and the placenta, using it like a blanket. Even though she refused to move how we wanted her to, we're hoping that just shows that she's a good sleeper and a little mellow. That's easier to swallow than stubborn and a touch uncooperative - we've got two of those already! :-)

Do you see her pretty profile? And her hand up by her face? My kids and I all prefer to sleep on our tummies, often with our hands either by our face or tucked underneath us. I think baby #3 will fall in line with the family trend of super snugly sleeping postures.

We didn't get a ton of good pictures since she was turned away from us (toward my spine - the one position where we can't see her face), but there are a few more pics on picasaweb, if you're interested.

So now that we have our third child on the way, we knew we wanted to sell our Toyota Highlander and buy a van. Two kids and all their accoutrements actually filled up the Highlander quite well. Still, it was bittersweet; that car was the first big purchase Ryan and I made as a married couple and we'd had it four years. We love that car. Still, we sold it within a week or two for a pretty good price to a really nice lady, and after just a couple of LOOOOOOONG days with just one car for the family, we found our van!

It's a used 2011 Toyota Sienna. It was a rental van with ~26K miles on it, so we were able to get a really great deal on it. That may be a lot of miles for a year old car, but it was a lot less miles than we thought we'd be able to afford. It's a pretty basic LE for an '11, but it's still got plenty of features that we love: power doors, back-up cameras, removable 8th seat between the 2nd row captains chairs, XM radio, and lots of neat little touches like built-in sunshades. It drives so much like my Highlander that I feel very comfortable driving it already. The acceleration is amazing, and there's just so much room. We are really happy with it, and it already feels like ours!