Happy Anniversary

David and I celebrated our 3rd wedding anniversary yesterday. We, well maybe I, had decided that we would go the traditional route with our gifts to each other. The first 2 years were simple: The first year was paper, and I got David B.B. King concert tickets. Last year was linen/cotton, and we went to Germany and Spain and agreed that would be the really nice hotel we stayed at. This year was a bit more difficult - leather. David has leather shoes and a leather briefcase. He has a leather camera case. He has leather belts (not that I would get a belt, but you see my point). Well, it was down to a leather beer bottle holster and a leather cigar case. While I decided on the latter, I will keep the other one in my gift repertoire for another year. I feel a future Father's Day gift calling... Anyway, I gave him a leather cigar case with 3 nice cigars in it, the idea being that he and our dads could celebrate the arrival of our baby with them. He loved it.
I had no idea what David was going to get me. He's a very good gift giver, so I didn't doubt that he would come up with something good. I was not expecting what he gave me - a Kate Spade diaper bag! I'm pretty sure when I saw the tissue paper with "Kate Spade" written on it my heart started to beat very rapidly, and I looked at him like, "You didn't?". I still didn't know it would be a diaper bag. It is beautiful. And he even made sure it's wipable and stain resistant.
David said he already knows I will be a great mother, and now I can do it in style :). I have such an awesome husband!

To cap it all off, we went to dinner at a fabulous French restaurant in Raleigh, Saint Jacques.

We both started off with salads. I got the mixed green salad and David got the crusted warm goat cheese salad. We shared an order of escargots. In between our salads and entrees we were given a nice subtle sorbet to cleanse our palates. For our entrees I ordered the lamb osso bucco: Fresh lamb shank braised for 12 hours until fork tender and served over roasted root vegetables and white bean ragoût, finished with the braising lamb juice reduction, and David ordered the veal oscar style: Thinly hand cut veal top round, topped off with fresh lump crab meat and a warm hollandaise sauce, served on potato galette and fresh poached asparagus. For dessert David had the mousse au chocolat and I enjoyed the warm peche delight a la mode. It was simply scrumptulescent :).

It was a very memorable 3rd anniversary, and I'm excited to start our 4th year together. (okay, so even though I turned off the italics it is still typing in italics). So that happened...

Show-off

It seems we have a bit of a show-off on our hands. We had our 16 week appointment today, and got to have an unexpected ultrasound. The doctor was only going to do a Doppler to hear the baby's heartbeat, but we had such a "mover and shaker" (doctor's words), that she had to go get the ultrasound. Amazingly enough I was not nervous. She kept telling us the sounds we were hearing were movement, and I was confident things we fine. David told me later that he was nervous. It is comforting to know that I'm not the only one who worries about this baby.
So out came the ultrasound, and there was our beautiful baby. It was a shame we didn't have the camcorder. We were going to bring it anyway to record the heartbeat, but forgot. We were really kicking ourselves after the show we received. It was no wonder the doctor had a hard time locating the heartbeat. Our baby looked like s/he was doing somersaults and cartwheels. It made for an awesome viewing. We saw the limbs in action and the spinal cord. We even saw the heart. This picture was a lot different than the one we saw at 8 weeks. At one point the baby kicked me. It was cool to see since I can't really feel the movement yet. I think we got to watch our baby Bunge move around for about 5 minutes. I had to hold onto David to keep the tears from coming out too heavily. Here we thought we were going in for a routine check-up, and we got to see our little baby again. It's hard to wait so long to see your baby, especially when you don't have a definitive way of making sure every thing's okay. This was a nice blessing for us today.
I asked about the heartbeat today. Everyone asked us last time what it was, and neither of us could recall (still not sure the doctor actually told us). We got so excited about hearing it, that it was kind of a blur. The doctor said the heart rate was 150 bpm. The doctor couldn't get a good view between the legs to give us a definitive answer, but with all the movement she feels like we're having a boy. I think I saw fireworks go off in David's eyes. I love seeing him so happy. I know he will be happy either way, but I think having a boy would mean a lot to him.
Our wonderful doctor scheduled our next ultrasound at 18 weeks (2 weeks from today) at WakeMed. They have a 3D/4D ultrasound lab, so we will get the whole shebang. We were going to go to Cary for one in 2 weeks, but now we can hold off on that until the baby is older and filled out. We will be able to tell you all for sure if we're having a boy or girl on June 12. So that happened...

Landscaping

After working on the inside of the house for over a year, David and I have finally been able to get outside in the yard and do some work. Over the past couple of months we have been spending some of our weekends weeding, digging up, planting and ground-covering. We're not quiet finished yet, but here's some of what we've done so far:

Front yard. Its actually got some grass now.

We've laid some pine straw down in the front.
David dug up some sickly azalea bushes and we planted another gardenia bush. We are getting ready to put some rock in front of the house.

We also put pine straw in the back and put in some new plants. On the right, all of our hostas came back, and we planted two hydrangea plants.


On the left, we've planted some more hostas, ostrich ferns, amethyst astibles, Virginia bluebells and cyclamen. They're just starting to come up, so it will be a bit before there's a lot to look at.