Peter and Caroline in Seattle!!

Peter and Caroline were in town for a wedding and we had a great time hanging out!! Sunday morning we went to brunch at Lola's downtown. It is a Tom Douglass restaurant and one of Caroline's favorite in Seattle. Brunch was awesome--including the fabulous doughnuts from Dahlia's :) It's crazy to think the next time we see Peter and Caroline, baby McGah will have joined us!! 

Here we are enjoying our brunch!

  

6 months (24 weeks)

We are definitely closer to the end than the beginning of pregnancy :)

Conference Fun

Tricia and I headed to Winona, Minnesota for a conference for high school religion teachers. We arrived via Chicago then La Crosse, WI, whose airport is even small than Helena's (which of course brings back so many memories of our whole family flying there for Colleen's graduation. Let's just say that Mom using the phrase SOL made the weekend amazing :).

The conference, hosted by St Mary's Press, was great! It was a great combination of inspiration and practical tips for the classroom. It was also wonderful to meet religion teachers from across the country. I loved talking to a few guys from Massachusetts...definitely had such strong accents!! It was also so fun that Gary was there. I first met Gary as a student at UP when he was a hall director. The joke was that I was on the Gary Hortsch plan to life...and here we were at the same conference many years later!!

Gary, myself, and Tricia

It's a Girl!

Today we had our 20 week appointment and ultrasound. The ultrasound tech asked us if we wanted to know the gender and I enthusiastically said, "Yes, very much so!" That part came toward the end of the appointment, but it was worth the wait. It was fun to see the baby again, this time SHE :) is so much bigger than the last time we had an ultrasound. The tech took tons of measurements of the baby--head size, femur size, heart size, etc. It was fun to see everything, and Pat really enjoyed the science of it all. She even switched into the blood flow mode a few times and Pat was excited.

After about 45 minutes or so, the tech said, "I think I know what you are having!" A few clicks later to verify she pointed out that we are having a girl!! It was so exciting!! We knew we would be very happy either way, but I was really hoping for a girl :) Pat was pretty open either way--although last week we did the old wives tale of dangling the wedding ring over my stomach and that said it would be a girl...so naturally, my scientist Pat wanted a boy to prove it wrong.

The one bummer is that they couldn't get a good profile shot. But thankfully that is something the midwives want too, not just me, so we get to go back next week for a short ultrasound to get the profile pic.

Last week when Colleen was over for dinner, we had a fun time taking pictures for our gender reveal announcement. It involved many, many outtakes; many, many laughs; making a boy and girl final version; and, then our final product: