Prenatal Doctor's Appointment #7

The regular doctor was out sick, so we saw a physician's assistant instead. Jaedyn's heart rate continues to be on track.

Pregnancy Scare #3

Kyla experience severe abdominal cramping for 2.5 hours. We didn't go to the emergency room, but Kyla asked the doctor about it on her next visit. No problems, just stuff stretching.

Birthing Class #2

Today we got a little more in depth about what actually happens during labor and how to handle it. It was Valentine's Day, and the instructor brought goodies!

Birthing Class #1

Today we started our birthing classes. There will be one a week for four weeks, each 2.5 hrs long. We decided to do the one that the hospital offers. Kyla had also been interested in a 'no meds' hippy dippy birthing class. After talking with some people that had gone through the former, she found out that it discusses the both meds and no-meds option and doesn't necessarily promote one over the other. While a natural birth is our goal, we also recognize that it is safest to have modern medicine readily available should the need arise. We are not interested in having to drive to a separate location should something go wrong during labor.

Side note: we watched "The Business of Being Born" a couple years ago. It was interesting, but I still have nightmares of Ricki Lake naked in a tub giving birth. Shudder.

There are 8 couples in our class. We started with the customary awkward ice breaker. I hate the ones where you have interview your neighbor and introduce them. I'd rather just freaking introduce myself. The couple we 'interviewed' wanted to just exchange pieces of paper instead of being interviewed. Sigh. Ice-breaker fail.

I found it interesting that exactly half the class was south Asian (Indian or Sri Lankan), whereas Austin apparently has only about 2% of those ethnicities. <racist comment>We chalked it up to the hospital's location, which is smack dab in the middle of several large IT headquarters.</racist comment> In all seriousness, though, every single one of them had a tech job (ok, maybe one of them was doctor or something). So there.

Also among the notables was a former NFL player that sat right across from me. I only mention this guy because I could tell that he found this whole class as hilarious as I did, and we exchanged many an awkward glance when something was said that screamed out for a snide comment to be made, but we knew we had to bite our tongues and let it go. And how many of those cases there were! I mean, that I got through these classes without going through fits of laughter is nothing short of a miracle. Moving on ...

The first class dealt mostly with the basic stages of labor. At the end, we did a breathing and relaxation exercise, which basically meant we turned down the lights and listened to some new age music overdubbed with an annoying British woman's voice telling us about the state of our consciousness. My favorite was when she literally paused for a full second mid-word. "You are now slipping into a state of nothing----------------ness." I just about lost it.

Prenatal Doctor's Appointment #6

Had a blood test for disease screening (CBC, HIV, and glucose). Jaedyn kicked the doctor when getting her heart rate checked out. She's feisty! Heart rate and size are average. Jaedyn is mainly to the left with limbs facing to the right, which is why Kyla feels the most movement there. Jaedyn was extra wiggly for the rest of the day because of the sugar from the glucose test.

Prenatal Doctor's Appointment #5

Just a checkup. Jaedyn's heart rate appears normal and healthy.

State of the Family 2013

We started this blog 2 years ago as a way to keep our friends and family informed about what's going on in our lives. In truth, we haven't been great about doing that, but I'm hoping that will change with so many things happening in our lives. A lot of families send out Christmas newsletters at the end of the year, and we've been meaning to join in that tradition. But instead of printing it out and mailing it, we've decided to just keep everything online. So here is the first of what I hope is many annual online newsletters.

Looking Back on 2012: The Year of the Dragon

2012 was a busy year for us. Kyla continued to pursue a Master's of Science in Nursing degree from the University of Texas at Austin. She is on target to complete her degree and become a pediatric nurse practitioner in the spring of 2013. It hasn't been easy on her, though. In addition to going to school full time, she's had to complete clinical hours while also working part-time at Dell Children's Hospital, even during the hot summer months.

Our beautiful black labs (Daphne and Lily) are doing well. Lily was diagnosed with an intrahepatic shunt in the summer of 2011, which caused her to intermittently seize. Our vet referred us to the A&M Veterinary Hospital to get it checked out. Instead of a costly surgery that was not guaranteed to fix the issue, we chose instead to try to manage the issue through medication and diet. We are grateful that Lily has not had any visible seizures since. Daphne continues to be in good health as well, though we are concerned that she may have arthritis as once in a while she seems to be in pain when walking.

I (Jake) got LASIK in March of this past year, and it has turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life. I continued to (slowly but surely) work toward my Bachelor's of Fine Arts degree in Communication Design (AKA Graphic Design). Ever since I quit my full time job at HomeAway in 2008 to grow my web design and development business, I've been following a general pattern of attending the Texas State University part-time for one semester a year. Due in part to fatigue of formal education and also out of the need to avoid the embarrassment of my wife getting her Master's before I get my Bachelor's, I increased my hours at school, attending part-time in spring, summer, and fall. I am now on course to graduate at the same time as Kyla in the spring of 2013. Unfortunately, my shift in focus has caused me to have to scale back my work hours.

Some respite came in August, when we forced ourselves to take a well-deserved vacation in Canada. For the better part of 2 weeks we criss-crossed Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island in a series of rental cars. We saw L’Anse aux Meadows, Gros Morne, Old Town Lunenburg, Grand Pré, and Joggins Fossil Cliffs UNESCO World Heritage Sites. It was near the end of our trip that we learned that Kyla had conceived our first child, a girl. While welcome news, the burden on her body made the fall semester all the more difficult to cope with for her.

We nonetheless managed to get to the winter break. We visited my family in Minnesota for a few days over Christmas before returning home for a quiet and uneventful New Year's. On our trip, we finally decided on a name for the baby: Jaedyn Amara. While we're glad 2012 is over, we look forward to reaping the rewards of our labor in 2013 (pun intended).

Looking Forward to 2013

Our New Year's resolutions mostly center around our physical health as this past year has taken its toll. I was plagued by persistent illness due to overwork and lack of sleep, and on more than one occasion was responsible for getting Kyla sick in turn. While my work habits haven't changed much over the years, my body's ability to cope with them has deteriorated. I will be 30 years old next October, and simply put: I can't keep staying up late whenever I please anymore without consequence. I spent many a late night this past fall working on school projects or work for clients. I also ate terribly, all too often resorting to fast food on my hour commute to and from school. In this coming year, I am going to try to be better about keeping a more regular schedule. Kyla (and my body) will thank me for it, and hopefully I'll be a lot more healthy as a result.

2013 is shaping up to be very eventful for us. We will welcome our first baby into our family, and we will both graduate with the degrees we have long been pursuing -- all within the span of a couple weeks in early May if all goes according to schedule. While neither of us is so naïve to think that being first time parents will be easy, we do look forward to not having to worry about school for the foreseeable future. After Kyla completes her maternity leave over the summer, we anticipate that she will be presented with many lucrative opportunities to put her new title as pediatric nurse practitioner to work. I look forward to refocusing my efforts on growing my business and perhaps hiring on a few employees to help with the workload after the baby is born. Daphne and Lily are eagerly waiting for Jaedyn!

Happy New Year, and may 2013 bring ever more blessings to you.

Jaedyn Amara

"It" finally has a name: Jaedyn Amara. The name means "God always hears," or more literally "God hears eternal." For anyone that has specific questions about how we arrived at the name, etc: this post is for you. This will most likely annoy anyone that is wanting to name their future baby or potential baby without outside influences. If that describes you, you have been warned and do not read further.

Before I get into it, I want to apologize to anyone that I secretly (and sometimes not so secretly) judged for giving their kid a pretty normal name with a nonstandard spelling. What I've learned from this process is that most popular names have been adapted to numerous phonetic systems from various regions, resulting in a whole lot of totally legit spelling variations. I've therefore come to the conclusion that most "ridiculous" spellings are probably just due to parents trying to incorporate their heritage's spelling of an otherwise standard name. I understand now, and I'm sorry.

We formally started the process of naming the baby on our recent trip to Minnesota to see my (Jake's) family for Christmas. I was against even talking about it much until we had more time and less distractions, and our trip fit the bill. We were both done with school for the semester, and I was even without my laptop for the duration (gasp). We had flights and quiet evenings alone to ponder and debate.

I wasn't really interested in just waiting for it to come to us or any other such hippy dippy nonsense. No, the decision had to be researched, systematic, and comprehensive. The most contentious of the decisions was to use a theme or not to use a theme. I am not flexible on this. I have not been rigid as to what theme we chose, but I insisted that there be a theme. One kid can't have a Greek first name the other Swedish, one kid can't have a middle name that's an adjective and the other a noun, and so on. OCD, maybe. But there it is. My kids' names will make sense together! It's pretty easy to say that when this is the first child ...

Step 1: Research / Brainstorming

We used an app that seemed to have the best database of baby names and a decent interface. We both decided to limit the pool of names by origin to our own heritages (Swedish/Norse and Gaelic) and Biblical languages (Hebrew and Greek). We went through all the names in this massive list together and picked any that interested us to go on our list of favorites. This first step probably took 50-75% of the entire process.

Step 2: Eliminate Spelling Variations

We went through our list of favorites and eliminated all but one of any names that were of the same origin and meaning but had slightly different spellings. One "n" or two; that kind of thing.

Step 3: Eliminate Duplicate Meanings

We were finding it very difficult to take the next step after we had our master list of names. Neither the app we chose for brainstorming nor any other apps that we could find had the ability to put a list of favorite names into a table so that we could compare their various attributes easily. This seems like the perfect job for a spreadsheet, but alas, I did not have my laptop and couldn't use "an approved portable electronic device" because we were sitting on a plane during a 2 hour delayed takeoff. So we old-schooled it (shudder) and actually used the back of our printed boarding passes to proceed. We picked our favorite sounding version of all the names that had the same or similar meanings. At this point we were down to 42 names.

Step 4: Rating Round #1

I cannot stress enough how important putting down ratings for each name was for this process. It saved us from endless 'I like this but you don't' exchanges. It eliminated more options more quickly than any other step of this process. Unfortunately, the app we chose to use did not have a name rating mechanism beyond just putting names on the favorites list. Other baby naming apps did have a 1-5 star rating mechanism, but a) we didn't want to transfer all of the names into another app, b) 1-5 is unnecessarily complicated in this situation, and c) there was no way to add multiple peoples' ratings. It's true that all of these deficiencies could be overcome, but we were far enough along that we just continued to use good ol' paper instead. 

A 1-3 rating from each of us was ideal in this situation. 1 = meh, 2 = likey, 3 = really likey. This system allowed us to see plainly where we really agreed, sort of agreed, and totally didn't agree. We initially eliminated any name that did not have a cumulative rating of 4+, but then we went ahead and eliminated the 4s as well. We did allow retroactive changing of ratings after we saw each others' ratings in case we changed our mind about a name in order to save or kill it. I ended up saving Amara by changing my rating from 2 to 3 because even though I wasn't crazy about how it sounded, I really liked the meaning. We were now down to 15.

Step 5: The Nickname Test

Kyla was very interested in making sure the name had a reasonable nickname, while I figured we could come up with a good one after the fact without too much trouble. Nonetheless, we found that all of them were short enough to not need a nickname or we could come up with a reasonable one, so this didn't really help.

Step 6: The Uniqueness Test

We decided that we wanted the baby's name to be pretty unique, so we gave each one a uniqueness rating. This didn't really change too much as we had been screening our initial list with this in mind. I understand the desire to not give a child a name that is so unique that nobody can spell it, nobody can pronounce it, etc. But we also didn't want to give our child a name that would be so common that she'd likely meet many other people with her same name, get confused with another person, etc. Besides, all the names in our list up to this point weren't particularly hard to pronounce or spell.

Step 7: Sanity Checks

Our list was still too long at this point. Bring on the hippy dippy stuff. I finally caved on Kyla's dislike of a common English word for a name, so we eliminated Hope and Grace. We both really like Arwen but decided that the connection with The Lord of the Rings and the timing of its theatrical releases would probably make people think that that's where we got the name from. It may be stupid, but I don't want people to think that. We also took one last opportunity to veto any names that one of us just wasn't feeling. We eliminated Jada because it was very close to Jaedyn, and we decided we liked the way the latter sounded and its meaning more. And then there were 7.

Step 8: First Name / Middle Name Permutations

With our list of 7 in hand, we were ready to start thinking about name combinations. We wrote out all the first name and middle name permutations. We eliminated any combination that didn't sound right, which were mostly those whose first name ended with the same letter as the middle name started with.

Step 9: The Initials Test

None of the resultant initials from the previous step were undesirable, so no dice on this one. Undesirable initials would include COC, CUC, DIC, FUC, GUC, HIC, KUC, MUC, NUC, PUC, RAC, SAC, SIC, SUC, and WAC.

Step 10: Rating Round #2

Next we wrote out the meanings next to each remaining combination. We went through another round of 1-3 ratings and eliminated those with lower combined ratings, leaving just 3. One of the combined meanings didn't make much sense even though it was Kyla's favorite initially. We finally settled on Jaedyn Amara because it has a pretty sweet meaning. We know that the male variation, Jayden, is a fairly popular boy's name nowadays (darn you Will Smith!), but this name has enough going for it in our minds to compensate. Besides, we can always call her Jade for short.

I scanned in all our scribblings for posterity and because we'll probably want to revisit some of these options if and when we have another girl. The name fits one of the themes I preferred: the combination roughly fits the roadmap of our spiritual heritage from Hebrew (Old Testament) to Greek (New Testament) to Swedish (Evangelical Free Church), and I think that's pretty cool. That theme should also give us enough options for the future should we have or adopt any more children.

It's a Girl!

We found out we're having a girl! Just what Kyla and her mother were secretly wishing for. Registries for anyone inclined: Babies 'R' Us and Target.

Prenatal Doctor's Appointment #4

Everything looked "perfect" according to the sonogram technician. The baby seems to be developing on schedule. All genetic screening tests came back negative.