These are the sorts of questions I end up Googling these days. :)

Weekday-only readers of the Irish Trojan’s Blog should be sure to go back and read my Saturday post announcing Becky’s and my big news: We’re pregnant!

More specifically, Becky is officially 13 weeks pregnant, as of today. According to BabyCenter.com, our little guy (or girl) is currently about three inches tall — “roughly the size of a jumbo shrimp” — and weighs about an ounce. However:

Despite the small proportions, there’s a fully formed baby inside [Becky’s] womb now. Much more proportional than it was a few weeks ago, his head is now only about a third the size of his body. His tiny, unique fingerprints are already in place. His kidneys and urinary tract are functional, and he’s starting to urinate out the amniotic fluid he’s been swallowing.

Aww. The little tyke is learning how to pee! ;)

There’s more here, including: “Little hairs, known as lanugo, will start to cover their body this week, as their sense of taste and smell are further refined.” (The use of the pronoun “their” in this instance is just a grammatically improper substitute for “his/her,” not a reference to twins or triplets — he says, shuddering. Heh.)

Anyway, our baby has grown an awful lot in the last few weeks, and has started looking a lot less like an alien (or fish, or frog) and more like a human. :) Check out this comparison of fetal development at 5, 8 and 13 weeks:

For some ultrasound images, go here or here.

Oh, and hey, check this out:

Pretty cool. It updates automatically as the weeks go by. I might have to put one up on top of the homepage or something.

P.S. Incidentally, for those who aren’t familiar with the way these things work (I certainly wasn’t, until quite recently), the due date and the number of weeks aren’t specifically based on the, ahem, conception date — they’re based on the start date of the mother’s last menstrual cycle before pregnancy. This leads to the somewhat odd result that the baby hasn’t necessarily even been conceived yet during the first and second “weeks of pregnancy,” which doesn’t make much sense to me, but what do I know?

For anyone who may not have visited my blog yesterday, be sure to read our big news. :)

We decided to give our kitties a wee taste of freedom and adventure today. While sitting out on our front porch — Becky typing away on her iBook, me studying for the bar — we deliberately left about a slight opening in the sliding door, just wide enough for a cat to slip through.

Butter, perhaps having heard horror stories about the dangers that curiosity poses for her species, stayed safely ensconced inside the apartment. But both Sasha and Toby ventured out into the great unknown:

We kept a close eye on them, of course, and didn’t let them stray too far from the porch. Toby seemed right at home, which isn’t surprising, considering she spent a good deal of time outside during her kittenhood: in the yard, garden and driveway at Becky’s parents’ old house in Buffalo, across the street in Bassett Park, and even at more exotic, faraway locales like Mount Rainier and the Oregon Sand Dunes. Anyway, today she happily took advantage of the opportunity to use concrete to scratch an itch, and then went merrily exploring in the nearby bushes.

Sasha, on the other hand, has been an almost-exclusively indoor cat for her entire life, so she was a bit more skittish, wandering no more than a few feet from the fence (as the top picture suggests) and quickly scampering back when she got too spooked. Indeed, she ran back inside the house after maybe 10 or 15 minutes, having apparently had enough of the great outdoors. (At this point, Toby was still wandering through the shrubbery.) But of course, in stereotypical cat fashion, she decided she wanted to come back outside as soon as we shut the door. I couldn’t resist videotaping her adorable efforts to paw through the glass:

Heh.

* * * * *

In light of our baby news, this post reminds me of a classic Loomer-Loy family story — one of my all-time favorites, actually.

Before my parents had me, they had two cats: Shirin and The Pooka. And of course, as “cat people” are wont to do, they would constantly regale their friends and relatives with tales of all the amusing things their cats were doing. (Sound familiar?)

Then, in 1981, they got pregnant with their first (and, as it turned out, only) child. They had been married for almost four years when they sat my dad’s parents down and gave them the big, long-awaited news: a baby was on the way! Naturally, Papa and Nana Loy were excited and thrilled. But after the initial expressions of joy and congratulations, Nana — a.k.a. Helen McNamara Loy, she of the famously sharp tongue and acerbic Irish wit — muttered out of the side of her mouth, “Thank God, now we can stop hearing so much about those G**-damn cats.”

I wonder if, up in Heaven right now, she’s saying the same thing about me and Becky. I’d be a little disappointed if she wasn’t, actually. :)

* * * * *

Speaking of Nana Loy, it so happens that my mom just sent us a photo album — it arrived in the mail today — with a bunch of great pictures of me and Nana. She died when I was very young, so I don’t really remember her. But I was her only grandchild, and I’m told I was the great joy of the waning years of her life. You can tell that from the pictures, actually. Here’s one of me on Nana’s lap:

I mentioned before that Nana was Irish. She was, in fact, 100% Irish, and is the source of all my Irish blood (that I know of). She wasn’t fresh off the boat, though: her family had been in this country for quite a few generations, since at least the era of the Great Famine, if not before, from what we understand. But anyway, you can credit (or blame) the McNamaras for my red hair — which, as you can see, hasn’t really changed color, or style, since I was a toddler — and my total inability to get a tan. :)

Nana was prominent in Connecticut political circles. Indeed, occasionally somebody from Connecticut will recognize my name and figure out that I’m Helen Loy’s grandson. I bet this post will get a few Google hits from folks who remember her. Among her many endeavors, she won the Republican nomination for Secretary of the State in 1962 (losing the general election to incumbent Ella Grasso, who would go on to become the first female governor in the U.S. who was not the wife or widow of a former governor).

Through the magic of Google News Archives, you can read excerpts of some Hartford Courant articles from the 1950s and 1960s that mention her — just search for “Helen McNamara Loy.” (You can find a few others if you search for just “Helen Loy,” without the “McNamara.” She normally went by just “Helen Loy,” but she included the “McNamara” on the ballot because she wanted the Irish vote!! Heh. The European ethnic communities in Hartford used to be very important voting blocs.)

Even cooler, from 1945, Papa and Nana’s wedding announcement! Man, Google rocks.

Anyway, here’s a photo of me with both my parents and all four of my grandparents — from left, Papa and Nana Loy and Grandma and Grandpa Loomer:

Hard to believe we’ll soon be a full generation removed from that photo! In less than seven months, we’ll be able to take another picture like that, with me and Becky in the foreground holding our baby, and Papa Loy, Nana Loomer, Dziadzia Zak and Babçia Zak lined up behind us. What a life!

And to think, this started out as a post about cats. :)

Dear readers, it’s time for me to come clean. For almost two months now, I’ve been hacking away at my keyboard on a daily basis, typing blog post after blog post about random, miscellaneous topics — events in my life, stories in the news, etc. — without telling y’all about the one thing that’s really been on the top of my personal “breaking news” list, the one bit of information that I’ve wanted to shout from the rooftops from the moment I learned it, the one fact that’s been totally dominating my consciousness since April 30 at approximately 12:30 PM. Namely:

BECKY AND I ARE EXPECTING A BABY!!!

We’re at about 13 weeks. That means we’re almost into the second trimester. Yesterday, we went to see an OB/GYN for Becky’s first major check-up, and we now have an official due date: December 31. That’s right — New Year’s Eve. Heh. Woohoo!

Among other things, at yesterday’s appointment, we got to hear our baby’s heartbeat for the first time. That was, needless to say, very cool. In fact, “very cool” doesn’t even come close to describing it. Naturally, I whipped out my digital camera in the doctor’s office and used it to make an audio clip:

source file

That heartbeat, that’s our baby! I mean, I helped make that! And it’s inside Becky right now! How amazing is that?

(By the way, if you’re wondering — since everyone seems to ask this — yes, we do plan to learn the sex of the baby in advance. But it’s too early right now. We’ve got an ultrasound scheduled for August 13, so hopefully we’ll find out then.)

Much more after the jump.

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