Week 8 -- Day 6

4:08 p.m. OH MY GOD! I am eating THE BEST sushi right now. Don't worry. It's COOKED sushi. Although cooked sushi sounds a bit oxymoronic, doesn't it? I just went shopping at H.E.B. (Texas' local grocery store), and I practically bought everything I saw. Going shopping while hungry is bad enough but combine that with being pregnant! NEVER take a pregnant woman grocery shopping! I decided to stock up as if we were heading into a nuclear winter. Lots of fruit, veggies, dairy products, juice and a lot of frozen foods. I also bought some printer ink for our just-finished wedding and pregnancy announcements. I swear, we've been working on those things since February! I just never found the patience to crank out a card on my Hallmark Card Studio software. It's really not all that hard, but I kept running in to problem after problem. First, the software wasn't compatible with Mac, so I had to set up this thing called Bootcamp that allows you to run Windows on a Mac. Then I realized that I couldn't print anything while in Windows because I needed to install the right printer driver for the Windows OS. So I spent days searching for the HP printer CD. When I finally found it, the Windows OS wouldn't detect the CD. By this time I was ready to call it quits. I finally found a way around it (or so I thought) by saving the card as a PDF and then opening the application on the Mac side. Only that wouldn't allow me to print my card in any other size but 8.5 by 11. FINALLY, I found a Mac compatible card program called Smilebox, which is actually really neat and highly recommended, and I was able to print out the cards on 5 x 7 paper. YAY! The cards turned out really nice. In fact, I may just post it on Facebook for all to see.
I flaked out on my post yesterday. We were busy ALL day. In the morning, we had to clean up the beach house; then we spent 5 hours driving from South Padre island to Austin; then we had to unpack and eat din-din; then we finally went to sleep. So I apologize to my much-loved followers. :) I weighed myself when I got home, and I gained 5 lbs!! Holy cheese balls! I'm supposed to be gaining 4 lbs every month after the first trimester. The pregnancy literature didn't say anything about the first trimester though. If anyone knows, feel free to shoot me an email at laurenrquack@yahoo.com, or you can just leave me a comment.
Kent and I have decided on baby names. We were having trouble picking between Ava or Vada (VAY-DUH), which happens to be the name of Kent's great-aunt, but we finally settled on Vada after I polled the audience. I posted a poll on Babycenter.com and Vada won by a landslide! A lot of the girls pointed out that Vada was very spunky, unique, and hip and would be the perfect name for a strong and confident woman. I figured that strong and confident most definitely will describe our little girl, so Vada it is! Her middle name will be Rae after my middle name and my dad, Rey.
If the baby is a boy, we want to name him Sean, after Kent's little brother. To tell you the truth, we really didn't have a huge selection of boy names that we were picking from. I liked the names Robert, Mark and Paul but Kent and I couldn't agree on those, so he suggested Sean and it stuck! His middle name will be Foster, after Kent's middle name and his daddy's. The first-born boy in the oldest Quackenbush son's family gets the middle name Foster. It's a family name, supposedly. So there you have it, folks! Vada Rae Quackenbush or Sean Foster Quackenbush. My only concern about Vada is that it's such a unique name being put with an already unique last name. One person on Baby Center said that the name Vada Quackenbush sounded too "cartoony." I can see how she would think that, but I still think it's a beautiful name. She's going to be teased anyway with the last name Quackenbush. Kids are just cruel. On the flip side, someone else also pointed out that if we named her Ava, a VERY POPULAR name, her last name would have to be used more often to distinguish her from the other Avas. So I guess each name has its good and bad points. No matter what, we're going to raise our child to have confidence in him or herself and to try not to be consumed by what other people think. I know...it's a lot easier said than done.
Well, what do you guys think about the names? Comments? Suggestions? Time for me to take the Frannie dog out for a walk. Cheers!