Christmas is here and gone and all we got was meat and hockey

Well another glorious Xmas has passed and Mary still doesn't have her pony....

Oh well. Here are some pictures of trees, future Grammy's with guns, and a getting rather pregnant Cindy Loo Who look-a-like. (and a big ass dog)






The next update may include a few more Asian people and some hockey fights, who knows?

I need a snowblower

Well, here it is, the first day of winter and we have snow. But not just a little snow this much:


2, 6, and 8 pm

We are expected to end with 10-18" of snow when all is said and done (on top of the 6-10" already on the ground from the last two storms), but being that I shoveled over 6" of snow this morning and there is already about 8" on the ground again, I am thinking we are well on the way to that 18" mark. Yay winter.

Now despite all of this snow we have been able to make some progress in the nursery. We got rid of the old ceiling fan and replaced it with a light that I won't hit my head on and we added this lantern and table:


And we also got the art from my pal Jamie that will go on Charley's wall as a six foot by two and a half foot vinyl mural, that will really give the room some character.


click to see all the fun.

So that has been a snowy weekend in Maine we will be back on once we dig ourselves out.

Here are some more pictures like I promised!Week number 25 and Cooper and I are now BFF.
Also we had a little bit of an ice storm last week and this is one of the plants in front of our house. All the ice is gone now but we do have 3inches of snow on the ground to replace it.

Week 25......

Sorry for the delay in posting these. We went to the doctor on the 5th and got a couple more pictures of our little girl.I will post some new belly pictures and some of the ice storm we had last week hopefully tonight. Hope everyone is ready for the holidays and getting excited. I know we are!

24 Weeks!

Well Charleston and I have now made it to the 24 week mark! Only 16(ish) more till she is here. But when she gets here she will already have her best friend ready and waiting......

This is Anne and Nathan's little boy Asher! He is 4 months old and wicked cute!

Charlie has a new house...

And some new friends.


We got a great crib, a special import from PA via DE all the way up here to ME, which we set up in the nursery and now we have a place for all of Charlies new friends to hang out and wait for her arrival.

It's a belly!!!

It's a....

Baby human! Actually a female baby human to exact. Well a 1/4 Chinese, 1/8 German, 1/2 Irish, and 1/8 Portugese female baby human if you want to be technical. In case you weren't aware, we got another ultrasound on Thursday and our lovely tech verified a lack of boy parts and as she put it, "very clear girl parts" which is pretty amazing because I thought I was watching a scrambled Tyson fight on the screen (I thought it was very cool of the medical center to let the fathers watch old Tyson fights while waiting for the machine to warm up and was amazed to see how hard the current economic situation had hit them considering most of those fights are played three of four times a day for free on ESPN classic).

My initial guess was that this was Tyson v Douglas circa 1990

Anyway, for those of you keeping track at home, this is the first girl in the Louie side of the family since 1980 (that would be Jen), the first girl in 9 tries (including Chris and Pam's little expected one, congrats again by the way), and only the fourth girl in 17 births starting with Kai. Being that I spend all day crunching numbers I could bore you all with statistics and frequencies but I will not do that to you all and will just say we have our lottery tickets and expect to be on easy street by tomorrow nights drawing.

The news has sparked a shopping spree up and down the east coast that should pull our countries current economic situation right out of the toilet and up to the lofty, over inflated heights they were at just months ago. These have all been purchased by just Mary and myself in the last 24 hours.






And these by Jen

In other baby related news, last weekend saw the beginning of the nursery renovation. The trim was painted white and tools were strewn about along with some saw horses to give it that Sherwin Williams paint commercial look. My guess is that it will stay that way for quite some time to give the impression that it took a lot more effort than it really has. We are still trying to decide on an overall theme, but early polling is indicating owls have a slight lead over bugs and turtles, while monkeys are a distant third. If Peter Tork is reading this, you were always first in my eyes.

And finally, now that we have a verdict on the species and sex, we have a name. We shall call it, err, her: Charleston Mae Louie (It's still so great to see it in writing). Until next time. Branden and Mary

Wicked Busy!

Sorry I have been such a slacker about the blog! We have had a very eventful month so far. We fenced in our back yard which has made our furry "children" very happy. Also we spent a long weekend in Delaware last weekend which was wonderful!

We have decided to paint the nursery a soft aqua color and have a fish theme. But it still is a long way out and that could change :) And if you have any ideas we would love to hear them!

It is also hard to believe that it will be 17 weeks tomorrow! I have been feeling much better recently and even stayed up past midnight this weekend which I haven't done since June.

This is picture is from this weekend! I can't get over how exciting it is that we will have 2 more Louies with in days of each other in March.

Busy October!

I hope you all had a wonderful weekend! There is not a ton to report on the baby front. Everything is still going great. Plus I have more energy and appetite which makes me very happy. On the home front we put up a fence this weekend with tons of help from our family and friends! It looks great and the dogs love it. I should have pictures to post in the next couple of days. Also we are off to Delaware this weekend coming up and can't wait to see all of our family and friends down there!

Hope you all had a great weekend! We spent the weekend on Clemens Pond which was wonderful. But before we left we had one more quick ultra sound.

This time the pictures look more like a baby and less like an alien.


We are also starting to think about nursery ideas. And we would love any ideas and suggestions you have!

Big News!

I am a newcomer to the whole blogging world so you will have to bear with me! And I thought this would be the quickest and easiest way to keep all our friends and family in the loop about what is going on. We are expecting our first baby March 27th 2009. We are both very excited and I think the dogs are starting to figure out there is something going on.

Bran and I went last night for out first ultrasound and to hear the babies heart beat. Everything thing was normal. And it was beyond cool to see the baby on the screen. Sadly we won't be finding out what we are having till the end of October.

I want to use this blog as a two way street. So please feel free to leave us questions and comments.