What's In a Name??

Our little man ~ CADE JEFFREY MATTHEWS

Eric and I decided that we would not share our baby’s name until we were 100% sure that we both loved it. And, we love it. We kept all of our prospects a secret, not because we don’t love your opinions, but because we wanted to love it without influence (except maybe a little from each other).
We both agreed that the middle name would be a family name, but the first name was a little harder to choose. I had made a deal with my sister back in high school that whoever had the first boy would name him Cooper, which of course is our maiden name. Since my dad doesn’t have a son to carry the name on it would be our honor to do so with our son. This however was before either of us was married, and well the decision is no longer just mine! Eric was gracious and tried to love the name as much as I do, but in the end it just wasn’t working for him. I probably gave him a hard enough time, so for those of you Cooper Matthews lovers – no hounding my Husby!
Onto the name… Cade Jeffrey. Eric found Cade online and mentioned it to me. I liked the sound of it and decided to look up the meaning. I think the meaning of a name is really interesting and fun. Cade means round, barrel and a couple other not so flattering references to large, BUT I also found that there was a minor character in Gone With the Wind whose name is Cade. I searched Cade and Gone With the Wind to find that a Wiki definition said that Cade is an alternate surname for a cooper. Cooper means barrel maker. So it is perfect! An interesting connection to Cooper and we both love the name. We chose Jeffrey as a middle name, which is also my dad’s middle name.

So now on to how we told everyone... We had dinner with my parents on Monday night along with our family friends, the Adams family. We brought along a hangman puzzle that I had quickly printed up for everyone to play along. After dinner everyone gathered in the kitchen and living room and plopped down with their pen and paper. We went around and everyone kept guessing letters until we had it all filled in. Everyone had fun and it was a unique way to let out the name little by little.

God is good – I can feel Cade moving about a little every so often and Eric and I are really enjoying praying for Cade by name. His salvation is always top of the list as we pray that he will one day love the Lord as much as we do! Hope you will join us in praying for Cade as he grows in my belly!

...and more pictures

(Eric)
I decided to post some pictures for those of you that wanted to see the whole "gender unveiling" unfold. For a little while, I'll post an album for everyone to view on my Picasa page. It can be found here

Enjoy!

The Big Day...Boy or Girl Revealed!

Today was an amazing day! We were able to see our little one for 45 minutes during a detailed ultrasound. We saw the baby's heart, lips, legs arms, heart - it's little face :). The nurse spent time explaining to us what we were seeing and assuring to us the whole time that measurements were normal and on target. She was having a hard time getting a clear picture of our little one's face and told us we had an active baby that didn't want to sit still! Oh no!! We have heard that twice now - we are in trouble when they start walking! I can just hear it now "Mr & Mrs Matthews your child will not stay in their seat" and I am going to tell them, "Yep we've heard that since the womb!"

We were so thrilled to hear that our baby is right on target and very healthy. I was praising the Lord throughout the ultrasound for this miracle that he has blessed us with. For its little arms and how they move, the quickness of the heartbeat and even the way our baby likes to make us work for a good photo. You can see its character already and know that God has formed that in his most perfect image. Everything about our little one has been determined before we even knew they were ours and how excited we are to find out all about them!
So we know you are all dying to know what this precious little one is! We made my parents, Jenny, and even Matt via the phone wait until they came over for dinner tonight. Here are some pictures of the set up...

We had bought three baby food jars and emptied them of their baby food, and then got all different kinds of pink and blue candy. We filled up each of the jars with different candy and different amounts of pink and blue so they couldn't team up and have one person count pink and another person count blue. We really made them work for it! All of the jars had more of one color than the other so they would know if it there was more pink it was a girl and more blue a boy.

It was really fun to watch them pour out the pink and blue candy and count away. My mom figured it out first and whispered to me what it was and then Jenny figured it out and screamed... IT'S A BOY!!!!

Counting away.... Mom is almost done.... It's a BOY!!!!
The candy on the plates after it has been counted and Eric giving Matt the play by play...

Finally, here are our happy faces with our little man's "gender" picture, and the picture up close! Can't wait to celebrate with all of you. The name is soon to come! Stay tuned.

Boy or Girl??

Our doctor's appointment on July 6 was so much fun. I was 16.5 weeks along and we were hopeful to find out if our little one was a boy or a girl! Since we had not heard the heartbeat, first things first. Our doctor moved the dopler around my stomach and found our little ones heartbeat. It was amazing to hear how fast and steady it was. That was our baby making all that beautiful noise. She was ready to move on to the next thing and we told her that was the first time we had heard the heartbeat, so she happily found it for us again so we could hear our baby a little longer.

I'll save you the anticipation now and just tell you that we still have a 50/50 shot at having a boy or girl. I know, I know how unexciting! She got a good angle and Eric asked if he could guess. He guessed a girl and the doctor thought the same thing. So she kept looking to get a better angle, but couldn't. So she told us 60/40 it's a girl. Then one last image had her saying "wait is that his punky?!" Apparently her little boys call their private parts their punky. We all laughed and then she said I don't know it could be a boy, so she was back to 50/50.

We have a detailed ultrasound in a week, so we will be excited to find out girl or boy then! What do you think?

The Birds

I am sitting at my desk this morning and I heard this weird noise behind me. It was like someone was playing with a cord or something. I should start by saying our office, where I sit, has floor to ceiling windows so we often see some interesting sites from beautiful sunsets to people doing a little dance (not knowing we are watching!!). So today when I turned around I wasn't sure what to expect. Well it turned out to be a very persistent woodpecker. Looking at himself in the window and then trying to go through the window. It kept flying into the window, flying away and then flying back into the window. Generally birds don't frighten me, but this one was posessed. So about 20 minutes later the bird decides to try the window right next to me. I happened to be facing the window at the very time it tried to fly right through it. I jumped about a million miles as I saw the bird and then heard thud as it hit and fell. Well I wouldn't get up to look and see if it was now dead on the sidewalk. We have had a few casualties in the past. So my co-worker was kind enough to check it out and the bird had flown away. Fast forward a couple hours and we are leaving for lunch to celebrate my boss' birthday. As we walk out the door I noticed that my windshield had been pooped on by not just one, but two birds!! Never in my 2 years of working there has that happened!

Needless to say, today was not my day with the birds. Let's hope they are more friendly tomorrow!