Chil's Point of View….

I think we have a vampire for a baby ; – ).
All the Twilight fans should be excited.

Why do we think Andre is a Twilight Vampire?
Well, he seems to be showing vampire characteristics.
- Active at night; way too active
- Sweet and innocent during the day

Take him outside where there is some slight sunlight, and he will curve in to silence.
He was born at the time when there isn’t much sun in the area, but the few days we have had a little sun breaking out, we were able to make this observation.

Oh yeah – another thing which stands out as showing the Twilight characteristics : Andre seems to be a hit with the ladies. He is already a charmer.

So how are keeping up with our new baby at night?
Is it true about saying “goodbye to sleep” after a new baby in the house?
Is he keeping you awake the whole night?

Nelly and I have split up the night into half. More on that later.
Initially, when the baby would wake up in the middle of the night, we would both wake up. Call it the “new parents syndrome” or whatever other excuse we can come up with of why we both would wake up, both try to calm him down, and both wait for him to fall asleep. This was making both Nelly and I to be really exhausted in the morning; almost like Zombies [Aside: with all these horror movie references such as “zombie” and “vampire”, you would think I am going into the haunted movies business]. To solve the lack of sleep, we split the night.
Nelly is in charge of waking up the late night to early morning shift till 3:00 AM.
I am in charge of waking up from 3:00 AM onwards.

Meaning of “in charge” : wake up when baby wakes up; calm baby down; warm up milk and feed the baby; burp the baby after feeding; change the baby diapers; convince the baby to sleep and all that is done.

It is amazing though, I have not got angry with him waking me up. The hardest night so far was when he was waking up every 45 minutes to an hour. My thought was – “Please Andre, let me sleep for another 30 minutes!!! Pretty please.” But he has only done that once so far. On average, we wakes up every 2 hours.

Even with all that, we are happy to have him in our lives!!!

IT’S A BOY!
(Chilumba just started cloning)

Nelly just gave birth to our baby boy (Andre Chilumba Mubashi) today, 14th November 2010, around 5 AM PST.

cute;
6lbs 1 oz;
20.5 inches;
new mommy calls him “adorable”;
new daddy is still speechless;

The baby is doing well, healthy, and already getting my attention. I tried to take a nap after so many hours waiting on him, and when it was my time to catch a snooze (while Nelly was napping too), the baby alerted me that he is not on my resting schedule yet.

 This should be a fun ride.

For many, when they hear Marshmallow Man, they remember the image of the ‘Stay Puft Marshmallow Man’ in Ghostbusters.
For the Mubashi household, this term has been used to refer to the pregnant lady .

No names mentioned. Just saying….
Ofcourse, Nelly is going to kill me now that I have posted these pictures! Hopefully I will survive.

This just could be my excuse for putting up pregnancy pictures.

Guess which side of the bed is mine .
2 pillows side, or 5 pillow side

.
.
Give up guessing yet?
I will give you a hint.

Over the course of her pregnancy, Nelly has been surrounding herself with pillows when she sleeps. This has been a combination of getting comfortable, and probably what I believe is to protect her and the baby from Chilumba. She would probably be right if I had a pattern of elbowing during sleep.

But, it has been hilarious seeing so many pillows used, especially for a person that does not like pillows much (well, Nell loves the small one which she carries when she travels; it is also going into the maternity room too).

I am the “Screaming T-Rex” this year.

Scream + T-Rex = Screaming T-Rex

I combined my Scream t-shit and my T-Rex hat.
Nelly created the tail for me.

Nelly showing off the completed tail

See the rest of the the halloween pictures here.

Happy Halloween!

Today, Nelly and I celebrate our fifth wedding anniversary. When I Binged 5th year wedding anniversary , two gift ideas came up – Wood or Silver. I hope she does not end up with a wooden broom  - since it is also Halloween (Inside joke: Nelly and I have been playing with broom and witches theme for many-many years now).

It has been 5 years already! Of course I have known Nelly for just over 11 years! But it has been an amazing journey, and about to be more interesting as we expect our new addition in the next couple of weeks (if not sooner; if not later ).

As I look back at our wedding day (see wedding pictures here  [opens in a new window]), I feel happy and proud of the commitment Nelly and I made. We had fun that day, and we continue to have fun. I hope the baby will continue to let us be goofy – maybe he too can join in on the fun.

To Nelly – I love you Nelly. Happy Anniversary!
Goofy me.

5 years, and counting….

Everyone keeps asking me if I am freaking out.
Should I be?
I am definitely excited, and I know that this will be a life changing experience….. “Bring it on!”

But so far, I am obviously like a kid waiting for Santa to deliver their package.
Even night when I sleep, I have noticed that my dreams evolve around the baby theme. My co-worker (Mr.K) had told me that as it gets closer to the due date, all I will have will be baby on my mind.
Two more weeks – i hope the guy arrives on time, and does not cause mummy too much hardship.

Diapers -
Nelly and I decided to go with the environmentally friendly option of cloth diapers.
We signed up with a diaper service where they deliver a new set every week, and they take the dirty ones.
For the service, it roughly comes to about the same price as going for the disposable diaper option.
We will probably use disposable ones for convenience (maybe when we need to go someone and don’t need to carry soiled diapers everywhere).
Plus, when the baby goes to day care, he will need to use disposable ones – the one we managed to get into only has that option.
We got our first batch of clean diapers today!

Flu Shot -
For the first time, I got a Flu shot. Nelly got hers weeks earlier.
The recommendation was that everyone in the household needed to have the vaccine, so that we are “less” contagious for the baby.
I did not swell or react negatively to the shot; hopefully it holds up and I don’t get a flu for the next 6 months.

….. and “Oh crap! Leaves are starting to fall”.

Last week, I knew the cold season had kicked in. Our heating system kicked in several times during the night to regulate the heat.
It had not done that since last winter. So our energy bill will be higher for the bill next month.
With the cold coming in in October, so has fall. Leaves have started falling already – but not too bad yet.
I have not needed to rake them yet. But last night, there was a heavy storm, and I noticed more debris. I anticipate that I will be doing a lot of clean-up this weekend.

A week before the baby shower, Nelly’s mum planned to surprise Nelly by announcing that she would be attending the baby shower.
She came over Thursday night, and participated in the baby shower on Saturday, and took off early Sunday morning.

But it looks like the ladies had some fun.

The Baby Shower pictures are posted [here]. Sheila’s friend, Shumaila, took pictures at the event. She took really good quality ones, and I scaled them down in the album presented on the site – so that I could easily put them up on the web for quick sharing.

Hospital rules – you are not allowed to leave the hospital without having a certified baby Car Seat.
So next on our priority list, was the immediate purchase of a seat.
We ended up getting one of those seats that turn into boaster seats for toddlers.
Only problem – The seat is too big for my car (fits perfectly in Nelly’s car). We will figure it out.
We got some more beddings.
We got a few clothes – so that we can finish packing up the baby bag
Pump – I will leave it at that. We are going with the breast-feeding option:-0
Baby food supplies; feeders; sterilizers;
Receiving blanket – baby is going to be born when it gets cold
Nelly threw in baby laundry detergent
… a bunch more other stuff. (And we are not done yet)

Nelly and I had set the goal of completing the baby room (the baby nursery) by August 15th. This was so that we would not leave everything until the last minute.
Plus, if the little dude decided to come early, we wanted to make sure that we were covered, and that both mummy&daddy were making decisions together on what to add in there (rather than last minute scrunching).

Baby nursery view from the door

It has been an exciting process.
The room is right next to our room, and small and cozy enough to have a crib + recliner for feeding.
We went with the color yellow – a neutral theme color. But a good baby color which went with the colors of the furniture we were going with.
Nelly also like to have the room have ‘Winnie The Pooh‘ (and Friends) as its theme. So we have some Pooh related stuff on the wall and Pooh beddings.

I painted, and I did not want Nelly to be in the room so that she does not get to smell the fumes. But she did help with the final site clean-up : vacuum and basic arranging.

The rest of the Baby Nursery pictures are [here]

We finally zero’ed in, and decided on a name.
Pretty funny that both of us had the name high on the list when we had narrowed the names we were considering.
We will only announce the name on the day the baby is born.

We are really-really close to zero’ing in on a baby name. We are down to 8 names for boys.
For the record, my attempt to use Casper, Caspar, or even Caspa failed, and was quickly vetoed by Nelly .

But, we have had a pretty fun process on name choosing.

- Nelly created her own list of names, which she kept to herself
- I created my name list which I also kept to myself
- We consolidated the 2 names lists [Amazing, there were some similar names from both our lists]
- We went through the combined list and we each started to veto the ones which we did not like
- Many minutes later, our 48 names list was down to 8!

It has been pretty fun. For example, we had to try out the names by speaking it out, alone, with last name, and as a full name complete with a middle name.

It was funny role playing acting and shouting out name like the kid is in trouble. Some names just did not sound right when shouted out!

Next step, we will individually give each name a value. Then add the numbers, and then sort the list and figure out the names which bubble to the top. We aim to be down to at least 4 names on our next name choosing session.

Should be fun.

‏I ran in the Seafair  Torchlight Run [http://www.seafair.com/events/torchrun] on the weekend. I did the 8K Run.

The route started off near South Lake Union, hit into Seattle downtown, went through the Alaska Way Viaduct and back to 9th Ave and Republican.

[Torchlight route]

Turn by Turn directions starting off at 9th Ave and Republican-

- Run down 9th Ave N
- Turn on Denny Way Towards Space Needle
- Take Wall St
- Turn on Seneca St towards water front
- Hit Alaska Way Viaduct towards quest field
- Near S Jackson St, navigate up Alaska Way Viaduct towards Seattle Center
- Proceed on Aurora Ave N
- Take Westlake Ave N towards Mercer St
- Onto 9th Ave N

Nelly and Sheila (Nelly’s sister; My sister in law) cheered me on while I did the run. 

[Nelly, Chilumba, and Sheila]

 It was a pretty cool experience, and I would definitely do it again.

It is amazing how many avid runners Seattle has. Looking at the table of participants, there were a total of 4618 registered runners – 2,838 finished the 8K and 1780 finished the 5K run.

The race announcer said there were over 5,000 (together with unregistered runners).

How did Chilumba do?

I did better than I expected.
I ran the whole course – never slowed down to walk. 

[Chilumba's running graph showing my pace]

I completed the race in 46 minutes and 22 seconds at a pace of 9:20 minutes per mile.
I was in the 1,713th position out of all the 2,838 registered runners in the 8K race – So I ran faster than 1,125 other people :- )
I was in the 1,084th position out of 1,490 males.
I was 161th out of 231 other runners in my age group. 

[Snippet of 8K run results]

Here some rough stats:

Run	Females	Males	Total
5K	1070	1070	2140
8K	1348	1348	2696
Total	2418	2418	4836

My Results:

Overall Position:	1713 / 2418
Male Position:	1084 / 1348
Age Group Position:	161 / 231
8K run time (min):	46 min 22 sec
8K run pace (min/mile):	9 min 20 sec

 

The race pictures Nelly took (and the ones I took on my phone) are here .

What a way to end a Friday, and what I scary weekend.
Nelly was driving from work, and on her way to a doctor’s appointment.
But while on the high-way, stopped (due to traffic), A truck hit her from the back, which pushed her into car in front. Driver was distracted with AC. Nelly was not injured; seat belt was the only thing which hurt her shoulder and side of stomach; was sore immediately after.
I took her to ER and they decided they want to monitor her overnight, and wanted her to rest. Baby heartbeat was normal.

So I ended up camping at hospital.
The room she was admitted in was in the maternity ward – so I got to Test Drive being in a similar room as one she would deliver in.
The guy admitted it was his fault, and he would have to pay damages for the two cars (and probably his).
The police had got to the scene will 10 minutes, and by the time I got there, it was sorted – hence my driving her straight to the ER.