I'm not dead yet

I know, I know. A four month hiatus. Life's been a little tiny bit hectic.

I was invited to give a talk at the conference I attended in September, so I spent the entire month of August scrambling for some last minute data and putting together my talk. The talk went well, though I was terrified (as I always am when it comes to public speaking). People seemed interested in my project which is always a nice little confidence booster.

We also had our gender ultrasound towards the end of August. It's a boy! We already had a boy name picked out, so as soon as we found out the gender we got to tell Bean about her baby brother and tell her his name. Since then she's been much more interested in the pregnancy and in her little sibling. We talk about him a lot, and she often asks us about him. The other day she asked me if he is naked in my tummy. I told her yes, but when he's born we'll put some clothes on him and wrap him in a warm blanket. "I'll help," she replied.

Husband is deep in the throes of job market hell. He has applied to over 100 places so far, and there are still more deadlines through December and even into January. No interviews lined up yet, though it's hard to tell whether or not that's a bad sign. It's starting to feel a little anxious though.

Bean moved up to the early preschool class in September and has been loving her new classroom environment. She is just amazing with her letters now, and will often spell out signs as we drive or words in books. It's pretty darn amazing. She's definitely entered a "testing the limits" stage of her development, and that gets a little tiring. Most days I have just nothing left by the time I get her to bed, and I fall asleep on the couch soon after.

I'm up to my eyeballs at work just trying to get things finished up before the baby is born. He'll be term just before Christmas and would likely be born sometime between Christmas and mid-January. (Though you never know. A friend of mine had her second child 12 days past her due date.) We're close to writing up my project, and so I'm trying to get some figures put together now and starting to outline the papers. But the days are flying by, so we'll see how much I can get done before the little one decides to make his debut.

So yeah, it's been a little busy around here. But good. Busy, but good.