Pregnancy

Luckily my pregnancy was pretty much without complications. Sure, in the first weeks I was often very tired, especially at a long work seminar over a weekend right at the beginning, where I was supposed to be learning about optics from 8am-10pm, but barely managed to "survive" from one 5-minute break to the next. As for the common problem in early pregnancy of getting sick all the time, I successfully managed to avoid this altogether with the "secret recipe" of eating my daily Bratwurst at the Christmas market right in front of our apartment in Aalen. ;-)
Otherwise no problems except for a few colds too many. My belly grew rather slowly (much more slowly than that of a girl from band who is due only two weeks after me), so we could stay pretty active, with hiking, biking, "caving", badminton, playing clarinet in my band including even some marching (until some baby-prep courses started taking place right at rehearsal time in Mid-May :-( ), plus many weekend trips to my parents' place, Rostock/Berlin, Cologne, Munich, Ulm, Nuremberg, and even to Prague as late as Mid-June... Aside from that, lots of classes - birth preparation, baby care, aqua fitness - and other young parents preparation seminars have been keeping us very busy since around Mid-April...

In the meantime, Daniel has been growing steadily and getting more and more active quickly (doing wild somersaults already on the second ultrasound). He made his kicks felt by both of us very soon (though Jefferson insisted at first it must be "gas" rumouring inside me when I first felt that Daniel had been dancing happily after a band rehearsal), and up to now keeps kicking and stretching wildly as if there was no such thing as a very tight belly in the way... The only rather big surprise we had in this pregnancy was that Daniel hadn't always been a boy! ;-) In the exam in Mid-February, it was supposed to be finally possible to tell the gender on the ultrasound. Whereas I had never minded one way or the other, Jefferson had been dying to know for weeks already. So he was a bit disappointed when the doctor could only tell that it will be "most probably" a girl. Still, the doctor sounded confident enough for us to pick a girl's name, start calling "her" that name and referring to "her" as "she"... - After that, there was a long time without ultrasounds, since everything was going smoothly in the pregnancy. When finally, in Mid-May, we got to take a look inside again, we suddenly learned "oops, this is certainly not a girl"!!! At that point even I had grown so used to "her" being a girl that it took both me and Jefferson quite some time to get used to the new gender and name. And hopefully Daniel has not suffered an irreparable trauma by being referred and talked to as a girl for months!!! ;-)
Luckily we are not at all into the strict pink vs. light blue separation, besides, we didn't even start getting baby stuff until June or so, so at least in that respect there was no need for readjusting... - But well, even though it seems to be much easier to tell for sure on the ultrasound if it's a boy, I already heard of two cases where a boy "turned" into a girl again, so let's keep thumbs crossed that Daniel will stay a Daniel even when he's out! ;-)