Recently in Family Category

Now that the outer shell of the house is pretty much nailed down, they're been focusing on the innards.  The cabinets are all in, their respective countertops placed, and they got all the tile work done this past week.

Seeing the patterns we worked out so many months ago with our designer finally come to life is so cool.  Sure, it seems neato bandito scrawled out on a piece of paper like this:

But that's just nothing like seeing this:

And in the kitchen:

Here's our beautiful master bedroom bay window:

And they laid the driveway, too:

Now it's getting hard to wait for the move-in date!

We went to a 3D ultrasound place this past week, ClearView Ultrasound in Austin.  We were wondering if our Little One is going to have my Italian nose or Serene's cute little Chinese nose.

As we were sitting in the waiting room filling out the paperwork and awaiting our turn, there was this strangely hypnotic music playing that seemed to be hand-bell renditions of various Green Day songs.  (It sounded like synthesized hand-bells, not real ones.) 

We snooped around a bit and found that it was an album by Rockabye Baby.  And they had several other selections there too, Coldplay, Bon Jovi, Nine Inch Nails, etc.  I'm really not sure what to think about all that...

 
Apparently since Serene is so tiny, the baby doesn't have much room to move around, or so saith the nurse.  I have a hard time grasping that.  It seems to me that the baby will make whatever room he needs.  At any rate, Little Lo was snugged in his breech position all nice and cozy.
In this first clip we started in 2D and watched the baby smack his lips, then switched over to 3D to see him with his hands in his face.  I sleep like that sometimes too.


In the second clip, we again started in 2D and switched to 3D.  I sped up the 3D section a bit so it wouldn't be 1 frame per second for 5 minutes of a sleeping baby.  For this one I was singing Istanbul is Constantinople by They Might Be Giants to try to get him to move around.  He wiggled and kicked, but didn't move his head very much.  Sometimes comfort supersedes any dancing urges.

The stone and brickwork has been finished.  It's so beautiful!  Pics:
I took another shot of the left side to better show the graduated stonework over the foundation. To recap: There's a rule in the Circle C HOA that there can't be more than some number of inches of concrete foundation exposed, so we get some extra brick work down over part of the foundation, making the whole house look taller.

And here's what the back of the house looks like with all that brick and masonry slapped on it:

They've also put in all the cabinets in the bathrooms and kitchen, and added most of the inside doors, along with the door and window trims and baseboards.  It's starting to look a bit like a house in there.

They've managed to squeeze in some masonry and brick-laying in between all the bouts of rain we've been getting these past few weeks.  Between that, getting a round of inspections done for the wiring and piping, and getting all the sheetrock up throughout the house, they've been busy, busy bees.

We stopped by a few times during the week this week to get the masonry and brick work stages in action, since those are so visible and fun.  Here's them working on the masonry along the bottom.

Here's the masonry done, and them working on the bricks.

I haven't shown any shots from the left side of the house yet. They were working on the bricks on that side when we were there, so I took one. Looking at the picture, it looks like a much larger house than it is. They had to build up the foundation quite a bit on that side because the ground sloped downward.

The back is built up as well. The back porch is around 3 feet from the ground at the back. It seems there's a rule in the Circle C HOA that there can't be more than some number of inches of concrete foundation exposed, so we get some extra brick work down over part of the foundation, making the whole house look taller. Of course, there's a stack of bricks in the way of all that in this picture, so it's hard to tell.

And here's a quick shot of our living room all walled in. Just because.

We're really loving living in Austin.  I do miss the big gorgeous redwoods of Northern California, and having mountains on the horizon.  But living in a city with a downtown built around a beautiful tranquil lake compensates quite a bit.

This weekend we took a nice end-of-autumn walk around Ladybird Lake (formerly Town Lake) and then wandered into the downtown for a yummy lunch of BBQ brisket.

I snapped a few pictures around the Zilker Park corner.  Serene is 25 weeks pregnant here with our little boy.


When we were paddleboarding during the summer, we saw heaps of turtles.  Apparently there are also heaps of ducks.


And, of course, somebody artistically placed a bit of holiday cheer on one of the trailside bushes.

They got most of the roof in place pretty quickly after that last update.  We went and visited it during a little bout of rain and found it nice and dry inside.  Almost cozy.  I was thinking a picnic might be nice.

The big changes to the house since the last update have been internal.  They got all the wiring and piping all wired and piped.  They even wired up all the doors and windows with sensors.  My home automation fantasies are feasting on that.
The white on the roof of the right-hand shot is ice. 

They'll be doing the brick and masonry work on the outside soon.  You can see the bricks in the foreground of the angled (left) shot above.  So the next update should be exciting.  (grin)

The house is coming together so quickly.  This week they got the roof planks on and the outside walls lined.  They were just finishing putting the windows in when we stopped by.
I love how the front is coming out.  That high vaulted entryway really makes the house look grand.

Wow!  One week between the foundation being poured and the house being fully framed.  It's so cool seeing it starting to take shape.  It's tough to remember that we're still four months away from move-in.

And look at this gorgeous woman.  You can hardly tell she's almost 5 months pregnant.

We did our big 20 week ultrasound today.  It sure is some shade of wonderful to see our little one for the first time.  Up till now I've been putting my ear up to Serene's belly to hear the baby move all around, and Serene can feel the little one kick inside.  But actually seeing the baby is just fantastic.

The big news: It's a boy.  It's rather definite.  There's none of this, "We think it's probably a boy."  Sometimes they're not all that sure, but it seems the evidence was rather convincing in this case.

	A beautiful profile of the baby's face.
	Another of the baby's face.  This one looks a bit halloweenish, but it shows a good healthy face there.
	On this one they were checking the bloodflow through the umbilical chord.  It was pretty cool to see it in action.  By the way, those colors you see are just representative.
	Here's a shot of the baby's hand waving "Hi" to us.  Heh.  He's such a ham.  You can see the bone structure of the arm and hand pretty clearly.
	This is the spine.
	The boy parts.  In this one you can see the leg bones too.
	The boy parts again.  Here he has his legs up.
	I have no idea what this is.  It looks like a cross-section of the baby.

Finally, here's a little video of the heartbeat.  It's just a heartbeat, but you can actually see all four chambers of the heart beating.



One thing that was pretty impressive to me was how fast the nurses and doctors could identify what they were looking at.  They'd jump the thing around, flashing past something and say, "Oh there were the kidneys."  I guess that happens when you stare at these things all day long.

They poured the foundation this past week.  They filled in the foundation framing with a gritty sand, then dug trenches in what they had just filled in using a trench digger, then laid the main piping down, then poured the concrete over the whole thing, like frosting on a cake.

It's pretty exciting (and amazing) to see everything coming together; the house and the whole neighborhood.  I know that tons of planning and hard work has gone into getting this together, but when a house springs up in the new neighborhood, it just feels like somebody planted a little house seed and started watering it.