Long May Your Big Jib Draw: Dog days of summer

It's hard to believe that summer is almost over. I head back to work on Monday, and Brian is currently away finishing up some lionfish work in Mexico. Porter has made leaps and bounds in the language department since his 2nd birthday (July 20), and we no longer worry that he'll be using only sign language to get his point across when he's 25! Here are a few of his favorite words:

Mine
Fish
Fishing
Shark
Turtle
Octopus
No

See a trend here? I guess that's what's expected in a house like ours. Don't get me wrong; we discuss tons of other topics too, like farm animals (lots of "moos" and "neighs" and "baaaas"), sports (LOVES the Olympic coverage!), food ("More please!") and numbers (Is it weird that he can count to 10 by himself, and 20 with help?). He still hasn't got all the letters and colors down, but we're working on that.

Baby Degan #2 (i.e. my belly) is getting bigger and bigger every day. I'm showing a lot earlier with this one, and let me tell you, the 1st trimester sucked! Everyone thinks I'm having a girl because this pregnancy is so different from the first. We'll have to wait and see! My first sonogram, including a fetal echocardiogram, is on August 28th in Chapel Hill, but we're not going to find out the sex until the big day. When is the 'big day', you ask? You'll have to wait on that one too. We learned the hard way what it was like to have a particular due date with Porter, and to go 16 days "overdue", with everyone and their dog asking "Is the baby here yet??" We'll let you know when baby #2 arrives, right on time, about 10 months from conception.

As for the fetal echocardiogram, it's standard procedure for mother's who've had other children with congenital heart defects, and is just a really detailed sonogram. The odds of having another child with a defect runs from 1.5-5%; pretty low. We'll let you know what we find out.

Here are a few pictures and videos from our summer adventures:

His first bloody injury - a face plant on the door hinge.