Valentine's Pick Their Son's Name. February 14, 2011

We walked out of the ultrasound on our tippy toes today. As a matter of fact, I'm not sure if we were actually touching the ground, or if we just rode Cloud 9 back to the car. Of all of the fun things I've ever done, this has got to be the absolute most meaningfully fun event ever. Prior to this, marrying my amazing husband held that spot; this only takes a slight step ahead of that, and only because we created this little life together. I can't wait to be a mommy to a son who has such an amazing daddy!

Our Valentine's Day dinner was planned at Sweetwater Tavern, where the food is always amazing and the service is never sub-par. Our favorite soup there is the corn and crab chowder, of which I ate two.. count them.. two bowls! I didn't know that they offered you a choice of 'soup or salad' as a side, and always picked the obligatory salad with ranch dressing and no tomatoes. Um, hello?! Every restaurant offers their "soup or salad" with your meal! A lesson well learned, here. We brought our gifts with us to dinner so we could exchange them there, and as soon as we sat down and ordered our appetizer chowders, we exchanged gifts. I gave Baby Daddy the headset he's been wanting for so long, and well... he got me something that made me explode inside! You see, we were visiting Olivia when I read something on the net that said you could hear your baby's heartbeat with a stethoscope starting around week 18 or so. So, we bought the stethoscope, but it was as useful as putting your ear up to my belly and hoping to hear talking. So we gave up on the idea and went along our merry ways. When I opened the fetal listening device, I nearly screeched! This was similar to the dopplers used by our doctors when they listen to the baby's heartbeat at our checkups, only it was a set of headphones hooked up to the sensor portion of the device. Amazing! He also got me my second ever maternity shirt- GO PACKERS! And when we got home, he led me into the bedroom where a wonderful pregnancy pillow was waiting for me. (I'd been having trouble sleeping. He's so thoughtful!) I LOVED my Valentine's Day. Best one EVAR!

We had agreed previously that whatever we did, Valentine's day would be our day to finalize our son's name. We chose this day because the ultrasound was going to confirm for us that we were indeed having a son, and that way we could pick his name without any reservations. We took those names I mentioned earlier and wrote them down again. We also added a few extras to the list. Here's what we had:
Giovanni Manicotti Rey
Gabriel Rey
... Well, shoot. I think there were more. I can't remember! We sat and talked about these and a couple of other names, pondered silently to ourselves, shared the names with each other, and then silently sat pondering some more. Out of nowhere, the name "Dominic" popped in my head, so I decided to present the name to my man. "Dominic Rey." He sat quiet for a long, long time, looking off into space, hand on his chin, eyes to the ceiling. He looked at me and said, "I really like that." We talked about it some more and decided that, of all the names we'd gone over, we liked this one the best. Of course, we started coming up with the various nicknames we could make out of Dominic, and laughed together as we imagined him getting so mad at us for "saying that in front of his friends."

So we finished up dinner, the three of us, happily enjoying our steak and soup, and looking forward to the day when we can see our little Dominic face to face!