IT'S A GIRL!

I am happy to announce that our little baby is going to be a girl! We found out at our "emergency ultra sound", but I haven't been saying anything because I wanted to wait until my mom knew. I tried to keep it a secret so that she could be surprised when she comes to Utah and gets to see an ultra sound with us on the 30th, but I just couldn't! So I gave her the choice and she decided to know now rather than wait.

No one is surprised that I tell, everyone thought that I was going to have a girl anyway, even Joseph. I'm not really surprised either because I had a dream the week before I was pregnant that I had a baby girl with fuzzy black hair. So I think I knew all along that it would be a girl, even though I did want a boy. :) The more that we think about it and talk about it and refer to the baby as "Her" now, rather than "it", the more excited we get.

We already have a name picked out, she will be Ayla Marie Salazar. (Pronounced Eye-luh, like Kyla with an A!) Ayla, more commonly spelled Isla, is a name that Joseph and I both liked long before we ever thought about having a baby together. So when we found out I was pregnant that name kept coming to my mind. Then a few weeks ago I was watching one of our favorite TV shows that we own on DVD and I noticed that a guest character was a foreign girl named "Ayla". I had never seen that spelling before and I fell in love with it. It is a Hebrew name that means "Of the Moonlight". And the more I say it and think about it the more I feel like that is the perfect name for her. I can't think of anything else that I like better. Her middle name is Marie, after Joseph's mother Marielena, who passed away when he was in high school. Put together, the name Ayla Marie means "Beauty and grace of the moonlight". I think that it is beautiful. I know that I'll get some strange responses from people who are not familiar with the name or who don't particularly like it, but I'm sure my mom went through the same thing when she named me "TonJa" instead of "Tonya". :)

My tummy is getting bigger and bigger everyday. I look like a basketball has been cut in half and put under my shirt. The closer we get to having her, the more stressed out we get! Our biggest concern right now is daycare. I HATE the thought of my tiny infant being in a daycare with lots of other children, possibly not getting the attention that she needs. And not to mention price. I have been researching and I'll be lucky if I can find a place that is less that $175 A WEEK. That's a second rent payment! I really don't know how we'll be able to afford it. Another option would be trying to find a nanny, someone who would watch just her, but even that won't be much cheaper. It would be ideal if I could just not work and be a stay at home mom, but that isn't realistic. We wouldn't be able to live comfortably, we'd suffer so much and I think that would put too much strain on our family. Soooo I will just have to stress out about it until the time comes to suck it up and budget it in I suppose!

Joseph and I are about to take off and have lunch. Mark is treating us to lunch at G today, an amazing restaurant that serves amazing meals for cheap! Today is steak day, so we get steak, mashed potatoes, steamed zucchini, salad, and a roll. Yum!