Lucille Ann Pettit

Our first born has arrived!  Surprised? Yea, so were we. Routine NST (Non-Stress Test) testing on Friday, August 13th turned into full-on pre-eclampsia on Monday the 16th then to birth on Wednesday the 18th.

Lucille Ann Pettit, born on August 18th at 11:20p EDT weighing 5lbs, 1oz. We didn’t take too many photos, but the 25 we managed to fire off have been posted on our Flickr page.

Lost blog posts found!

I was messing around with my Google account settings and saw that Blogger.com was listed under my services. Clicking through, I saw a blog that I completely forgot about “All Glory To The Hypnotoad“, our first attempt at keeping track of our lives. It only lasted about 3 months from September to November 2007 before we completely flaked out on it. A year later we converted Pettitopia.com from a photo gallery into what it is today and picked up from there. Finding this was such a treat, just like opening a time capsule. I have recreated the 12 posts below to preserve them:

• Halloween Party, Halloween Hospital Fun and Thanksgiving
• Birthdays, Disneyland, and Gretta the Jetta
• Happy Birthday Katie!, Disneyland and Apartment Found
• Illness, Handguns, iPhone, The TV and Apartments
• My amazing Joshy
• California Kings, United States Marines, and dogs who poo
• Oh my Joshy =)
• What’s That Big Lump?
• Men and shoes….My rebuttal to Josh’s “New Duds for the Dud”
• New Duds for the Dud
• Oh what a day we have had!
• Date Night on the Sofa

Photos: Babymoon and Monterey

Monterey Bay

While in the bay area, waiting to go to New York, we have been taking advantage of the beautiful scenery and amazing destinations all around us. This time, we made it down to Monterey Bay on a whim. No real plans or destination, we just thought Monterey would be a pleasant escape from San Jose if even only for a 1/2 day. We didn’t make it the aquarium, but we did have a wonderful drive and lunch on Cannery Row. We only snapped 18 photos which have been posted to our Flickr gallery.

Disneyland Baby Moon

What is a baby moon? I asked Katie the same thing! Turns out that it’s your last vacation before the baby is born. Pretty slick, eh? We took ours at the place that got us in this whole mess, Disneyland in Anaheim. We always wanted to stay at the Grand Californian at the resort, but thought it deserved a better reason than just “because”… what better reason than Lucy? The hotel was amazing and because Katie was preggo, we really couldn’t go on too many rides, but that didn’t matter. This was not only our baby moon but our last trip to Disneyland for a very long time. Our goal was to walk the park, take many photos of our favorite spots and just relive the thousands of happy memories the park facilitated. To sum it all up, mission accomplished. 121 photos have been posted to our Flickr gallery:

East Amherst, NY… Here we come!

For a while now we have known that we are moving to Western NY but hammering out the fine details have been a laborious task to say the least! The most important task and the foundation of the move was getting an exact date when we would be moving, which so far has only been “between July and August”. We finally stuck a pin in a date, July 17th.

We have our tickets & dogs booked to travel from San Francisco CA to Buffalo NY. No turning back now, What’s even more exciting is that we have a very nice apartment all lined up for us in East Amherst, NY. “Where is East Amherst?”

Right about there. Our apartment was built in ’06, boasts 2 bedrooms, 2 baths, first floor, 1230sq feet, attached garage, gas heating (big plus for the cold weather), gas fireplace, washer/dryer in-unit and a private entrance. We’re told by friends & coworkers that this area is amazing and that it should be stellar for raising a child in. The rent is high for WNY standards, but is cheap compared to what we are used to in LA County.

It’s A Girl!

We’ve officially hit the 20 week mark in the pregnancy which meant another fetal survey via ultrasound. This also meant that we had a very good chance to determine the sex of the baby. We are two of the most impatient people on the planet so waiting 20 weeks just to find out the sex of the baby was almost torture. On Friday the 14th of May, we went into the Perinatologist for our appointment and couldn’t have been more excited.

Once the appointment started, the ultrasound tech, who very clearly wasn’t a people-person, did her thing with a very stern face almost the entire time. The good news is that the baby measured normal in every way possible. The bad news is they couldn’t see the sex. While a healthy baby is our priority… c’mon! We left happy that Peewee was healthy but a little heart broken that we still didn’t know what he/she was. My beloved wife always has a backup plan and is diabolically crafty… we had an alternative!

On the way home, Katie told me about other couples who were in the same boat went to a 3D/4D elective ultrasound office who had no problems finding the sex. So we did a little research and it was way more affordable that I thought it would be. We booked an appointment for Saturday the 15th and off we went. Within the first 5 minutes, the tech said without a doubt, that we have a little girl! The name we chose: Lucille Ann Pettit.

Katie’s New Ride

Katie’s 2008 Jetta has been due for it’s big 30K service for a little while now and we wanted to wait until we got her up to the bay area to get the work done. On Friday, I had to run to the office really quick and Katie came with. Not too much excitement but on our way back to the apartment, I remember that her car needed service and the VW dealership was on the way home. We swung on in, made the appointment for the very next day at 9:30a and proceeded to peruse the lot. Now, we love to fantasy shop… we know good and well that we have no intention of buying a car, right? Yea, that’s what we thought!

So we met up with a salesman, Mark, who reminded us of our pal Joe back in SoCal. We liked him immediately. We first had our eyes set on a used 2008 Toureg, but it turned out to be WAY too expensive for our taste. We wanted to look at other options and started to make our way down towards the Routan’s (VW’s mini van) and Katie started to lose it! She kept squeezing my hand and shaking her head… but I’m not getting it. I was warm on the idea, she wasn’t, so we moved on. Maybe after the second kid is born we’ll explore the mini van option, but until then, we’ll stick with the SUV range!

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We’re having a baby!

No joke, we’re pregnant! March 25th marks the start of our second trimester and the results of our NT scan (Nuchal Translucency)… which were fantastic! If you are just finding out, don’t get too bent out of shape. We told only a few core members of our family, for support mostly, because we wanted to wait to have the all-clear from the NT scan. With the results coming back in such a positive light… we’re officially spilling the beans! We won’t know the sex for another 8 weeks and we hate calling the baby “it”, so we’re calling our baby “Peewee” for the time being. Oh yea, and we’re due on October 2nd.

Because we are no longer based in SoCal and will be bouncing around the country during the pregnancy, Katie will be keeping a blog of all things pregnancy/baby related:

monkeytopia! – http://www.pettitopia.com/monkeys/

Check it out & follow along in our journey! Here’s a photo of Peewee from today’s appointment, 12 weeks, 5 days.

Random Santa Cruz Visit

Katie and I are road trip advocates. I think it is a very key part of our happy marriage actually. Communication is our cornerstone and when we are on one of our day trips, we get nothing but hours of communication time in. We seldom play the radio, and when we do, it’s at a very low volume.. more background noise than anything really.

This trip was, like most, 100% spontaneous. We were sitting around the apartment and just felt compelled to get outdoors. We hopped in the car and headed to Santa Cruz, about 30 miles up the 17 fwy. The 17 is an amazing drive! Very wooded and windy, nothing like we are used to back in SoCal. We left pretty late so we knew we wouldn’t get much site seeing in, but that really didn’t matter as being in the car with each other was the goal. When we got into Santa Cruz we really didn’t know where to go from there so we wandered the streets until we came across a cliff overlooking the sea. The ground was covered in ice plant and the soft dirt only found at the beach. We made our way down a narrow path overlooking the sea and stood there in awe until the sun set.

Driving home we talked about staying at a little B & B we saw and how on our next visit, we would find a sandy beach to stick our naked feet in. This is an example of our spontaneous road trips we take… while the trip may not be that great, the company always is. Photos of the day have been posted on our flickr page.

Visiting San Francisco

While I am working up in the bay area, they have me in corporate housing in San Jose. The apartment is nothing stellar, but the price is right and quite frankly, it’s really not THAT bad. The part that really sucks is the loneliness. I have been up here for about 3 weeks and I forgot how much I dislike being single. Granted I have been home to LA last week, it doesn’t feel the same. I miss going to bed and talking with her at night, walking the dogs, just being near her. It’s quite a lifestyle shock.

Katie decided to come up to San Jose to visit and cheer me up… she even brought the dogs! Brave move on her part and she paid the price as poor Rex got sick in the car while driving over the 152, throwing up in her cup holders. I had the pleasure of cleaning it up when they got into the apartment complex.

I took on a grand tour of Hayward, the town I spent most of high school in. We drove by the old houses, saw a few of my schools and even ate at the pizzeria Joel worked at, Bronco Billy’s. The town hasn’t changed much and why should it? Not much going on in the Hayward hills. We visited San Francisco on the 15th, spent most of the day there. We hung out over on Pier 39, drove down Lumbard St,  had a great lunch and just walked the Embarcadero. This was Katie’s first trip to the bay area but she will be moving here once the lease on our apartment in Valencia is up, so we were in no real rush to do the entire city.

I posted about 80+ photos of the visit, check them out over on our Flickr page.

Western NY Recce

With our move quickly approaching, Katie and I flew out to Western NY to check the area out. First, there are no direct flights to Buffalo. I emphasis this point because layovers were designed by the devil himself to pit man against one another. Our first leg was from LAX to Dulles (5 hours) with a 2 hour layover, then to Buffalo (1 hour). Normally this wouldn’t have been so bad, but we thought we’d gain extra time in NY if we took a red eye. We quickly learned this was a mistake as you really don’t get that restful sleep while flying. Between turbulence, the what felt like foam-less seats.. just an uncomfortable time.

We made it safely in to Buffalo, and man was it snowing. Like full on blizzard snowing. As a matter of fact, we were one of the last flights allowed to land, the rest were being diverted. We rented a Suzuki Grand Vitara which turned out to be one of the nicest rental vehicles we’ve ever had. From the car rental lot, we scooted over to the hotel (Crown Plaza) in downtown Niagra Falls. While the hotel was very nice & comfortable, downtown Niagra Falls is a dump. The city has clearly fallen on hard times as several streets had nothing but boarded up shops and “For Lease” signs. We immediately discounted living in Niagra Falls and toured our first choice, Lewiston. Lewiston is a very quaint community, very ‘Norman Rockwell’. So far we are sold on Lewiston, but the lack of retail outlets and basic signs of life had us starting to rethink our decision to move.

A few days later, we met up with our friend Mike who lives in Niagra Falls for a grand tour of Western NY. Wow, what a difference. You how when you go to LA, you have certain assumptions about areas you think would be nice, but in reality are just awful. Turns out, Western NY isn’t so different. Mike’s tour helped us fall in love with the area. We now know of at least 3 areas where we want to look for houses to rent for at least 1 year before we think about buying: Lewiston, Amhurst or Tonawanda.

Overall, this trip proved invaluable for us. Seeing winter at it’s worst, getting to know the area, seeing how we could drive in snow… invaluable.