We’re Having a Baby!

We’ve been visiting our friends and family here in Salt Lake City, Utah the past week or so. It has been great to see everyone, share some nice hugs, meals, and long conversations, and also experience the cozy feeling of the town we grew up in. I had forgotten how nice it feels to walk on carpet in socks! Ahhh… The leaves on the trees have shown us some beautiful colors, too, and we’ve even had a little snow the past few days.

Fall colors in Utah

Our kids have loved seeing their cousins, and have gone trick-or-treating, ice skating, jumping in piles of leaves, and playing all sorts of games with them. They’ve also had a lot of fun with the toys and dress-ups at Grandma’s house, where we’ve been staying. Our kids are a lot less shy around new friends as well, since they all speak English here!

Baby Number Three

One announcement we had fun making this week was that we recently discovered that we are pregnant with our third child! We found out while we were in Florida, and calculated that we probably conceived around the time we were at Machu Picchu, so we expect the baby to be born around the end of June, 2011.

Since we haven’t been able to get pregnant for 4 years, this came as quite a surprise, and has thrown us for a bit of a loop in our travel plans. At first I was in denial – I didn’t want to have to deal with trying to fit 5 in a hotel room built for 4, and drive a larger car that can fit three car seats comfortably. Then comes the increased cost of airfare, and having to go back to the whole diaper changing bit… <grumble> But we’re getting more used to the idea, and we’re sure this will be a wonderful change and adventure in our lives! We’re hoping for a boy.

Halloween with cousins

Jennifer has a tendency to deliver babies very quickly. Our last baby was born 9 minutes after we got to the hospital! So we’re planning on a home birth this time, with a midwife. We’re not sure where we want to live when the baby is born. Costa Rica is great, but we have to leave every 90 days to renew our visa, which will be more difficult in the third trimester and when the baby is very young. We could come back to the states (California? Hawaii?), but since some countries grant citizenship simply for being born there, we thought that might be a great gift to give our child. I’m currently using oDesk (my favorite outsourcing site) to have someone put together a list of countries for me, with visa requirements, citizenship opportunities, cost of a midwife and a maid, healthcare quality, and more. Hopefully this will help narrow down our options. If you have any suggestions for a good place to have a baby, and our home for most of 2011, please post them in the comments.

Celebrate Your Life

Last weekend, Jennifer and I left our kids with my fabulous sister to attend the Celebrate Your Life Conference in Phoenix, Arizona. We had a great time being together, met some wonderful people, and had plenty of time to think and talk. Many of the sessions were very interesting. I learned some great tips on how to make decisions by choosing the option that brings you the most joy, how to discover your purpose, and follow your heart and be more in tune to the little promptings you feel. I also realized from listening to a book publisher for several hours, that most publishers seem to offer so little compared to what they expect the author to do. So I will probably be self-publishing my book on how to create a self-sustaining on-line business, once I finish it. Maybe I’ll do something similar to what Leo Babauta did on his awesome new book, Focus. (It’s a free read, so check it out!)

We also heard a couple speakers (I won’t mention names) that to me appeared to be deceiving people. I don’t have a problem if someone claims they can talk to spirits or angels, but when they call people out of the audience, and use obvious cold reading techniques and vague guesses to make it appear they know something they don’t, playing on the people’s emotions, it amazes me that so many people fall for it. Okay, I’ll admit it’s great entertainment, and these people are very good at it (one even had a PhD in psychology, which explains a lot), but it seems pretty deceptive to me. Regardless, we still enjoyed the conference, and were glad to get some time alone together, and give the girls more time to play with their cousins.

We’ll be here in Salt Lake City until the end of the week, and then it’s back to warm Costa Rica!