Happy New Year!

A little late, but Happy New Year everyone! Tom and I had fun celebrating - I made scalloped potatoes for the first time, and they didn't turn out too bad. Much better than my pizza! I posted a picture of the pizza since I thought the "great divide" down the middle was pretty funny. Tom made sure to keep the pepperoni far away from my "poison" (a.k.a. tomatoes to us normal people!) and artichokes. It looked beautiful before I cooked it...but then when I went to pull it out it was a little burnt and VERY crispy. Tom is an angel for eating it anyway with no complaints; he always puts up with my experimenting :). I think next time I'll check on it periodically, rather than just setting the timer and forgetting about it...Anyway, for New Years we went over to our friends' house and celebrated with the usual group of friends. Everyone brought a ton of fireworks, so we had a lot of fun with that. Germans go nuts with fireworks! Nothing like in the states, so that was pretty cool.

I also posted a couple belly photos, this is about 30 weeks. We're getting close! We've been really busy lately, and Tom just came down with a bad cold, so we haven't made much progress on Julia's room...but, everyone has been so generous with gifts (THANK YOU!!) that we feel very prepared. I also signed us up for a crash course in child birth (it's a whole day of class, I'd rather have it spread out, but it's hard to work around our schedules), so that should help too. A lot of the guys at work have been telling me all the birthing experiences their families have had, and sometimes it makes me more nervous, but it also puts everything into perspective - at the end of it all, they went home with their precious baby! Julia's been moving around a lot, and sometimes I can feel her pointy joints through my skin. It's really cool, but can get uncomfortable. Tom and I like massaging her back too, it's really neat to be able to interact with her like that!