He's Almost Here!

Well, this is it! After 39 weeks of waiting, our baby boy is almost here!

We've been busy getting his room and our home ready for his arrival, packing our bags and gearing ourselves up for the sleepless nights - and waiting.

These last two weeks have been a lot of anxious waiting as my first son came super fast at 39 weeks (total labor was just over 2 hours - and our hospital is a 45-minute drive away!) - so I was half-expecting things to start moving at any moment!

But it looks like this little guy is taking his time! So instead of speeding down the interstate at midnight (like we did for my first son), we're staying overnight in a nearby hotel - much to my wife's relief!

I may even get to blog some tonight ;-)

Here's a little montage of his latest ultrasound pictures, from when we found out he was a boy to the last ultrasound we did 2 weeks ago. It can be hard to see him - especially in the later ones, he was running out of space in there!

19 Weeks: He's a boy! (the profile of his head is on the left)

25 Weeks (his face is on the right, laying down, looking at us - I think this is his best ultrasound picture!)

29 Weeks (his face is on the right, on his back looking up)

33 Weeks (arrows point to his nose and lips - he's looking straight at us, his eyes in the shadows)

37 Weeks (on his back looking up, his lips on the left - he's nestled in there pretty tight!)

I'm super-excited to meet him face-to-face and look forward to spending lots of time with him - and of course, playing some mouse-only 4v4 with him on the Blizzard ladder in the middle of the night!

His big brother and I got into Silver League in about a month (almost 2 years ago!), and I've not played any 4v4 since then, so I get to start from scratch and play all 5 qualifier games again with this little guy!

Ok, time to get rolling, say goodbye to my co-workers, and start my long, sleepless weekend!

28 Tweets, 5 Videos, 1 Blog Post

Well it's been almost 3 weeks since my "I'm back!" post, and despite the lack of posting, I have produced some results - 28 tweets and 5 published casts!

I also qualified into Silver for Season 8 (2012 Season 3), though I must say that the game was quite the embarrassment... don't worry, you'll get to see it in all it's glory when I eventually cast it!

I've enjoyed tweeting on Twitter - it has done exactly what I hoped it would - provide an quick way for me to send updates and small thoughts, and keep some activity on the blog between posts.

Right now it's been a lot of tweets about my work casting, producing videos, and how I really need to catch up on the blog!

On the video side, it's been an adventure - I've been doing work of some sort on videos pretty much every day I think.

It took me around a week to produce Game 1 of that showmatch vs. RaZe, but the result was awesome. I think it rivals the Welcome Back video as far as production complexity and definitely in the hurdles to make it come together. You can see the entire showmatch on YouTube now, but I will also be doing a blog post for the showmatch - and some tricks I learned about uploading to YouTube!

Over a few days I finished casts of my showmatch with the QuailGang YouTube channel - and started a practice of trying to do the segments of a video (intro, game, closing) in one take - a crucial practice if I hope to cast with any regularity.

After that I cast Ethereal's 2v2 and then 2 ladder games, all in about an hour. The next night I cast another ladder game. But afterwards, felt in the rush to start a backlog of videos (so I could post from the backlog after my son is born), I missed the intent of the ladder casts - reflection on my play/strategy in preparation of playing Zerg in the current season.

So I'll be re-doing those casts, starting with my 1v1 qualifier tonight - I will be uploading it after this post!

So I'm a bit behind on the blog - but it's an exciting time - both on the SC2 side and at home, with a new baby coming in the VERY near future!