39wks, 2 days

For the record:

I feel fine.

No, I haven't had the baby yet.

No, I'm not "desperate to have it out", "ready for this all to be over", "feeling huge", or "miserable".

My first week of maternity leave is done . . . and, as it tends to happen every single time I have a break from work, I got really sick. I'm not sure how much is actual illness, and how much is allergies, but I started antibiotics just in case. I've spent most of my time off just sitting around, realizing how miserable I would have been on bedrest. The first 2 days of not working were relaxing, but after that it was mostly boring. The highlights of my day are naptime and milkshake time . . . I'm not sure which one is better.

Here are some other highlights from the week:

-Tuesday: I went to a store called "The Upper Breast Side". Seriously. (It's a breastfeeding/nursing supply boutique). There motto is something like "You bring the breast, we do the rest." I couldn't make this stuff up.

-Wednesday: Dave & I went to the midwife & perinatologist. After lonngggg appointments & tests the consensus is that the baby isn't drastically small, but it's abdomen is measuring little (in the 13th percentile). Everything else is perfect (it scored an 8 out of 8 on some development tests). So I have to go get the tests repeated on Monday and Thursday to make sure baby is continuing to grow properly. Here are pictures from one of the recent sonograms:

Profile (baby is looking up):
Baby looking straight at the camera:

-Thursday: My mom came to visit and help clean. She got an amazing amount done as I mostly sat in the chair and stared at her sleepily. I don't know if it's the pregnancy or the sickness, but I am totally exhausted this week. It was really helpful to have her here.

-Friday: Dave & I went to dinner with his mom. We're trying to squeeze in some more dinners out before the baby arrives.

-Saturday: We spent the day hoping that the baby wouldn't come so that we could just enjoy the day and get things done. We barely managed to get our errands started, however, as I became starving in the car. (I seem to quickly get so hungry that I'm nauseous, which also happened back in the 1st trimester.) So we went to a drive-thru and got french fries. I thought it was photo-worthy. (Neither one of us could remember the last time that we had been to a drive-thru. I think mine was probably when I lived in Baltimore, which was 5 years ago.)


Today we got some more stuff around the apartment done. I finally uploaded the camera to my computer too.---See the pictures in the post above!

Our life in pictures

So the camera cord has been found, and here are some pictures of life recently:

Moving was a lot of work.

All of the dust made me miserably congested and sick, so Dave ran out to the drugstore (scoring major points) to get me a steam machine (since I was trying to avoid medicine). He then negated all of the points he had scored by taking this picture.

Here are some pictures of the master bedroom suite in the apartment. Pics of the rest of the apartment will come soon.

The office (Dave built it himself-no joke):

The sitting area:

The "inner" bedroom- separated from the office & sitting area by double doors (please ignore the fact that the bed's not made and the bedskirt isn't on yet):

The master closet

The master bathroom (look, we have one of those showers with all of the nozzles, like a car wash!)

And here I am, after getting home from work today. I definitely look pregnant now. I'll have to get another picture of my width, but I wasn't sure if it would fit in the frame.

And here's the little baby at 20 weeks along. It has a huge head---I showed this pic to the kids at school and they seemed terrified by its giant head. The little thing next to the head is the hand-we think it was sucking its thumb.

The blog begins . . .

I have no idea what I'm doing. Do not come here with high expectations of wit or regular updating. We'll see what happens. Lisa has kept a great blog going since she was pregnant with my first nephew, and people (like me) love checking it to see new pictures, etc. So I thought it was worth a shot. Right now the baby is about the length of my pinky finger from head to butt (that's how they measure these things). It's about 2 1/2 inches long. See the new pic below! Now that we're past 12 weeks, I'm starting to feel like this whole pregnancy thing is a little more real, so we're starting here . . .





Here's my pregnancy test from September 12th. You're looking at something I peed on. Hee hee.

This is the baby at 9 weeks- it looks like a gummi bear! That fact made my friend Dan sing the Gummi Bear cartoon theme song, which was stuck in my head for a while. Now it is again.

And here it is now--the 12 week picture. If you're good at checking out ultrasound pics, you can actually see the outline of the face (nose, mouth, etc).