38 Weeks Pregnant

Only two weeks till the due date! I wanted to get this blog up sooner to make up for last week, but yesterday and today were both pretty busy…sorry! I also wish I wasn't wearing the same outfit two weeks in a row...hopefully no one cares. :-)

We got home from our final Bradley class around 9:00 last night, and then I couldn’t stay awake for another minute. All day today I was working on preparations for one of the recitals I had scheduled for my students. (Half of them were in tonight’s recital, the other half will play in next Tuesday’s recital.) I had this great idea to make three different kinds of cookies to put in goody bags for each kid, but when you procrastinate and end up doing all of that in one day, it’s a big job, especially when you have to go out and buy ingredients and cute bags to put the cookies in. I also had to make certificates for them, which Travis ended up pretty much doing for me, and I had to alter the top I wanted to wear, etc. etc. The recital went really well, though!

Baby Norah is still growing, I’m sure, but my belly measurements have stayed the same this week. As predicted, she has started to descend into my pelvis, which is pretty exciting! I definitely feel like she is lower. I told Amy that sometimes when she moves I feel crampy in the lower part of my belly, and she said that’s a good sign that things are moving in the right direction! I seem to be having even more Braxton-Hicks now, and sometimes they’re stronger than usual.

I didn’t get to weigh myself at this week’s appointment because we were in a different room (there was another appointment going on in the usual exam room), so I don’t know what I weigh this week. I don’t mind. J

The only other piece of news from the appointment is that I am Strep B negative. It wouldn’t have been a big deal if I was positive, but it’s nice not to have to worry about it.

I got my oral Vitamin K in the mail, and I am to take a drop a day to give Norah a boost while she’s still in utero, and then I’ll keep taking it for some unknown length of time so it will be in my milk. I think Norah is supposed to get a drop soon after birth, another at one week, and another at one month.

Someone bought the 5-W from us! Yay! I’m really glad our money wasn’t wasted, and neither were the pills.

Travis’s Aunt Carolyn and cousin Leanne threw us a great baby shower last Saturday! They went crazy with food, decorations, and gifts!!! The cake was so cute – they used a picture of the mural Travis painted on Norah’s wall (which I realize I still haven’t shown you…) and had it airbrushed onto the cake, which was so yummy! Unfortunately, most of it is still in our fridge, and I refuse to eat it. I think Travis might take it to school tomorrow.

Anyway, we got lots of CUTE outfits and other stuff we needed. Travis’s sister Rachel even got us a Boppy pillow that matches Norah’s room! So I guess my other one will be a spare, or I’ll keep one upstairs and one downstairs or something. We also got lots of diaper money! We’ve already used some of it to get all the diapers (6 of them) that we wanted from www.alvababy.com. I can’t wait to show you our diaper stash! The Alva Baby ones will probably take several weeks to get here since they’re coming from China and the shipping was free. Here, I’ll show you a picture of one of them:

While I’m at it, here’s a photo of a couple of little tiny shirts that Travis screen printed for Norah. So cute!

Our last Bradley class was kind of sad! I can’t believe it’s been three months since we started. We learned so much and feel very well prepared. Mary spent most of the class talking with us about how to handle different situations, such as strangers trying to grab the baby’s hands or pick the baby up, or people staying too long when they visit, or people trying to push their own parenting style onto us. It was good just to start thinking about how we would handle situations like that. I’m not terribly worried about all of that, but we definitely do want to make sure Norah isn’t exposed to too many germs before her system is developed enough to handle it.

Then we spent a few minutes talking about care of a newborn…mostly just feeding, bathing and caring for the umbilical cord. Interesting factoid: you don’t have to rub alcohol on the umbilical cord stump. If you leave it alone, it will actually fall off faster because the bacteria help it to decay. However, if bacteria gross you out, it’s fine to clean it. J We’re going to do a bit more research on that.

At the end of class, we got contact info. from some of our classmates (the ones who didn’t run out the door before we could get to them), and Mary gave us each a goody bag with some free samples of stuff, plus a couple of adorable burp cloths that she made.

As I mentioned, we really feel like our class helped us to feel prepared. My excited emotions are starting to outweigh the apprehensive ones. I’m really not worried about anything going wrong. Sometimes I’m still afraid of the pain, and sometimes I’m totally confident that I can handle it. Hopefully I still have two weeks or so to finish getting myself mentally prepared. I’d like to go into it just feeling excited and ready. We are definitely looking forward to meeting our little Norah!