November1

November 1, 2001

Week 24

Another month passes! It all still seems to be going so quickly. As of today, I have spent (quickly checking my BabyZone calendar) 167 days being pregnant, and I have 113 days to go - assuming Natalie shows up directly on her due date, of course. :-) I'm sure she'll be a punctual child, always doing things according to my schedule - right? Right? Wow, 113 days, suddenly that seems like such a long time, but then again the past 167 days have really flown by and I feel like I've hardly blinked twice. At least now that I'm starting to actually look pregnant and not like I've just become a couch potato, I'm feeling better that way. I haven't had any comments in the last couple weeks about how "you don't even look pregnant" or "how far along are you, a month or two?" I know, I know, people really mean those comments as compliments, but I always heard it as "I just always thought you looked that round and roly-poly". I'm pretty sure before I got pregnant that I made comments like that, and what I meant was "you look really good, I just can't believe you are so far along and look that good" but now that I've been on the receiving end of that, when I'm really excited about what's going on and for the first time in my life I don't MIND having a belly, I now know not to say that to a pregnant lady! Now I'm starting to get strangers pass by and give me smiles and the question of "when are you due?" Maybe I'll get sick of hearing that eventually, but when you've been feeling huge and not fitting into your normal clothes for awhile now, and others are just finally starting to notice WHY, it's a nice change.

Speaking of not fitting into my normal clothes, I've also now outgrown my first crop of maternity clothes. A couple things, like some dresses and my favorite pair of khakis, that's been the case for the last few weeks, but recently I've started to retire some shirts too. MATERNITY shirts! Big, blousy shirts that made me look like I was wearing a tent back in June now don't fit! I don't notice it too much on a day to day basis, but recently it's gotten a little warmer around here again and I took out some of the short-sleeve shirts I wore this summer, only to find that they are tight around my belly and tight around my chest. So my wardrobe has once again gone back to a dismal array of choices. Three of the shirts I've worn this week were shirts I also wore last week. I'm probably the only one who cares, I'm sure my co-workers aren't scrunching up their noses at me and thinking "UGH, she just wore that shirt *6 days ago*!" but *I* still notice it! I remember when I first started buying and wearing maternity clothes, I would read articles that said to "bring a maternity outfit with you to go home from the hospital in; even though you will feel like burning those clothes by then, you will still need them a little longer." I couldn't imagine feeling that way about my maternity clothes, I thought for the most part they were really nice (big improvement in styles over the big bows and cutsie baby-doll outfits of previous years) but lately I can see where I'm going to feel that way. I am rotating my clothes so often that I feel like I just wore something yesterday and I'm now wearing the same outfit again. If I ever try to change an outfit by adding a second shirt on top, I end up being miserable all day because I'm ALWAYS roasting these days. People around the office are breaking out their space heaters, and I'm running my fan. And for the first time in married life, Phil has more covers on his side of the bed than I do. Before it started getting warmer again a few days ago, he had the big comforter on his side of the bed, and I'm sweating under my sheet and quilt. But at least I'm not putting my ice-block toes against his leg anymore when we first get in bed, he can't complain about that!!!

Which reminds me of another thing for the past about week and a half - I've been waking up every morning about an hour before my alarm goes off, to get a drink of water. I seem to be perpetually thirsty and HUNGRY lately! I would not be surprised at all if, when I go to my doctor's appointment next Monday, that I've gained 10 pounds in the last month alone. I wouldn't be upset if I did, because up till now my weight gain has been really slow, but I definitely think I've started making up for it lately. She must have really started growing in there, not only because I feel her karate-kicking me all the time now, but because I can't ever seem to get enough to eat; I'll eat a full meal and an hour later I'm snacking again. And fortunately here at work we get bottled water for free, so I'm never without my water bottle either. It seems everything about me right now is in extremes: my hunger, thirst, EMOTIONS (WAY up and then also easily perturbed)...belly stretch marks... and SUDDENLY my "nesting instinct" has kicked into high gear too. Starting about the middle of last week, after I'd woken up for my early morning water break, I'd go back to bed and try to get one more hour of sleep in, only to lie there and think about everything that needed to be done in the next, well, 113 days. And I'd work myself up into a panic about it all -- the patch of wall in our entryway that had needed to be painted ever since the shelf had fallen down and we'd realized we had painted around it, our wretched kitchen walls, and our nursery-to-be which was still being consumed by Phil's office; we didn't know what we were going to do about that, Phil really didn't want to be sent down to the basement right next to the kitty litter boxes, and we just don't have the money (or the energy) to even make a half-finished basement right now. The feelings of panic set in even more on Friday, and I think it was because the night before I'd gotten my shower invitation for my friend April's baby shower. She's due exactly a month and day before me, and she has pretty much everything ready to go for her baby. Her nursery is fully equipped, painted, and beautiful. April always gets things done early like that so that's not what has gotten my brain churning (she had her whole wedding pretty much ready to go within a month after getting engaged) but it did get me thinking about how I had NOTHING ready. People have been asking me left and right when I am having a shower, and I don't know what to tell them, about either my friends/family shower or the church shower (which I usually plan since I'm the church wedding/baby shower coordinator) so that has caused me some stress. And I don't like it that I don't have the nursery begun yet (although I don't have anything to put it in anyway!) but I can't start that until the office gets cleaned out...so, the list goes on and on and it was making me toss and turn last week. Even though I still have over three months until Natalie is scheduled to arrive, I'm really starting to slow down and it's getting much harder to move around, so I feel like I only have a short window to get all these things taken care of. And, honestly, I just can't get my friend Marcia out of my mind, who started going into preterm labor at about this time and was put on complete bedrest until she delivered about a month early. So far everything is going completely great for me, so I have no reason to worry about not going to term, but I still think about it...

On Saturday I started to do something about it, so even though I have a lot more to go, at least I feel like I'm beginning to make some progress. We started by getting out the hallway paint and filling in the spot that used to be occupied by the entryway shelf. That was done pretty quickly, which was why I did that first, it was a very small thing that I could finish in one sitting, so I could check something off my list! Then we went to Home Depot and we got a couple big buckets of spackle and a stack of sandpaper! We spent the rest of the day sanding and spackling just about every inch of every wall in our kitchen. After having stripped (or bare) walls since the weekend we moved in a year ago in August, I just couldn't take it a day longer to see all the holes and strips of drywall all over the place. By Saturday night we had finished spackling and we started sanding. We went to bed completely exhausted, and my back was really hurting from all that back and forth movement and stretching up and down to sand the walls. I definitely did too much. On Sunday afternoon, Mom and Sarah came over -- with an electric sander! YAY!! We donned our breathing masks, and Mom went at the walls with a little machine that worked great - making the dust fly EVERYWHERE, and causing such a racket that after awhile Natalie was jumping around so much that I could really feel like it was starting to agitate her little ears! I felt bad to leave Mom in there sanding my kitchen walls by herself (Phil was gone to a church board meeting) but I had to take a break and sit down in the living room to get out of the way of that sound for a little while! Monday night, Phil finished up the sanding and we were able to wash, dust, and finally vacuum our whole house back to normal. Tuesday we went to a wallpaper store and found what we are probably going to use for in there -- it's a really nice blue and taupe stripe: the blue matches my Poppies on Blue pattern, and the blue of our living room, and the beige/taupe matches our entryway, and the paper has a texture-like pattern in it, so hopefully that will mean it will hide the MANY, MANY problems on our drywall! This weekend, we are going to prime the walls, so then we can put the wallpaper up and FINALLY be done with it! We've decided (thanks to Mom's suggestion!) to move Phil's office stuff down to the big empty space we have in our kitchen, until we can afford to rent him an office somewhere. The space is just sitting there empty right now anyway, and that will at least be better than being in the basement. So THEN, we will soon be able to actually start working on our nursery!! Hurray! We are going to probably paint the walls with a lighter color of taupe (a can of paint that we bought when we first moved in, what we wanted to do in our entryway but against the peach that was there it ended up looking pink, but the bedroom walls are in great shape and WHITE right now, so that won't be a problem) and then put up a Noah's Ark border that I found on an Internet site. I really like the one that I found, it looks sort of like an oil or watercolor painting and less "cartoony" than most Noah's Ark patterns I find. It won't really match the bedding pattern that we've picked out (which is pretty cartoony, but still really nice, and includes a kitty cat in the middle so of COURSE we liked it) but, as far as I can tell with putting the two Internet pictures up against each other, it doesn't look bad together either. I'm just excited to finally have made some progress on our house at all! There's so much on my "to-do" list right now that even just making these decisions without getting anything really done about it feels good. Speaking of which, no, we haven't decided for sure on the hospital yet and we haven't gotten scheduled for labor classes....that's something I've got to do this week, I'd hate to put this off and then find out all the classes are booked up through February...



	November 1, 2001 Week 24 Another month passes! It all still seems to be going so quickly. As of today, I have spent (quickly checking my BabyZone calendar) 167 days being pregnant, and I have 113 days to go - assuming Natalie shows up directly on her due date, of course. :-) I'm sure she'll be a punctual child, always doing things according to my schedule - right? Right? Wow, 113 days, suddenly that seems like such a long time, but then again the past 167 days have really flown by and I feel like I've hardly blinked twice. At least now that I'm starting to actually look pregnant and not like I've just become a couch potato, I'm feeling better that way. I haven't had any comments in the last couple weeks about how "you don't even look pregnant" or "how far along are you, a month or two?" I know, I know, people really mean those comments as compliments, but I always heard it as "I just always thought you looked that round and roly-poly". I'm pretty sure before I got pregnant that I made comments like that, and what I meant was "you look really good, I just can't believe you are so far along and look that good" but now that I've been on the receiving end of that, when I'm really excited about what's going on and for the first time in my life I don't MIND having a belly, I now know not to say that to a pregnant lady! Now I'm starting to get strangers pass by and give me smiles and the question of "when are you due?" Maybe I'll get sick of hearing that eventually, but when you've been feeling huge and not fitting into your normal clothes for awhile now, and others are just finally starting to notice WHY, it's a nice change. Speaking of not fitting into my normal clothes, I've also now outgrown my first crop of maternity clothes. A couple things, like some dresses and my favorite pair of khakis, that's been the case for the last few weeks, but recently I've started to retire some shirts too. MATERNITY shirts! Big, blousy shirts that made me look like I was wearing a tent back in June now don't fit! I don't notice it too much on a day to day basis, but recently it's gotten a little warmer around here again and I took out some of the short-sleeve shirts I wore this summer, only to find that they are tight around my belly and tight around my chest. So my wardrobe has once again gone back to a dismal array of choices. Three of the shirts I've worn this week were shirts I also wore last week. I'm probably the only one who cares, I'm sure my co-workers aren't scrunching up their noses at me and thinking "UGH, she just wore that shirt 6 days ago!" but I still notice it! I remember when I first started buying and wearing maternity clothes, I would read articles that said to "bring a maternity outfit with you to go home from the hospital in; even though you will feel like burning those clothes by then, you will still need them a little longer." I couldn't imagine feeling that way about my maternity clothes, I thought for the most part they were really nice (big improvement in styles over the big bows and cutsie baby-doll outfits of previous years) but lately I can see where I'm going to feel that way. I am rotating my clothes so often that I feel like I just wore something yesterday and I'm now wearing the same outfit again. If I ever try to change an outfit by adding a second shirt on top, I end up being miserable all day because I'm ALWAYS roasting these days. People around the office are breaking out their space heaters, and I'm running my fan. And for the first time in married life, Phil has more covers on his side of the bed than I do. Before it started getting warmer again a few days ago, he had the big comforter on his side of the bed, and I'm sweating under my sheet and quilt. But at least I'm not putting my ice-block toes against his leg anymore when we first get in bed, he can't complain about that!!! Which reminds me of another thing for the past about week and a half - I've been waking up every morning about an hour before my alarm goes off, to get a drink of water. I seem to be perpetually thirsty and HUNGRY lately! I would not be surprised at all if, when I go to my doctor's appointment next Monday, that I've gained 10 pounds in the last month alone. I wouldn't be upset if I did, because up till now my weight gain has been really slow, but I definitely think I've started making up for it lately. She must have really started growing in there, not only because I feel her karate-kicking me all the time now, but because I can't ever seem to get enough to eat; I'll eat a full meal and an hour later I'm snacking again. And fortunately here at work we get bottled water for free, so I'm never without my water bottle either. It seems everything about me right now is in extremes: my hunger, thirst, EMOTIONS (WAY up and then also easily perturbed)...belly stretch marks... and SUDDENLY my "nesting instinct" has kicked into high gear too. Starting about the middle of last week, after I'd woken up for my early morning water break, I'd go back to bed and try to get one more hour of sleep in, only to lie there and think about everything that needed to be done in the next, well, 113 days. And I'd work myself up into a panic about it all -- the patch of wall in our entryway that had needed to be painted ever since the shelf had fallen down and we'd realized we had painted around it, our wretched kitchen walls, and our nursery-to-be which was still being consumed by Phil's office; we didn't know what we were going to do about that, Phil really didn't want to be sent down to the basement right next to the kitty litter boxes, and we just don't have the money (or the energy) to even make a half-finished basement right now. The feelings of panic set in even more on Friday, and I think it was because the night before I'd gotten my shower invitation for my friend April's baby shower. She's due exactly a month and day before me, and she has pretty much everything ready to go for her baby. Her nursery is fully equipped, painted, and beautiful. April always gets things done early like that so that's not what has gotten my brain churning (she had her whole wedding pretty much ready to go within a month after getting engaged) but it did get me thinking about how I had NOTHING ready. People have been asking me left and right when I am having a shower, and I don't know what to tell them, about either my friends/family shower or the church shower (which I usually plan since I'm the church wedding/baby shower coordinator) so that has caused me some stress. And I don't like it that I don't have the nursery begun yet (although I don't have anything to put it in anyway!) but I can't start that until the office gets cleaned out...so, the list goes on and on and it was making me toss and turn last week. Even though I still have over three months until Natalie is scheduled to arrive, I'm really starting to slow down and it's getting much harder to move around, so I feel like I only have a short window to get all these things taken care of. And, honestly, I just can't get my friend Marcia out of my mind, who started going into preterm labor at about this time and was put on complete bedrest until she delivered about a month early. So far everything is going completely great for me, so I have no reason to worry about not going to term, but I still think about it... On Saturday I started to do something about it, so even though I have a lot more to go, at least I feel like I'm beginning to make some progress. We started by getting out the hallway paint and filling in the spot that used to be occupied by the entryway shelf. That was done pretty quickly, which was why I did that first, it was a very small thing that I could finish in one sitting, so I could check something off my list! Then we went to Home Depot and we got a couple big buckets of spackle and a stack of sandpaper! We spent the rest of the day sanding and spackling just about every inch of every wall in our kitchen. After having stripped (or bare) walls since the weekend we moved in a year ago in August, I just couldn't take it a day longer to see all the holes and strips of drywall all over the place. By Saturday night we had finished spackling and we started sanding. We went to bed completely exhausted, and my back was really hurting from all that back and forth movement and stretching up and down to sand the walls. I definitely did too much. On Sunday afternoon, Mom and Sarah came over -- with an electric sander! YAY!! We donned our breathing masks, and Mom went at the walls with a little machine that worked great - making the dust fly EVERYWHERE, and causing such a racket that after awhile Natalie was jumping around so much that I could really feel like it was starting to agitate her little ears! I felt bad to leave Mom in there sanding my kitchen walls by herself (Phil was gone to a church board meeting) but I had to take a break and sit down in the living room to get out of the way of that sound for a little while! Monday night, Phil finished up the sanding and we were able to wash, dust, and finally vacuum our whole house back to normal. Tuesday we went to a wallpaper store and found what we are probably going to use for in there -- it's a really nice blue and taupe stripe: the blue matches my Poppies on Blue pattern, and the blue of our living room, and the beige/taupe matches our entryway, and the paper has a texture-like pattern in it, so hopefully that will mean it will hide the MANY, MANY problems on our drywall! This weekend, we are going to prime the walls, so then we can put the wallpaper up and FINALLY be done with it! We've decided (thanks to Mom's suggestion!) to move Phil's office stuff down to the big empty space we have in our kitchen, until we can afford to rent him an office somewhere. The space is just sitting there empty right now anyway, and that will at least be better than being in the basement. So THEN, we will soon be able to actually start working on our nursery!! Hurray! We are going to probably paint the walls with a lighter color of taupe (a can of paint that we bought when we first moved in, what we wanted to do in our entryway but against the peach that was there it ended up looking pink, but the bedroom walls are in great shape and WHITE right now, so that won't be a problem) and then put up a Noah's Ark border that I found on an Internet site. I really like the one that I found, it looks sort of like an oil or watercolor painting and less "cartoony" than most Noah's Ark patterns I find. It won't really match the bedding pattern that we've picked out (which is pretty cartoony, but still really nice, and includes a kitty cat in the middle so of COURSE we liked it) but, as far as I can tell with putting the two Internet pictures up against each other, it doesn't look bad together either. I'm just excited to finally have made some progress on our house at all! There's so much on my "to-do" list right now that even just making these decisions without getting anything really done about it feels good. Speaking of which, no, we haven't decided for sure on the hospital yet and we haven't gotten scheduled for labor classes....that's something I've got to do this week, I'd hate to put this off and then find out all the classes are booked up through February...