1 day away...

...from the due date. yesterday i had a fleeting thought that maybe the baby is waiting to make its arrival right on the exact due date because it is going to be a perfect, precise little thing like its father. :) i hope i'm right. because the thought of like 2 more weeks of living on pins and needles waiting for it to arrive is kind of overwhelming. ...and if the child is a precise, perfectionist, its life might be easier in some ways. for example, yesterday i decided to spray paint some picture frames black and white. the 2 i did look horrible. dave came home and did 1. and it looks like a factory paint job...only like 9 more frames to go. and if the baby hurries up and arrives then maybe dave will finish them while he's off work :)

i am absolutely exhausted today. i have already taken 2 naps and all i've accomplished is reading a little in a book, eating lunch and doing half a load of laundry (i.e. it still needs to go in the dryer...) and since i woke up from my second nap i feel like vomiting up my lunch. ugh.

i'm looking forward to meeting this little baby. and i'm trying really hard to not complain. i have done a pretty good job throughout the pregnancy but it is getting hard now. i need to remain grateful and stop whining.

today is the day...

...that i've been predicting the baby will be born (and both our moms too). of course, i'm not really seeing a ton of signs pointing towards that actually happening, but we still have 11 hours till midnight, so maybe...?

i have been feeling a lot more tired the past few days yet i've had trouble sleeping at night (mainly i lay there kind of panicking because i'm so tired and i'm afraid my water will break and i won't get to sleep and i'll have to face labor in a state of total exhaustion).

last night i mowed the yard hoping to put myself into labor. haha! and then there's also the fact that this evening is the full moon which many women say is a popular time to go into labor. so...here's hoping.

i am not necessarily looking forward to labor. i've heard about a billion horror stories from people to make me pretty apprehensive, but i'm trying to remain calm. there's only 1 way that we will get to meet our baby, after all. allowing it to be born...and the other night dave & i were discussing it and likened it to vomiting. you never really want to throw up, but your body just sort of takes care of it when it needs to and you have no choice but to go along with it. it might be horrible to go thru and sometimes you spend hours rolling on the floor in misery before it happens, but once it does, you feel much better. i like to think that labor will be similar and i'll be able to deal with it in a somewhat graceful way.

at church today i was bombarded by people asking how i'm doing and when the due date is, etc, etc. the best was the "you're still here?" and the "i heard you're having a midwife" followed by a look of horror and "why would you want to do that?" hhhhh....nice...but the best was "i thought you weren't due till september!"

so anyways, i think i'll go take a nap. dave already is and if today does end up being the day, then i'll be glad i did. :)

as dave so eloquently put it the other night...

...any day now we will receive a gift from the creator of the universe. Our heavenly Father has knit together a little baby just for us and we will receive it very soon. How amazing a thought is that?

the nursery is coming together

above you can see the refinished white dresser with the changing mat and diaper supplies on top

in this pic you can see the rocker, the bookshelf and the crib (which david was finally able to find time to set up yesterday. woohoo!!) i think the bedding looks very adorable. dave says our baby is already spoiled beyond belief...i think he's right.

in this corner we have the pack n play. once we move the birth tub out of the front room, we will probably put the pack n play in there, next to our bedroom door. the baby may sleep in there at night, or they may sleep in the crib. i really haven't decided. and there you can also see the carseat which will be in our car soon. so once that stuff is moved out, i may push the crib over in front of the window. although that may be an issue when the baby is old enough to grab the curtains. oh well, then we could figure something else out. :) i love moving furniture.

i still have several pieces of artwork to put on the walls. but that's kind of the story in every room of the house. no exception in the nursery. we just hate to make holes in the walls after all the work we've done to make them smooth and blemish free. :(

we set up the birth tub friday night. we're having some issues though with our water. it is very murky and muddy looking. all the sediment has now settled to the bottom of the birth tub but it looked disgusting at first. there was no way i would have given birth in it! so, we have to figure out a way to suck out the sediment now and hopefully figure out a way to get our well fixed that's somewhat affordable :)

37 weeks and 6 days!

i just took this pic today, at 37 weeks and 6 days. so flattering, huh?

it is hard for me to believe that the due date is only a couple weeks away. it is very surreal. i asked dave sunday afternoon if he knew what was about to happen to our lives. he said an a-bomb is about to hit us. nice. that's kind of a good way to put into words how i'm feeling. :) i think that we've been so focused on remodeling and getting as much done as possible that we haven't been mentally preparing ourselves to become parents very much. of course i'm not sure that we can actually do that anyways, so i suppose it's good we're just keeping busy and not stressing out.

for 5 hours saturday afternoon, we had a childbirth/breastfeeding/newborn care education session at our hosue with one of the midwives. that was pretty informative. a lot of the stuff we'd heard before but it was great to have that refresher session and that time set aside just to focus on this blessed impending event...

last night we had our 38 week checkup with the midwife. my blood pressure was lower than it has been for months, so that was a blessing. i was praying that it wouldn't be high again. the midwife commented on how cheerful and joyful i am, more than when she first met me. i think that i'm just really excited that we're actually starting our family now and i'm feeling at peace with what i'm going to have to do to have a home birth, etc...we heard the baby's heartbeat again. the midwife said the baby is in LOA (left occiput anterior) position which the other midwife said Saturday is one of the most ideal positions for birth (basically it's head is down...way, way down according to the midwife, she was pretty surprised again...and the rear end is on my left side and the feet are on my right side). they also said i have lots of amniotic fluid and that the baby is "good-sized". i'm trying not to dwell on that "good-sized" thing. ugh. or i might just stop eating for the rest of the pregnancy, which probably wouldn't be good.

last week i had a couple things happen that indicate impending labor. and there was a spell of contractions happening about every 3 minutes thurdsay night that fizzled out after about 15-20 minutes. so we're getting pretty excited. now if only dave could find time to finish the baby's room. and oh yeah, set up the birth tub! or we won't have a water birth...

i have been pretty emotional lately. crying at the drop of a hat. ugh. sometimes i even laugh at myself while i'm crying. it's craziness. just uncontrollable. we have taken walks the past 2 nights. i regret that i haven't been more active this whole time but at least i'm doing something here at the end.

i'm feeling very huge these days. i never realized how challenging or near impossible it would be to do certain things with a stomach this size. trimming my toe nails and especially painting them myself is out of the question. that's now dave's job (as if he doesn't have enough to do, right?), putting on pants is a huge challenge and picking anything up off the floor is hard too. i'm looking forward to meeting the baby and being able to do this mundane stuff again for myself with ease.

our friend nick guesses the baby will be born july 19th since that's his bday. and our mom's guess the night of the full moon (the 25th/26th). so do any of you have any guesses?

35 weeks and 5 days today!

this pic was taken saturday after our midwife home visit (at 35 weeks and 3 days). i was talking to emily on the phone but didn't want to miss having dave take my pic while i looked nice and he was here and i actually remembered to do it. i've been forgetting all sorts of things the past few weeks. it's driving us crazy.

it's amazing how big this baby is getting, isn't it? i think i'm really, really looking pregnant now. i still just feel fat when i look in the mirror though but this pic helped me to see that it's mostly baby.  i have been feeling more and more uncomfortable i guess because of my size. ugh. it's just awkward to have all this belly. and when i roll over in bed or something, the baby feels like it kind of wants to do its own thing and not roll over but then it does, kind of like a delayed reaction. it's weird. and i've been having practice contractions off and on the past few weeks. mainly when i'm doing a bunch of stuff that i probably shouldn't be doing. haha!

last week at the 34 week midwife appt she noted that the baby was still breech (as it was at 32 weeks). and she said that 80% of babies have turned by week 32, it's a developmental milestone. so...she referred me to a chiropractor to do the webster technique and they both gave me a bunch of random things to do to encourage the baby to turn. the craziest of these was when i had to lay upside down on a door propped up on one end of our couch and dave had to burn these little cigar things next to my pinky toes for 20 minutes. of course the pyromaniac in him loved that!

as of monday the baby was transverse. then wednesday it was back to breech. but anyways, something must have worked because saturday the midwives checked the baby and said that it is now vertex (head down). woohoo! so we are praying that it stays that way till it's born. then it can move around in the real world as much as it wants :) since the baby took its time to turn, the midwife has been saying that she thinks that it won't come until mid august because it might just not be as ready developmentally to come. but then when they were checking it, they realized that its head is very far down for this stage of the game. so that tidbit of info had them second guessing when they think it will come. i of course have always felt that it would come early, so i'm sticking to that. i feel like it was just procrastinating turning but now that it has, it's ready to come meet us. :) of course i'll probably be pretty frustrated now if it is like august 10th when we finally have it. so i try to just take this all 1 day at a time and not think about it.

another thing that i realized last week, and i was talking to dave about is that since i don't know the baby's sex, i really don't feel like i've connected that well with it at this point. i don't know if it's a defense mechanism or what, but i just feel kind of like i don't want to bond too much yet because i'm still waiting to be sure that everything goes alright with the birth, etc. it's like i don't want to count my chickens before they're hatched. i won't let myself get too attached but i feel like when the baby is born and i see it with my own 2 eyes, i will truly bond with it and then i'll feel like i can let my emotional guard down. is this messed up?

also, i feel really good about the homebirth choice after the visit saturday. we gave them a tour so they know where everything is, they brought the birth tub (which we are not setting up till next weekend), and they checked to make sure that i had all my supplies in order (fun things like chux, depends, hydrogen peroxide, baggies to store the placenta for them to take for research or something, a cookie sheet in case the baby isn't breathing they can resuscitate it on that, etc, etc.)  i was also able to meet 3 other ladies who may be attending the birth with the midwife (depending on who is on call i guess at the time). 1 is a nurse and 2 are also midwives. our midwife said that the other 2 midwives have probably attended more births than her, especially the one who is from the UK and worked in a hospital there. i was very glad to meet them since i had only met 2 other assistants in the practice, 1 of which is moving and the other who is expecting her baby 5 days before me. so, i feel better knowing the people who might be here for the birth. the nurse who was here will only be here thru july so she will only attend the birth if it happens in july. she reminded me a lot of the riggles that we grew up with so i felt instantly close to her. i hope that it works out for her to be here.

we feel like God is really preparing us and helping us grow up these last few days before our baby is born. we've both been a lot quicker to forgive each other, to compromise, etc. we're moving from our extreme opposite tendencies and merging more into the same person. for example, i'm becoming more anal retentive and dave is becoming less anal retentive. it's nice. i've been an emotional basketcase the last few days though so that's been a challenge for us both.

update

i blogged a little on our main blog about the pregnancy right now. things have been crazy lately trying to wrap up remodeling. took a belly pic about 2 weeks ago at 31 weeks and 2 days. i know...outdated now...

right now i'm 33 weeks and 5 days. feeling pretty good. just huge. sometimes i can't wait till we meet the baby. sometimes i'm scared and think it can wait as long as it wants...

here's the pic...