36.5

Here we are, 36.5 weeks. For those counting along at home, that means I'm 4 days away from being considered "full term".

Thanks to all who responded to my last post. We ended up not going. To clarify, this was an informal gathering, not the actual engagement party. Anyhow, I was having an off day where sitting up was making me feel all kinds of dizzy and weird (darn baby mushing my internal organs around), so driving half an hour was really not in the cards anyway.

Many things are going really well around here:

The Garden
My potatoes are flowering, and so are the peas. We have a crop of carrots that looks like it'll be ready by the end of the month, and have sown a whole bunch more. The cucumbers have sprouted. The tomato seeds are in the ground. Sunflowers are slowly catching up to the squirrels, height-wise, and our new fruit tree and raspberry bushes seem to be thriving. Even Kali's pot of carrots, whose future was in question ("no, sweetheart, we don't dig the dirt again after we've already planted the seeds!") is producing some nice little sprouts.

The Toddler
At turns infuriating and endearing, Kali just amazes me. Sometimes she comes up with things that I know I haven't explicitly taught her. Today someone was asking her about the new baby we'll be having soon. Kali explained that she would put the baby in the stroller and take it for a walk and put it on the swings. The adult then asked, "what about feeding? What do you feed a baby?" Kali's response? "Babies eat breastmilk!"

The Pregnancy
I won't lie, the heartburn is killing me and I'm dying to be able to turn over in bed without heaving myself violently like a beached whale in its final throes. But overall I've been blessed with an easy pregnancy, and just enough weight gain to not worry me while at the same time making me feel optimistic about losing not only the baby weight, but the IVF weight too.


The only thing that has scared me recently is, improbably, a charley horse. It woke me up in the middle of the night and was breathtakingly painful. In that moment, suddenly, I thought, "I can't handle this cramp! How am I going to manage in labor?!?" Fortunately, the cramp subsided and I'm left both laughing and silently fretting.