Cantaloupe

My wonderful parents-in-law visited over Labor Day weekend and spent the entire time doing home improvement projects on our new house. (Are we great hosts OR WHAT!) One of those projects involved painting the nursery this peachy-cantaloupey color (chosen by me, so be nice). It's very pretty in real life, I promise.

When they weren't mowing the lawn or desperately trying to make the nursery walls ABSOLUTELY PERFECT so that their moody, pregnant daughter-in-law would not freak out, Ben's parents checked out our new town (which they had visited many times before we moved here, actually), did some birdwatching, and enjoyed Chinese food with us. It was a nice visit. Oh, and there were chairs: we now have Ben's BEAUTIFUL wooden high chair (our girl will be the third generation to fling mashed-up banana from it!), and Ben's folks bought us a ridiculously comfortable (and pretty) white Shermag rocker/glider for the nursery. So nice!

We still aren't fully unpacked, because we haven't established our storage and shelving solutions for the studio (and for our ungodly number of books) yet. So almost all of my studio stuff, and absolutely all of our books, are still in boxes. And, you know, looking at those boxes inspires pain, but not as much pain as actually putting up shelves.

30 weeks

I passed! I passed!

As a result of [just barely] failing a standard glucose screening at an ob/gyn appointment last week, I spent this morning taking the extended screening at the doctor's office. Failing this one would have meant that I'd somehow developed gestational diabetes, despite not having a single one of the risk factors. Apparently this type of diabetes goes away after pregnancy, but for the remainder of your nine months you have to do all of the testing and pricking and monitoring and dieting associated with the non-gestational variety of diabetes. Obviously, I was really, really hoping to avoid this.

So I'm relieved and happy that I scraped by, but I have to complain a teeny bit... because I think it's pretty cruel not to let a pregnant lady eat anything for fifteen hours,* and then make her give blood four times in three hours (from the same vein, in my case!). If you're pregnant and you haven't been experiencing quite enough nausea, light-headedness, and unbearable, gnawing hunger -- then the extended glucose test is for you, my lady friend!**

* Fasting when pregnant just doesn't seem right. Baby's hungry! Would you starve a baby for the better part of a day?
** Also, get out your tiny, invisible violin, because I had to sit in a hard wooden chair for three hours and watch multiple episodes of something on Nickelodeon called "iCarly." That's right, had to.

Not itsy-bitsy

Today I finally spent an afternoon at our town's amazing outdoor swimming pool. I loved it! The water was gloriously cool, and there were plenty of lounge chairs, and they have a climbing wall... when you fall off, you fall into the pool! There were about a billion kids loving the heck out of that climbing wall.

Mostly, I floated. I had read that being in the water is nice for pregnant ladies because, during the heavenly half hour or whatever you spend in the pool, you feel relatively weightless. I'd been going about feeling very weighted indeed, so that was a nice sensation. I floated and floated, when I wasn't being smacked by the flailing limbs of local children (I'm used to the flailing limbs of our unborn daughter, but that's a different sensation). As I floated, buoyant in spirit and body, I imagined our baby, floating in her little space as I floated in the pool. We both wiggled, suspended, and I wondered if her floating-within-floating felt any different to her, or if floating, at some point, is just floating. If you're already floating, can you be any more floating?

I haven't posted many belly photos here, and above is one that might make you glad I've spared you until now. I figure since this swimsuit is basically a pair of loose shorts & a modest tank top, I can feel free to post pictures ALL OVER THE INTERNET! Don't worry, in public it covers my belly. But that makes for a boring photo.

How to draw an owl