Week 35

  I love that Greg and I are have a baby in the spring!  It feels kind of perfect to be in harmony with nature.

  I think I am pretty much ready to have this baby.  Okay, I'm just ready to be done being pregnant now.  I am excited to meet this boy, and I'm almost at a point where I just don't want to experience any more symptoms of pregnancy.  Sure, I'll take them in stride, but I just want my body to be normal again.  The one thing I have enjoyed throughout this pregnancy is feeling the baby move.  That has to be the best part about being pregnant.  But even then I hate that panicky feeling that I sometimes get when I haven't felt the baby move in a while--which, fortunately, doesn't happen very often.  Sometimes I'll be around Greg when I tell the baby he needs to move for me, and Greg will tease and say, "Your mom always wakes me up, too."  And when the baby pokes back at me really hard, Greg will say that I "deserve" it because I keep 'poking' and rubbing at the baby.  (Greg: "How would you like someone to rub your face all the time?" Proceeds to rub my face.  "Do you like it?" "I mostly rub his backside and his bum since those are the parts that are most accessible since he's head down!")  But it's definitely the worst when I'm alone attempting to feel the baby move, and I am trying to recall the last time I felt the baby move.

  Cravings: I'm not sure.  Cheese?  Peanut butter?  Bananas? All I have wanted is to eat things that I haven't been eating regularly lately, so I've been trying to switch up our menu a bit by incorporating new recipes into our menu.  Greg didn't enjoy tuna casserole as much as I did which has bummed me out.  (But it'll be a recipe I'll keep around for when he goes to conferences, etc.)  I got so tired of pancakes for breakfast that I started eating oatmeal.  Guys...oatmeal...at least I found a decent recipe here which I did change up a bit.  I attempted to make meatball subs on homemade Artisan bread which was good over all, but they turned out like Sloppy Joe's because everything kept falling out!  Kudos to sandwich artists out there.

  We are still stuck on names at this point.  I think we will be those parents who send in the baby's name a few weeks after they are born.  Picking out names when I was 14 years old was so much easier; I mean I came up with like 8 names that I liked--not that I necessarily wanted 8 kids!  Of course, they were either classic, old-fashioned names like Francis or Eleanor or they were non-English names like Nikolai or Natasha. (I had just read War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and my mom had just learned we had Russian ancestors while doing genealogy. OK?)  As a teenager, I loved gleaning from other cultures (and I still love that idea).
   Greg and I had a couple of names in mind, and once we found out the gender of the baby, I told Greg what I thought his name should be, and Greg was on board with my idea.  However, not everyone in our family has the same opinion towards this name which has stressed me out.  I know I can't please everyone, so I just decided names are something we're keeping between ourselves from now on until the paperwork is filled out.  I know that whatever name we end up choosing will be because we, the parents-to-be, like the name and this is our child.  For now Lucky, Chewbacca, and Lehi are the names we are sharing.
 ; )

  On a happier note, the baby's room is coming together slowly.  I kept the same paper decorations I originally had in there because I love how the colors brighten the room.  I love this blue-green chair we found at a garage sale last summer.  The dresser with the blue drawers also fits this room so well!

I just stuffed pretty much everything in the closet!  So two bins full of clothes that don't fit in the dresser, blankets/sleepers, stroller, car seat, bathtub, play mat, and baby carrier.

So many toys!  I don't have bins for them yet, so I just left them on the bouncer chair.  (You can see Greg's red 20-sided die that he had hanging in a rear-view mirror has been demoted to baby toy. Haha! We're raising a nerd...) 

Last of all, a picture of my belly.  I never feel really pregnant until I see the side view of myself in the mirror...     

Hopefully only five more weeks to go!