Despite some Braxton-Hicks contractions that were annoying enough to get me out of bed at 5am this morning (*yawn*), the Grifflet is showing no signs of wanting to join us this weekend. On Monday we’ll be 37 weeks along, and he can safely arrive at any time he chooses after that. Me and Jag both selfishly hope it will be sooner than later. We’re at the point in our preparations where we’re confident that we have all the basic supplies we need, and now we’re just really really anxious to meet him!

At this risk of this becoming Heather’s Diaper Cover Blog, I’m almost done with another knitted wool soaker. I really like this pattern, so I’ll see if I can finish another before the intended recipient makes his appearance. This is the Frantic Mama wool soaker pattern.

I should also not be allowed to browse Etsy without a chaperone. I could not resist buying these two diaper covers. The skulls…the retro woodland animals…so cute!!!

The ultrasound/OB appointment today was less exciting than we’d hoped. We did confirm that Griffin has definitely dropped/engaged (the doctor didn’t even bother to note down my belly measurement, since it had changed so much from the baby moving down!). And the baby has been head down for a long time, but he’s turned anterior (ie, the ideal position with his face towards my spine), which is a big relief. We’d suspected this was the case because the pressing on my tummy in recent weeks has been feeling a lot more like “butt” and less like “feet”, but it was good to have this confirmed. (If you’re curious, take a look at the difference in anterior vs posterior positioning here. The angle of the head is a big deal.)

Speaking of heads, the baby measured in the expected size range for 35 weeks, except for HIS HEAD, which is measuring BIG. This is NOT what I wanted to hear. :-/ The doctor told us that it’s tough to get an accurate head measurement at this point with my pelvis in the way, and if his head was at an angle when the tech took the measurement, it could easily have been off. I hope he’s right.

The ultrasound equipment at the OB’s office is pretty basic, so we didn’t even get any nice pictures. (Not that we could really get any good images of his face at this point anyway, with it pointing towards my spine. )

On the other hand, everything else is fine (Griffin’s heart rate, my blood pressure and iron, etc). I’ll be going in for weekly appointments now, so hopefully things will continue to progress as they should.

On a more amusing note, here’s a great Free Range Kids blog post about my least favorite pregnancy book.

Unlike Friday night, I actually got some sleep last night and was in full nesting mode today. I think I swept the kitchen floor 3 times this morning.

No pictures yet, but I spent most of the day making a crib skirt, packing the hospital bag, and doing some more nursery cleanup. As of today there are no more crafting supplies/Rubbermaid storage towers/etc in the baby’s room. The closet still has some boxes of fabric and fiber, but we literally have nowhere else to put them at this point, and there’s room now to hang the Grifflet’s clothes, at least. I need to buy some peel and stick velcro to finish up the crib skirt, since that’s how I want to attach it to the crib frame, but it’s otherwise ready to go. I have plans for a little matching window valence too, but that should go pretty quick.

I did finish up a quick hat to match the sweater that I knitted for little Griffin (note that the pompom on top was Jag’s idea!).

And the second wool soaker wrap is done, too, except for the Applix closures.

I’m currently mulling over what to knit next. I have a ton of baby sweater patterns downloaded and printed, and I’d like to knit another type of soaker to see if we end up liking it better.

On a semi-related note, I keep running into references to “push presents” lately (see the Wikipedia article for details if you’re not familiar with the term, I wasn’t). Does this seem…just sorta creepy and tacky to anyone else? Seriously, women are really signing up for “push present” REGISTRIES???

Having a kid is really expensive, and it seems pretty stupid to blow a chunk of change on some kind of thanks-for-enduring-the-pregnancy bribe at a time when money is flying out the window. Do people really need some kind of material reward for every frigging thing they do these days? Biology isn’t “fair”; being female, there’s nothing I can do about being the one to endure the various inconveniences of being pregnant, and I fail to see how that translates into “I deserve a pair of overpriced diamond earrings”. If Jag wants to make me happy after the baby’s born, he can take me out for a sushi dinner or get me a 4-pack of Guinness draft cans. And change a couple extra diapers.

Yesterday I tore up a half loaf of past-its-prime raisin bread and threw it out on the deck and into the back yard. The bluejays and squirrels are finishing up the scraps and crumbs this morning, much to Miranda’s delight.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends against crib bumpers these days, so how’s this for a safer alternative? It’s light, breathable, and probably pretty fire-retardant! 😉

We spent some time cleaning out the nursery closet today, and I came across this banner that I bought at a Ren Faire at least 10 years ago. How perfect is this for the Grifflet’s room???? We’re trying to avoid inundating him with heraldic beasts because he’ll probably get pretty sick of that as he gets older, but I can’t resist hanging this up.

I started knitting another wool soaker with an oddball of Plymouth Boku that I had lying around, with the waistband in a coordinating solid wool. This kid will have the prettiest diaper covers ever!

Me and Jag have been watching Season One of “The Tudors” on DVD lately. It’s entertaining, it’s gorgeously filmed, the actors are great, but the writers seem to get about 10% of the history correct on a good day. I usually spend half the episodes looking up stuff on Wikipedia that turns out to be completely wrong. No, Henry Fitzroy didn’t die at age 5, no, Henry VIII’s sister Margaret didn’t marry the king of Portugal and murder him in his bed, etc etc etc. If nothing else, we’re learning a whole lot about Tudor history just from figuring how exactly how far from the truth the series is (which is usually by several miles).

Today was a VERY lazy snow day, although I did do lots of cooking! We took a short walk outside to see how things were looking, but mainly hung around indoors.

Our street had maybe 3 vehicles on it all day. It looks pretty crappy. A whole lot more foot traffic than car traffic. That’s the poor old blue battlewagon parked on the street; I had planned to take it to CarMax to sell it this weekend. Not so much, now!

The tire tracks here melted and refroze, which does not bode well for the condition of the roads tomorrow.

Here’s the house from the street.

I was in quite the cooking frenzy today. Banana-walnut muffins for breakfast, and a big dish of chicken pot pie with sage/thyme biscuit crust. We probably put on 5 lbs apiece today.

I finished the wool soaker wrap last night, and I LOVE it. The newborn size I made is perfect (just a little bigger than some of the newborn PUL diaper covers we have) and it’s just so darn CUTE. Bartholomew Bunny once again agreed to model for me. This is the cover with a newborn-size prefold diaper inside.

Obviously I’ll be adding velcro closures; the safety pins are just to hold it on the model for the pictures. 🙂 People go on and on about how cute cloth-diapered babies are, with their big fluffy cloth diaper butts, and I totally see why.

I just finished sewing a pouch sling for the Grifflet, using some great heavyweight 100% cotton home dec fabric from fabric.com (on sale for $6/yd, so a total of $15 for 2.5 yards, and I only used half of it!) and a pattern from Handmade Adelaide. I am extremely pleased with how this turned out, it fits great and looks totally professional. It’s also sturdy as all get-out, with a very secure French felled seam at the bottom where the weight will be.

Of course, I had to try it out immediately! Perl seemed like the best subject for the experiment. She suspected nothing, at first.

Come here, Perl, mommy wants to, um, cuddle you!

In you go!

This won’t last…

Enough is enough!

Undeterred, I decided that Ada might be convinced to hang out in the sling for a bit.

This won’t hurt a bit…

After about 30 seconds, she had had ENOUGH. She did get a shot and blood draw at the vet this morning, so I guess I can’t blame her for being cranky.

At last, I found a compliant victim, er, subject!

The fabric was 54″ wide, so I have a ton left over, easily enough to make another sling if I want to. I’ll definitely add a pocket to the sling, which seems to be a useful feature of the commercial ones. This was so cheap (less than $9 of fabric) and fast (maybe 2 hours max) to do, I don’t know why I would buy one!

I had another regular OB checkup this morning, one I was a little nervous about because I brought along my “birth plan” to discuss with the doctor.

My OB/GYN practice is a pretty standard non-granola one (no midwives, no emphasis on alternative birth methods like waterbirth, etc), and they deliver at Rex, so I’ve been getting a little anxious. I’ve recently read a lot of accounts of stuff like forced inductions at 40 weeks, doctors pushing unnecessary c-sections, women being tied down to an IV/fetal monitor and not being able to move around during labor, doctors flatly refusing to look at patients’ birth plans, etc. In general, I’ve seen a lot of stories from women who were really unhappy with their treatment in traditional hospital settings, and was starting to wonder if I should have gone with a birthing center instead. (It’s too late to switch; I checked with the Women’s Birth and Wellness Center in Chapel Hill 2 weeks ago and they’re full up for March.) I’ve also been worried about putting Jag in a position where he’s forced to argue with possibly hostile medical staff to advocate for our preferences, if I’m not in a position to advocate for myself.

I met with the last doctor in the rotation today (in a big practice you get merry-go-round appointments until you’ve met them all, since any one of them might deliver your baby) and presented my plan. He read the whole thing, answered all of my questions in a very satisfactory way, and took a copy for my chart, recommending that I bring copies to the hospital with me to give to the L&D nurses when the time comes. So now I’m feeling a whole lot better about the whole thing. We’re going in for our hospital prenatal class/tour in a two weeks, so I’ll have a chance to confirm that the hospital/labor nurses policies will also be accommodating of my wishes.

Aside from that, I’m at 32 weeks but measuring at 35, so I get an ultrasound on my next visit to check on the Grifflet’s size. He’s been measuring big all along, so I’m not sure if he’s just a big baby or if my due date might need to be adjusted.

In other news, we came home to find our new Pack ‘n Play on the front porch! We immediately unpacked it and set it up, which was easier than expected. This will end up in our bedroom for the first months. It has a “newborn napper” mini-bassinet and changing table, and right underneath those, a bigger bassinet for when he outgrows the napper. And of course it’ll be a portable crib/playpen at the very bottom when he’s even bigger. We’re really happy with it; it seems very sturdy and will see a lot of use over the next year or two.

We got little Griffin’s crib assembled today. It took about 2 hours. Jag and I are still married. 😉 (I will freely admit that I was a whole lot crabbier during the process than he was.)

We decided against a drop-side, but chose one with a “swoop” in front to make laying the little one down to sleep a little easier. It also converts to a toddler bed later on. The directions were awful, and the whole process just kinda sucked (the fold-out metal brackets on the adjustable “box spring” were particularly annoying) but it is very pretty now that it’s all put together. We just need to get a mattress and a few fitted sheets, and we’re all set.