37 Weeks
This week started with a birthday party for a friend’s daughter. She turned 4 and had a princess themed party, so of course I offered to do the cake as a gift. They wanted a cupcake cake that looked like Rapunzel’s dress. I had so much fun with this cake! They needed 4 dozen, so I used 2 dozen for the cupcake cake and decorated the other 2 dozen to match the Rapunzel “theme” of the cake.
Of course I had to make things complicated and do the separate cupcakes in pink and purple. But I really got into it and allowed myself to get creative. When I asked Eowyn if the cake looked like Rapunzel’s dress, she said, “Um, a little bit.” The little perfectionist supervised the whole process, popping into the kitchen to make sure that I was using the right colors in the right spots. She’s going to make quite the artist one day…
The girls dressed up in their princess dresses for the party and had a lot of fun! It was a shocking 80 degrees that weekend; probably the last time we’ll get anywhere near those temperatures until next summer.
The rest of this week saw 3 cold, rainy days in a row, and then brisk Autumn weather. The first day that it stopped raining it was rather chilly out; around 40 degrees with the wind chill (and the wind was blowing pretty hard). But the girls and I were so stir crazy that we bundled up and still headed outside for some fresh, albeit cold, air. They didn’t seem to mind much.
Thursday I had an OB appointment, so Tyler’s parents took the girls for the day. I’m 2 centimeters dilated, and at the time of the appointment, the baby was head down-ish but not engaged. Henderson Adipose has since moved, preferring to lay almost diagonally across my stomach, with his/her head facing my hip. I’ve actually felt fingers digging around that far corner of my uterus. It’s not painful, but is really uncomfortable. I’ve asked Henderson to stop, but like my other children, he/she is not listening… I am certainly not holding my breath about being dilated to 2 cm; my Timehop from 2 weeks ago was me posting on Facebook that I was dilated to 2-3 cm with Arya and that my midwife had said it would be any day now. Too bad Arya decided to be late by 3 days. My children have their own agendas; I’ve come to terms with that. This one will be late just like the other 2 were. Or, it will come early just to spite me since I’m expecting it to be late this time around. I did lose my mucus plug, so maybe it will be early. But probably it will be late.
After the appointment Tyler and I took advantage of the empty house and did some baby prepping. He got the bassinet and swing set up while I searched for bibs and receiving blankets. I found what I think are all of the bibs, but if Henderson is a boy, even those will have to be replaced–90% of them are pink. I only found half of the receiving blankets, but I’m pretty sure I know which box the others are in. I thought we would never use all 30 receiving blankets when we got them for our first baby shower, but it there’s one thing I’ve learned as a parent, it’s that you can never have too many of those things laying around! Babies puke. A lot. Receiving blankets are invaluable. Although we still have yet to retrieve it, we at least know where the bin of newborn clothes is–it’s in the most inaccessible corner of our ceiling storage in the garage. The only way we’re going to be able to get it down is if someone climbs on top of the rafter. That’s Tyler’s project for this coming Thursday. I then will really only have one more problem to sort out, which I just barely thought of last night–where to put my rocking chair for night time feedings. Our bedroom is small and already full of furniture; there really isn’t any space for it in there. We have a guest room, which will eventually be turned into the baby’s room, but my family is going to be occupying it from October 16-November 1. I can’t very well put it in there and wake them up every 2 hours when I need to feed the baby. I could go all the way downstairs and sit in the recliner, but I don’t trust myself to be able to safely navigate the stairs and baby gate while holding a newborn and basically sleep walking. I could bring the baby in bed with us for the time being, but co-sleeping kind of freaks me out when they’re so ity-bity (although I had Ary in bed with me within hours of her being born because she nursed for 8 hours straight that first night). We’ll figure something out. But it’s stuff like this that we would have had worked out weeks ago when I was pregnant with the girls. You really do grow more lax with each kid.
I was expecting it to be a nightmare to have the baby swing out, because I was anticipating that Ary would try to climb in it every chance she got. But to my great surprise, she has been really good with it. All she really does is put her baby dolls in it. Or, her movies (which she’s not supposed to touch):
We threw her in the bassinet to mess with her, and she didn’t seem to like it much. Probably brought back memories of her crib days when she was a confined prisoner at bedtime, unable to escape at her own free will as she does now (oh how I miss the crib days!)
I can’t believe how big this kid is getting. She’s going to be 2 on Wednesday, and I want to cry every time I think about it. They grow up too fast.
Baby Stats:
-Henderson is about 6 1/3 pounds and around 19 inches long, about the length of a bunch of swiss chard
-Babies aren’t considered ‘full term’ until 39 weeks, because baby needs these next 2 weeks to fully mature the brain and lungs
My Own Unexpected Journey 