Thirty-three weeks! Can you tell I was tired when I took this picture? I'm not too tired in general; this was just during a post-lunch slump. I took a quick walk in the sunshine a little later (with frequent stops to smell all the lilacs in bloom), which helped a lot.

• Our checkup on Tuesday was reassuring. My doctor seemed relieved that my placenta had moved (I am too!), and she didn't seem too concerned about our big breech baby. She said there's a good chance that he'll flip on his own (though she gave the go-ahead to try a breech tilt, so I think I'll do that if we can find a wide board to use). She'll check the baby's position when we get closer to the due date, and if he still hasn't turned, she said there are a few things we can do, including moxibustion. I was surprised that she mentioned moxibustion--when I read about it online, I was skeptical, but she said it's effective.

  Regarding the baby being larger than expected, she reminded us that ultrasound size estimates can be off by as much as 20% (though that could mean that he's actually 6 lb--but that's unlikely, since my fundus measurement is pretty normal). She didn't say anything about inducing early labor because of his size, which was a relief. She said that I'll have the chance to labor normally, and if he's too big for me to push out on my own (or technically, breathe out, since hypnobirthing doesn't typically involve pushing), she might have to resort to using vacuum or forceps to get him out. That doesn't sound so great, but it's better than having a stuck baby. Anyway, there's not much point in worrying about what could happen at this point.

  I had expected that she might order another ultrasound in a few weeks to check the baby's size again, but she said it's unlikely that we'll do another ultrasound, unless she's not able to determine his position by palpating my tummy. So I guess we'll just wait until he's out to find out if that ultrasound was right.

  Oh, and one thing I forgot to mention about the ultrasound--it showed that the baby has some hair already. I had no idea ultrasounds could see hair! That's pretty cool.

• Still not much progress on the nursery. The plasterers finished up on Tuesday (they were supposed to finish last week, but the main guy got appendicitis, which is an excellent excuse for postponing work!). This weekend, I went to Ecohaus and bought paint for the nursery. We ended up going with the Yolo Colorhouse paint in water.01 and leaf.04, as planned. I'm excited to see how it looks in the room! I'm hoping we'll be able to get the painting done next week, and then we can start moving the furniture in, which will help make the room feel more put together.

  Our painting project is complicated by the fact that we also need to do touch-up painting in nearly every other room of the house, because of all the plumbing and electrical work we had done. The previous owner left behind cans of paint for a lot of the rooms, but there were a couple missing, so I had fun this past weekend doing some detective work to figure out which colors they used in the living room, dining room, and stairwell. I bought the necessary paint from Miller Paint on Grand, and I was really impressed by how nice everybody was. One of the employees even carried my paint to my car for me, even though I was parked 6 blocks away. I kept telling him not to worry about it, but he insisted. On the walk to the car, we chatted about crocheting hats (it's a little side project that he started when he broke his collarbone snowboarding). It was nice!

• We've been weighing diaper options for a while now, and we finally made some decisions this week. We're still planning on trying Elimination Communication, but I'm sure we'll still need diapers (if only as backup for when we go out). So the most sensible solution seems to be using cloth diaper prefolds with diaper covers, since the prefolds are also useful for EC. So that's the plan. I ordered newborn and small prefolds from Green Mountain Diapers to get us started, and I'm working on buying some used diaper covers (Ebay, Craigslist, and our local consignment stores seem like the best sources for these). That should get us through 5-6 months, at which point we can re-assess the situation and decide if this approach works for us.

  I had a little freakout last night--fueled by diaper overwhelm and staying up too late--and spent some time crying before bed. I just got stressed out about everything left on our to-do list and the dwindling amount of time before the baby comes. Probably pretty standard stuff. Patrick was a champ at comforting me, and he assured me that we'll get everything done in time (or at least all the important stuff--there are a lot of things on my to-do list that aren't really necessary). I think I've been pretty even-keeled throughout this pregnancy, without many crazy pregnant lady outbursts, so I guess I'm allowed a couple.

• Oh, and a pregnancy side effect that I wanted to make note of for posterity--my left sock no longer fits properly--the heel is always in the wrong place! I wear knee socks pretty much every day, and they all have the same problem. Based on what I read, I expected that my shoes might stop fitting, but my socks? Weird. (Also, my shoes still fit so far--yay!)

As far as food goes, tonight and last night we had pasta with slow-simmered leeks, prosciutto, and mozzarella for dinner. Not bad, though I'm not sure we'll make it again. I do like fresh mozzarella though!

We've also embarked on a food freezing campaign in preparation for baby time. Our general approach has been to make something, eat half of it, and freeze the other half. Here's what we've stashed away this week:

1. Split pea and ham soup (from America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook, because I was too lazy to find my mom's recipe) and multigrain waffles (based on the Cook's Illustrated multigrain pancake recipe, but with the amount of butter doubled). The soup was good, but I like my mom's recipe better. We've made the waffles in the past, and I continue to be a fan--the nubbly texture and slight sweetness are great! Plus we can pretend they're healthy, because of the grains. I think I'll make another batch of these to shore up our freezer stash. Having homemade waffles in the freezer makes me happy.

2. Lentil-chestnut soup and savory barley muffins with thyme and romano (from Whole Grains Every Day). This is one of my favorite easy soups--we should have doubled the recipe so we'd have more to freeze. The muffins are okay; I didn't like them as much as I did the first time I made them.

Maybe next week we'll make and freeze something that isn't soup--like lasagna!

A while back, I bought a cute fabric headband at Union Rose (you can see it here and here). I love it, because it keeps my hair out of my face but doesn't give me a headache like normal headbands. Today I used the headband as a pattern and made myself four more. I'm hoping they'll help me look more pulled together after the baby comes and I haven't washed my hair for days.

It's a really easy sewing project, so I thought I'd share the steps with you (and if you find my instructions confusing, there are plenty of other tutorials online--for instance, this one and this one).

1. You need a 10" piece of elastic (I used pretty fold-over elastic from Bolt) and enough fabric to give two 3.25" x 12.5" pieces. Cut two blunt-ended ovals, each measuring about 12.5 inches long, 3.25 inches wide in the middle, and 1.25 inches wide at the ends. I traced my existing headband and added 1/4" seam allowances to get my pattern.

2. Fold over and iron 1/4 inch of fabric on one end of each oval, and then sandwich the ovals right sides together with the elastic in between. One end of the elastic should be even with the non-ironed ends of the ovals, and the other end of the elastic should be floating freely somewhere in the middle of the fabric sandwich.

3. Pin together and stitch around (using 1/4 inch seam allowances), leaving the ironed-down edges open. I pinned the loose end of the elastic to the middle of the fabric so that it wouldn't accidentally get caught in the seams.

4. Remove pins and turn right side out. Flatten, pin around the edges, and iron.

5. Tuck the loose end of the elastic into the open end of the headband by about 1/2 inch, and pin in place.

6. Topstitch all the way around (I did this by moving my needle to the right and using the edge of my presser foot as a guide). Backstitch over the pinned elastic to make sure it's well secured.

Voila--you have a headband!

So the ultrasound this morning was interesting. We learned three things:

• My placenta has moved higher, and it's not blocking the cervix anymore. Yay!

• The baby is currently in a frank breech position (hey, that's a good name for a boy!). His butt is facing downward, and his legs are up by his head. That doesn't sound too comfortable, but I guess babies are flexible. I'm not sure if I need to actively start trying to turn him around (there are all sorts of unusual methods described online!), or if there's a pretty good chance he'll flip before birth. I won't do anything before talking to my doctor. Luckily, our next appointment is on Tuesday.

  Because of his funny position, we didn't get any good views of his face or profile (but we did get visual re-confirmation that he is a boy). Oh well, we'll see him soon enough.

• Mr. Frank Breech is huge for his age! He's supposed to weigh 3-4 lbs at 32 weeks, but based on the measurements the ultrasound tech made, he weighs about 5 lb, 5 oz (equivalent to 34.5 weeks gestation). Wow, baby, I haven't been eating that much! It's better than him being underweight, but he's big enough that it merits some attention, apparently. So we'll be discussing that with the doctor next week as well.

I spent a little time reading about both findings online. It sounds like these could be cause for a C-section or early birth via induction, both of which I'd like to avoid if possible. But I'm trying not to worry about it. My boss told me that when she was pregnant, there were multiple times when her doctor predicted she might need a C-section, but everything resolved before birth. I think this baby knows what he's doing.

Thirty-two weeks! This marks the start of the eighth month--whoa! If I think in terms of months, two months still sounds like a decent amount of time to get ready, but 8 weeks, not so much. Babies are normally born between 37 and 42 weeks gestation, which means that he could be here 5 weekends from now. Oh man...

Not much to report in the past few days. Our follow-up placenta ultrasound is tomorrow, and we're hoping for good news.

As predicted, the meal planning kind of fell by the wayside this week, so I only have one meal to tell you about--saffron-basmati rice with chicken in garam masala sauce (from Whole Grains Every Day) and sweet and sour okra. Patrick made this, and it seemed pretty easy to put together, and the end result was nice. The chicken was good, but the okra was my favorite part of the meal. Yum!

Although I didn't get much cooking done, I did get some crafting time in. Remember the ripple blanket I started back in November? Well, I'm still working on it--almost halfway done now. I had originally planned on crocheting a row a day, in which case I would have been done by now, but that's not how it worked out. I'm not going to stress out too much about finishing this before the baby gets here. It'll get done eventually. Patches likes sitting on my lap (and periodically attacking the yarn) while I work on it.

And I finished sewing that potato sack dress I mentioned in my last entry. Luckily, the addition of a waist tie and ruffles helped a lot. It was based on the maternity or not frock tutorial on Presser Foot, with a few changes based on the limitations of my cheapo sewing machine (I attached the elastic differently, and I pleated the ruffles instead of gathering them). I used Joel Dewberry's Deer Valley columbine fabric.

I love projects where you don't have to cut and pin pattern pieces--this dress is basically two rectangles sewn together and embellished. Very easy! And if the dress isn't flattering when I'm no longer pregnant, I can take it apart and reuse the fabric to make a skirt or a different dress.

Thanks to Patrick for taking these pictures, by the way. They turned out much better than my tripod self portraits. While we were both semi-dressed-up, we took a few family portraits too. And then we went to Por Que No and had fish tacos and strawberry-mango lemonade for dinner. Life is good :)

Thirty-one weeks! Actually we're at 31.5 at this point. Patrick was out of the house this weekend enjoying some pre-baby hang-out time with friends from college (they rented a condo downtown for the weekend and sampled beer at many locales), so my normal routine kind of fell by the wayside. I didn't do my weekly meal-planning either. What are we going to eat!?

• I seem to have reached the stage of pregnancy where strangers feel comfortable assuming I'm pregnant. I've had a couple people ask me when I'm due, but no belly touching yet. I've even had one person express surprise that I still have 2 months to go (I assume because my belly is so massive). I actually found that strangely gratifying, like I'm doing an extra good job of being pregnant or something. Silly, I know :)

• We had another OB checkup last week, and everything continues to go smoothly (yay!). The doctor palpated my belly and guessed that the baby is head down, with his back facing to my right. I had been thinking that he was sideways with his head on the right side, but her interpretation makes more sense. We'll know his position for sure on Friday--we're going in for a follow-up ultrasound to see if my placenta has moved off of my cervix into a more normal location. Cross your fingers!

  When the doctor had me lie down for the exam, she told me I was having a contraction (apparently a normal occurrence when pregnant ladies lie on their backs). I had no idea! Even when she pointed it out, I couldn't tell--it just felt like the baby's back was pushing on my belly, which is a pretty normal occurrence. I wonder how often I have contractions and mistakenly attribute them to the baby.

  It turns out that I don't have sciatica, but something similar--the baby is pressing on my femoral cutaneous nerve, not my sciatic nerve. The doctor said sciatica affects the back of the thigh, but for me it's the skin on the front of the thigh that goes numb. Actually, my condition has a much racier name than sciatica--tingling thigh syndrome! So I can't walk around talking like an old lady anymore, since the people who most often get this condition are women in tight jeans and high heels. Patrick and I have been referring to it as tight pants syndrome, but apparently that's something different. Anyway, the good news is that this should go away once the baby's born, so it's nothing to worry about.

• In general, I've been pretty comfortable during this pregnancy, apart from some normal aches and pains. A strange thing happened on Saturday though--I walked up to Cool Cottons, which is less than a mile from our house. By the time I got there, my lower abdomen was aching. Sitting down and standing still helped a little but didn't make it go away. The pain lasted all through my walk home, which made it pretty unpleasant. I considered calling a cab, but I just gritted my teeth and kept going (I know, probably not a prudent decision). I made it home, lay down on the couch and put on my relaxation CD, and within 10 minutes, I felt totally fine. My guess is that the baby settled on some nerve or internal organ while I was walking, and he just needed some help getting repositioned. I should have gotten on all fours at the fabric store and done a couple cat-cows to help him out. Pregnant ladies are allowed to do weird stuff like that, right?

• One of the less exciting baby-related tasks I've been putting off is choosing a pediatrician (also: writing a will). This past week, we met up with a pediatrician in Sellwood, and I think we've found our doctor. Phew! She's on board with our parenting approach and seems to know her stuff, plus she went to college and grad school in the Bay Area (I guess that's not really relevant to our child's care, but it's nice to have something in common that we can talk about). She's only been with this practice for a few months, so she's actively looking for new patients (the other doctors in the practice are busy enough that they don't do meet and greets, so we lucked out that we were able to talk to her).

  Sellwood is a little far from where we live (there aren't any pediatricians in our immediate neighborhood), but it's nice to have an excuse to go down there. When the baby's older, we can bike there via the Springwater Corridor! And bonus: There are multiple ice cream shops/bakeries near the pediatrician's office, so we can institute the important "you get a treat after your doctor's appointment" tradition. In fact, we have already instituted the tradition--we stopped at Lovecup for ice cream after meeting the pediatrician. Mmm, Tillamook mint chocolate chip. I hope the baby enjoyed it!

• We crossed another item off the to-do list last week--buying a glider for the dining room. I had been watching Craigslist for Dutailier gliders for months, but most of the listings were pretty far out in the suburbs or too expensive. I was also kind of hoping that a Monte Luca glider would magically pop up for cheap (yeah, right). There actually was one listing for a used Monte glider and ottoman a month or so ago, but the seller was asking $800, which, while reasonable (they're $1400 new), was still a lot of money. I hemmed and hawed about it long enough that it was gone by the time I contacted the seller. Oh well!

  Anyway, I finally got it together and responded to a listing for a Dutailier glider and ottoman out in SW Portland. The seller was asking $150 (they go for $600-$700 new), which is pretty standard. It looked good (apart from some pen scribbles on the wood and some dinginess to the cushions) so we brought it home. Based on what I've read online, Dutailiers are considered very comfortable, but not particularly stylish. I agree with that. I'm planning on covering the cushions in a more exciting fabric. If we had unlimited time, I'd also want to stain the wood a darker color, but with all those little spindles, I think it would be better to just leave it alone. I'm sure I won't even care what it looks like once the baby's here.

  

• I was originally planning on covering the cushions this weekend, but I ended up doing some maternity clothing sewing and fabric shopping instead. The maternity dress I'm working on now looks kind of like a potato sack, so I don't have high hopes for the finished product. But I'll persevere. I also bought some beautiful Anna Maria Horner voile at Bolt for a sundress, and I'm much more excited about that project. Hopefully the sun and warm weather will return by the time I finish it!

In house news, the plasterers started today, and they're basically done--no more holes in our walls and ceiling! The guy just has to come back on Wednesday to do a little sanding. I continue to be impressed by how quickly contractors work. Here's a picture I took of our stairwell wall hole while they were plastering it. Instead of installing new wood lath, they used metal mesh--much easier!

Now we just have to paint over all the new plaster work. Actually, that's not as straightforward as I make it sound--we don't have all of the paint that the previous owners used on the walls, so we'll need to match those colors. I'm guessing we might end up putting that off in favor of more pressing house work. But you never know--Patrick is way more motivated than I am about getting this kind of thing done. I'm so lucky to be married to him--I would do such a crappy job of taking care of this house on my own. I'm pretty good at keeping it tidy, but it would totally fall down around my ears over time. I'm just put off by the bigger home improvement stuff.

A quick round-up of last week's food:

1. Patrick made fancy pizzas topped with sauteed nettles (yay, spring!), fromage blanc, mozzarella, and farmers' market eggs. For future reference, he added the egg 5.25 minutes before he took the pizza out of the oven, and it turned out just right. He used the whole wheat dough recipe from Whole Grain Breads. He's getting good at pizza-making!

2. Black bean chili (from Morning Food) and corn muffins (another batch from Whole Grains Every Day). This chili wasn't super exciting, but doctored up with cheese and sour cream, it made a perfectly fine meal.

3. Brown-sugar rubbed pan-seared salmon (from Cast Iron Skillet Cookbook), roasted brown rice pilaf scented with leeks (another repeat from Whole Grains Every Day), and sauteed spinach. Healthy, easy to make, and tasty. Yay!