i'm 11 days to my due date. not that i actually have any hope of anything happening on my due date--i fully expect this to be an april baby.

anyhow, in the meantime, watch the belly (and the stretch marks) grow! these shots are from 14-38 weeks.

32 weeks

01 February 2007 - 5:21 pm

how time flies!* last post i was 24 weeks, i'm now 32 weeks! eek! baby in T minus 8 weeks (mas o menos).

*as a take-home exercise, determine how many different interpretations there are of the sentence "time flies like an arrow"

other things that have happened in the last, um, nearly 2 months.

• we sold our car (a 1995 accord) for $100 less than what we bought it for, 2 years earlier. 'course, in the time we owned it we put a couple grand into it in repairs, but who's counting?
• we bought another car, a 2004 cr-v, a couple days ago. from a dealership, so we didn't get a bargain-basement price, but on the other hand the dealership has supposedly looked it over and thinks it's in good condition. i'm not excited about being an SUV owner for the first time in my life (and for the first time in my family's history), but the word on the street is that ground clearance is useful in peru if you want to get out of the city ever. roads in lima are fine, but roads outside lima are not necessarily. whatever. at least that's done. now we can move on to buying a carseat (which we'd been delaying til we got a car to put it in), which, once installed in the car, will *really* make me feel like this baby's on the way. eek!
• i've changed over from my previous OB practice to a midwife-staffed independent birthing center. the whole hospital vibe was just too much for me. i want, assuming my body cooperates, to have a medication-free natural childbirth. the hospitals and OB practices around here seem to be, not anti-natural childbirth exactly, but pretty dependent on medical interventions during the course of delivery. stuff like pitocin to induce labor, epidurals, episiotomies, c-sections... generally, the approach that they take seems to be that they're expecting a woman's body to fail during labor and birth so they anticipate that and jump right in with (in my opinion) excessive monitoring, caution, and interventions. the midwives have the mindset that women's bodies are built to do this whole birthing thing, that by and large women's bodies can successfully deal with the work of childbirth, and that barring some actual *reason*, they'll let things progress at their own pace.
• christmas was nice, as usual. karl went to england to spend it with his parents and i stayed with my parents (who live about 20 minutes from me). i got lots of nice presents and didn't get too many that were "for the baby," which i appreciated. it was all very low-key.
• spanish continues to continue. but only for 3 more weeks, then i'm done with spanish! (til i hit the ground in peru, anyway) 'course, in 3 weeks i have to test at a "professional working knowledge" level in speaking and reading. but i'm trying very hard not to think too much about that.

32 week belly shot. note beginnings of stretch marks, sigh...