clearbluecup

phew, I think I have entered into the 'exhausted' phase of pregnancy.

I could sleep anytime. I get up after an eight hour sleep, eat breakfast, and within an hour I'm ready for a nap again. I eat lunch, then sleep for an hour or two. yesterday I woke up from my nap feeling refreshed and recharged, today I woke up, ate again and felt ready to go back to sleep. Just like a cat.

I got up instead and worked on my baby quilt. Even though I'm only doing simple, repetitive tasks it feels like I'm being productive.

I'm telling myself that it's good to sleep whenever I want to, that a huge amount of my energy is going to the baby right now and I need to recharge and rest whenever I feel I need to. But I still can't believe just how much I want to sleep.

do you enjoy spending time in solitude?

usually I do. I sink deeply into books, reading for hours on end. I bury myself in projects, happily working away until I realise I've forgotten to eat lunch and dinner. I go walking for hours. I just sit and think.

but when tom went away on sunday morning, I really felt like I was echoing around an empty house. I felt the silence was thick and sticky, like syrup. I felt a bit like I didn't know what to do with myself, and kept myself busy with chores and things until I got tired and sat down and let the internet suck away the time so I wouldn't notice.

i've noticed another hormone shift in the past few weeks, in which I don't really want to go anywhere or do much of anything. I want to stay close to home, close to my loved ones, and clean up my nest. also, i'm feeling like my emotions are very close to the surface. A friend loaned me The Red Tent (sorry, must update my book list...) which made me totally sob. It's a great book though, about the family of Jacob told from the perspective of Dinah, the only daughter. Birth, death and midwifery in ancient times, and I did actually become completely absorbed in it for two days, until I'd finished it.

anyway, at one point, I realised that I probably wouldn't have the same quality of alone time ever again, not for a long long time. nobody needed anything from me. i didn't have to do anything I didn't want to. i started to appreciate the silences and had a few restful naps. and when the silences became too much, I started picking through tom's music and playing a few random choices. It's total pot-luck, because I have no idea what is what, but there's some good stuff in there.

tom gets back from vancouver tomorrow, and then we will enter into the last push of nesting and thesis writing and decision making before baby arrives.

speaking of which, I'm really starting to wonder if it's a boy or girl. boy? girl? boy? girl? I'm trying not to get too fixed on one or the other. I had a dream this morning in which I went to pick up our stroller at a warehouse, and the stroller hadn't arrived but they had a package for me anyway. It was a beautiful black leather bag, the perfect size for carrying baby gear and it was such lovely soft leather. I opened it up, and inside there were crisp white linens, baby blankets and white sheets. There was a baby hat as well, and as I pulled it out I noticed that it was decorated with blue and white stripes. I turned it around and there were pink and white stripes on the other side! Even my dreams aren't giving away any secrets...

normally I'm delighted with hot weather, but this past week has made me decide that if there is going to be a baby #2, it will certainly be born in the winter instead of the hottest part of the summer. hot hot hot. and some unpleasant preggo complaints, like swollen fingers and a sore back, are starting to catch up with me in the past few weeks. I've been very lucky overall, so I'm trying not to get too bent out of shape, but I'm looking forward to having baby in my arms instead of inside my bump.

no big updates on the job/moving front yet either. Tom is back from his interview and we are waiting for the official offer. While we wait we are checking house prices and tax calculators and making budgets, trying to work out just how much it will cost to live in Vancouver. it looks like it will be expensive, but just how expensive is impossible to tell from here.

the countdown is now at 3.5 weeks to go. I've packed a bag for the hospital, just in case. the birthing pool arrived in the mail today. we're starting to receive gifts in the mail too, which is so exciting. tiny little baby hats! so adorable! we've been going to childbirth preparation classes, both from the hospital and the homebirth perspectives. at least with this heat it was not hard to imagine panting like a hot dog during the breathing exercises. pant pant pant woof.

now that I have entered the "baby could arrive any day now" phase of pregnancy, I have suddenly lost my former inclincation towards procrastination. Everything seems incredibly urgent. Baby quilt? Finish it, stat. Cleaning the bathroom? Better do it today. I don't want to look at my own dirty bathroom while I'm in labour. Grocery shopping, researching moving costs, looking at house rentals in Vancouver? Do it now, now, now. Even meeting friends to see a movie or getting my hair cut, I'm making that appointment for this week rather than next.

this has spilled over into my housekeeping habits, and I can't really tell whether it's because we're having a homebirth and I want to be in a tidy space during labour or whether this is just normal nesting behaviour, but holy my house is way cleaner than it usually is. And I've discovered (ssh!) that it's actually easier to keep up with the cleaning by doing it all the time. Of course, now that I have developed these new habits they will all very shortly go out the window in favour of feedings and changings and catching whatever sleep I can, but at least now I know that I had a clean house once upon a time.

no updates on the moving situation yet, we are still in the negotiation phase but hopefully coming to the end of that and will be making a decision soon. and the thesis, oh the thesis! it's still being written. we're actually having a race, thesis vs fetus. who will finish first?