preparations abound

Yesterday, M and I went to a workshop about preparing your pets for a new baby. We left feeling confident that everything is going to be okay. Our dog is pretty laid back. If we didn't know that going in, we realized it quickly while listening to the questions other people were asking about the neuroses their pets either already had or developed in response to their pregnancies. The funniest part of the whole experience was at the very end: As soon as the one-hour workshop was over, all of the moms-to-be headed straight for the bathroom. I was fifth in line and there were at least that many women behind me. When I came out, there was M standing against the wall... along with all of the men from our class, waiting for their bladder-capacity-challenged other halves. :-)

From there, we went out for a yummy lunch then tried to go to the cloth diaper store but it was closed when we got there. Foiled! We're doing pretty well on the great diaper stock-up, but we need to start buying some of the extras - wipes, pail, totes, etc. Since they were closed, we went to a couple other stores trying to get curtains for the nursery but we were unsuccessful in that venture as well.

We started an online baby pool. My mom predicted the baby will be almost a week late and weigh 9 lbs. 4 oz. Traitor! I'm just kidding. I actually agree with her, on the weight at least. I'm so flipping huge. M says it's not that the baby is big, it's that I am small (read: short), but I suspect it's at least a little of both.

I'm starting to wrap things up at work. I probably have a full two months left there, but the big thing on my to-do list is putting coverage in place for my clients and I don't want to save that for the last minute in case something comes up and I have to go on leave earlier than planned. I've started taking co-workers along on home visits to introduce them to my clients and writing service authorizations in advance so that unless there is a status change, my colleagues only have to fax them while I'm gone. It's definitely making all of this feel a lot more real, and close!

I'm feeling a need to soak up these last few weeks of pregnancy. We spent so long trying to get here. Up to this point, I've been so nervous that something was going to go wrong, but we're in the safe zone now. It's likely that if the baby was born today, he or she would be just fine after a relatively short stay in the nicu. Granted, I'm peeing a thousand times a day, sleeping like crap, and a day of errand running (such as yesterday) completely wipes me out but I have so little time left in this magical state and I don't want to take any of it for granted.