home stretch plus holidays equals new priorities

Wow, today I am 36 weeks. Only 4 more weeks until my due date, so baby will be here anytime from 2-6 weeks from now. I'm definitely in the home stretch, and counting the days until my last day at work. (13 working days and about 18 calendar days). Today I'm trying to get caught up on some things around the house. After I wash my sheets today, when I remake the bed, I'll put a painter's drop cloth over the mattress and mattress pad. I also want to do some more sewing. I still have that fleece coat that I want to cut out (it is one that also has an extra zip-in panel so I can wear it around just me or around me AND the baby). Plus my sewing things in general need to be organized. Then after I do that coat, I'll see what I have fabric-wise and try to make some nursing clothes.

At Thanksgiving I'll be just under 38 weeks, so we're not going very far out of town. A family from church wants to do something together with us but it might not be right on that day. Whatever we do, it hopefully will be fairly mild. In Thanksgivingses past, I would always look forward to making food and eating and having leftovers for days. But this year the food just doesn't seem that important to me. It's definitely a year to focus more on the "thanks" in Thanksgiving. And then Christmas is shortly after that, and I've done no shopping. DH and I are going to do that on Monday morning, but have already decided to get our siblings gift cards. Kindof lame, I know, but adult siblings that you hardly see or talk to are very hard to shop for. But we'll get something "real" for our parents, and also spend a little time pointing out things that we ourselves like so we can go back later and pick out gifts for each other.

Childbirth classes are going fine. Our teacher skips around in the curriculum, and last week we went over the newborn care lesson, which is the last one in the book. She said in the past that if she went through the book front to back, her couples would randomly go into labor at 36 weeks and miss the newborn care class, so she puts that one in earlier. And of course she made that comment within days of ME reaching 36 weeks. :P But it just made me excited for this little one to come. Our hospital tour is Wednesday evening. I can go to classes and read books and talk online about having a baby, but the labor and delivery tour will really be a wake-up call to me, and make this baby feel even more real.

My appointment yesterday went fine. I'm still not having a whole lot of late-pregnancy discomforts, BP is fine, weight is fine. I measured a week behind, but I have yet to have an appointment where I measure right on so that's pretty normal for me. Because of the weird schedule, I'm not having another appointment until the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. I did have my GBS test yesterday and she said they culture it for 48 hours and then will mail me the results. So hopefully by Wednesday or Thursday I should know those results, and start to plan for an IV or not.

Our male cat is still going #2 outside the litter box, but our in-laws want to take him. When DH goes down there in a couple of days he'll take Tuxedo with him. I think he'll do better there with the change of scenery, and when DH and I move again it'll be a lot easier to find an apartment that will let us have one cat than it would be to find one that would let us have two cats. (What the big deal is between one cat vs two I'll never know, but some apartments have a limit of one pet.) Plus now there will be half as much hair and half as much cat food and litter to buy. Going down to one income, every little bit helps.