Birthday Babymoon

Well, it looks like we are in the final stretch!  It is starting to feel like I've been pregnant forever.  It looks like Baby Stanis may be greeting us around July 10th or 11th.  We go back for our final placenta previa check a week from Monday.  The doctor isn't hopeful that there will be any change.  If that is the case, then we will most likely schedule the c-section on July 10th or 11th.  

It has been really warm the past few days and that has been really hard for me.  I'm exhausted and hot most of the time.  Two days ago I started having contractions brought on by heat/dehydration.  Fortunately, after drinking a few jugs of water and laying down for a few hours, the contractions stopped.  Tom and I were just about ready to go to the hospital, though.

Last weekend Tom treated me to an extra special birthday present --- two nights away from the noise and chaos of our remodel!  It was my Birthday Babymoon...  We stayed at a spa resort in Los Gatos, which is just a few minutes from our home.  On my birthday I got a massage and a pedicure and felt positively spoiled.  It was great!  We were able to stop back home and check on the construction and then escape back to the hotel.  We enjoyed breakfast in our room each morning, several wonderful meals out, and even made time for a jaunt to Lowe's to buy yet more stuff for the remodel!  :)

Car Seats and Nesting

Not too much new on the baby front these days.  I've been "nesting", aka organizing, our little area in preparation for Baby Stanis' arrival.  Tom put the car seat in the car this weekend.  It is still weird to see it there.  We have a little bunny strapped in to it for now.  I tried to stop by the fire station yesterday to see if we had the car seat installed correctly.  For everyone saying "just stop by the fire station", it just isn't that simple.  They don't do it at our fire station, so they sent me to the Sheriff's office.  (Saratoga doesn't have a police force - we are covered under the county sheriff's office.)  Once there I was told I had to call someone to set up an appointment to get the car seat checked.  I left a message yesterday but have yet to hear back.  I found a list online of local inspection sites.  The first one I called, a local Audi dealership, no longer does inspections.  The second place referred me to another number, etc, etc, etc.  This seems entirely more complicated than it needs to be...

Over the weekend I was moving stuff from one closet to another, to make room for all the baby stuff.  While putting some empty binders on a shelf, I gashed my finger on a piece of our old cast iron bathtub.  It was actually fairly grotesque and quite bloody.  Tom and I ended up in the emergency room a few hours later when I started to get tingling in the finger.  A few stitches later we were on our way.  We were actually amazed that we were in and out of the ER in an hour.  Don't know if we just lucked out, or if the ER up here has shorter wait times than LA.

Friday is an important milestone for Baby Stanis.  I'll be 34 weeks along and at that point the OB said it is ok to go to the hospital where we plan on delivering.  Before then, we need to go to the "bigger" hospital that has a more advanced neonatal center.

Tonight we have an infant CPR class.  Last week we had a breastfeeding class.  I can't say I'm getting much out of these classes.  The breastfeeding class had about 20 minutes of info spread across 3 hours.  And I got to practice latching a fake baby to a fake foam breast in front of the class.  That was fun.  It seems like we'll get more information during the one-on-one with the nurses in the hospital than we got in the class.  Many of the nurses are lactation consultants and they have a very pro-breastfeeding program at the hospital.  After our disappointment with the basic baby care and breastfeeding classes, we decided to cancel our Childbirth Prep class.  We're most likely looking at a c-section, anyway.