another week down

Here's the "baby room", by which I mean our giant walk-in closet with baby stuff in it. The plan for now is to have the tyke sleep with us but we still needed a spot for the (rare?) diaper changes and a quiet corner for nursing, so I did a little bit of shuffling in the blue room. Sorry for the disorienting picture, its actually 2 pix that I crudely pasted together in photo shop, but hopefully you can see the changing pad on top of my old dresser and the blue chair in front of the window. Right now there are still drifts of baby things crowding out the cuteness of the space, but eventually I'll have some shelves on the wall and in the corner for all the little stuffed animals, books, and other non-wearables. Everything we can actually put on the baby goes in the dresser or the white drawers next to it. The piles of stuff around the chair are mostly made up of my craft activities: on going knitting projects, clothes to patch, a long-in-process braided rug. This stuff will probably live in the wake of the chair for the rest of eternity, or until we get a new house- I just don't know where else it could be stashed and accessible all at once.

the pool in a bag
On Tuesday, Kim and her accomplices came for the home visit. I think I mentioned before that I'd given myself the home visit as a deadline for major nesting activities, and down to the wire, got nearly everything done. They brought the birthing pool with them, which Travis is excited to be in charge of, as well as some directions for it. The whole thing is inflatable and looks like it inflates to the size of a jacuzzi (but without the jets unfortunately). It's got a sort of seat/stool thing in one end, which may or may not be fixed in place, and comes with an electric syphon for getting all the water out at the end of the day. It also has a special, sterile house to get the water in, which we're planning on hooking up to the hot water spigot by the washing machine. We don't have any specific plans to actually birth the baby in the pool, but gosh, a giant warm bath sounds so nice to me these days, I can only imagine how helpful it might be once labor gets going. This is all so exciting and mysterious, I'm having trouble just sitting and waiting for it all to play out. Oh well, that's how it goes I guess.
While they were here, Kim et al also inspected the birth kit. This is a list of birth-necessary items we were to have assembled by this week, and while I made sure to put lots of check marks on the list itself, I don't actually have everything assembled yet. Luckily, they were very forgiving. Apparently we'll make it through the next couple of days without ALL the towels listed.
Other than the pool and the inspection, the visit was like all the other prenatals we've had. She measured my belly with a tape measure, we talked about symptoms, she answered my questions. Apparently all is perfect, normal, and right on schedule.


I've also been doing a fair amount of gardening around the house lately. Here are some of my baby lettuce plants in a pot on the back porch. I'm actually having trouble finding enough goat-free space to plant all of my little seedlings now that we're grazing the yard in lieu of mowing. We have a small garden behind the house that's fenced in, but I'm almost at capacity out there. Already in the ground we've got carrots, onions, leeks, LOTS of lettuce and spinach, squash, medicinal and ornamental flowers, herbs, some tomatoes, basil, cukes, and luffas. There are also a few herb-y looking things that Ryan, the CSA guy from the ranch, gave me but I don't remember what they are. I planted them anyway and I hope they don't turn into big bushy things because they're in the sail-boat right now and there's not a lot of space there. Again, time will tell.
Everyday I go out to the little garden in the back with the intention of weeding, but there's just not much to do yet. There are a few little sprouts of grass, but I'm afraid to pull them lest I accidentally disturb my sprouting veggies. One could easily tire of all this waiting, but luckily there are lots of other house chores these days like laundry, endless sweeping (dirty dogs), and of course, nesting!
Speaking of house chores, Meredith arrives in a few short minutes and I haven't swept at all yet today. I better get that done quick so she doesn't think I'm a failure as a wife and mother (j/k)!