32wks & 33wks

Getting closer and closer. According to the compare-your-baby-to-fruit-website, our baby is the size of a pineapple this week. That's given me this unshakable image of a pineapple-baby in my stomach.

My 32 week appointment last week was uneventful, up about 1.5 lbs. (ugh). BP is normal and all that jazz is still good. I'm starting to feel more hefty and tired, mainly in the afternoon. It's more difficult to sleep comfortably and I have to roll over a lot because my legs get sore. I still have nothing to complain about, I'm pregnant, I'm healthy, as far as we know baby's healthy and hopefully we'll have a healthy full-term baby with an uncomplicated delivery. Baby moves around a lot and I think I've felt hiccups. Sometimes he/she will curl up on one side of my stomach, making it appear lopsided and it's equal parts weird and amazingly awesome.

Our childbirth classes were this past weekend. On Friday night we had a two-hour class called 'Mind Over Body'. I wouldn't call it a natural childbirth class exactly but it focused on ways to use your mind/different positions, etc. to work through labor without an epidural. We learned breathing techniques and used birth balls and chairs and massage. At the end we went through these stations and used clothes pins on our ears and ice cubes in our hands to simulate the pain of a contraction. On Saturday morning we had the all day 'Pregnancy to Parenthood' class. It started at 8:15AM and finished at 4:30PM. It was useful, there were a lot of couples in there with due dates close to ours, lots of younger couples too. I think there was about 12 couples total. The guys seemed kind of immature for impending fatherhood. I was really glad to have a husband who is not worried about the lack of beer, parties, and money after the baby comes. I think we both learned more about the actual length and the stages of labor, plus we got a tour of the Labor & Delivery unit and the nursery, which had a teeny, tiny newborn in it. At one point we were standing by the elevators waiting and there was a little chime. The nurse told us that every time a baby is born the chime plays. Cue the tears (for me). Of course I only teared up a tiny bit, I didn't want all the other people around us to think I was insane. But that little chime just made this actual birth of a baby thing seem a little more real. Plus I started to think about everything we've been through and how we got it, add to that the fact I'm full of hormones and then you have the tears. All in the all I think the classes were helpful, even though we both know how to change diapers, feed, bath, and swaddle babies. I've been around little ones since I was a kid and Doug has been around all our nieces and nephews since they were born so we've both changed our share of diapers.

I can't believe how quickly time is flying by. It's just a few short weeks until it's July and then not long after that it'll hopefully be baby time.