36 weeks (9 months!) through my pregnancy! Oh my, oh my. The final countdown. Which is also what Chris titled the calendar that he wrote on our laundry room message board. He likes to remind me that the baby could arrive "Any day now!" Although I'm still sticking to the due window approach and hope to calmly breeze into April and to whatever date this baby decides is his day.
While I've had a wonderfully uncomplicated and healthy pregnancy I am definitely experiencing discomforts as I'm getting bigger. The hardest thing for me right now is being at work all day. My back and hips get tight and sore and my ankles and feet get swollen. I'm wearing compressing socks, frequently get up (to go to the bathroom mostly) and try to stretch and move a bit. I've also tried sitting on a exercise ball. Nothing seems to cure the swelling or tightness. I could take a mid-day walk which might help although sometimes it seems that once they get swollen nothing will help. The best days are Thursdays when I go to an early morning spin class. I feel sooo much better on those days and have minimal discomfort and swelling. I'm almost thinking of adding another morning of spin to my routine just to have another comfortable day of work per week. We'll see. Saturday morning prenatal yoga is heaven after a long week.
Sleeping is pretty good on some nights and lousy on others. The winning combination seems to be cutting off water in the later afternoon, an extra strength heartburn pill, a decongestant (all midwife-approved, of course), and what we call my pillow fortress. The pillow fortress involves my head resting on my Tempurpedic Symphony pillow (I am so in love with this pillow that I travel with it), one pillow on each side of my body so that no matter which side I'm on I can have a pillow between my knees, and another Symphony pillow at my feet to keep them elevated and help with the swelling. (Luckily earlier this year Chris and I upgraded to a king mattress so there's also still room for Chris in the bed.) But even with all these things I still wake up to turn from side to side (which takes some effort!) and will usually wake up the baby who kicks around until he can find another cozy nook.
Last weekend I hosted a brunch and nursery tour at our house (details and nursery pictures next week!) and so the nursery is pretty much done! Except for those glider cushions, which I never did sew. I just pinned the fabric on for the nursery tour and I don't think I'm going to get to them. But I do need to find someone to sew them.
At work I've mostly wrapped up the projects that I wanted to which makes me feel much better. Now I can just work on things that I've been meaning to get to but aren't priorities. Maybe I'll even give my desk a good clean-out. I talked with my boss about working from home as I get close to my due date and she said it would be fine as early as two weeks out from my due date so I'm looking forward to taking advantage of that. I can only imagine how much I'll want to put my feet up in two weeks!
We have some busy weekends coming up (what else is new?) so time might go by fast but then again as I feel more uncomfortable and we get closer I've also heard that time slows to a standstill. So I'm remembering my phrase of 2013: be present. I want to enjoy these last few weeks of pregnancy and being a little family of two with Chris before we're a family of three. It's oh so close.
