One Month and Counting

Yesterday was one month before my due date! Looking back on the last month it went by so quickly, it amazes me that in that short amount of time in the future we will have our baby! Here are some progressive pictures of my pregnancy.18 weeks- I didn't even have a belly!28 weeks

Today- 36 weeks

On another note, this week we surpassed our record for most people to spend the night at our house. I think the previous record was five when Robert's brother and his wife and his dad were visiting us. This week we shot up to eight! My cousin Kamille and five of her friends came down from Cache Valley to do a little SoCal sightseeing and I invited them to stay at our house for the three days they were in the area. They were are all very nice and Robert and I enjoyed chatting with them until very late at night.

P.S. This is also our 200th post!

Dream Time

It’s dream time again! In a recent dream I was at one of my doctor’s visits and the doctor told me very sadly, “I’m sorry Melarie, but your baby has a vampire disease called quid pro quo and won’t be able to live for more than a day after she is born.” It was a very distressing revelation of course, although kind of funny now that I am awake and know it was all a dream. A vampire disease? Probably from reading Twilight and thinking of Bella’s pregnancy. Called quid pro quo? I have no idea where that one came from. In my dream it sounded like a perfectly logical name for a disease, but in waking naturally I know it’s Latin for “something for something,” and refers to giving and receiving something of equal value. (Yeah right, I had to look it up). I think dreams are a person’s way of sorting things out in their mind, so I do believe that dreams have meaning, but I don’t know where I was going with the quid pro quo thing. Hmm, that could get deep.

So in my dream I am very devastated. All my plans for watching my baby grow up and having this perfect little family with her are dashed. I’ll just get one day with her. At first I don’t know what to think, but after a few minutes I can recognize that I am devastated not to get a lifetime with her. My dream self thinks that I should be feeling like carrying this baby for another month is useless because she is just going to be dying anyways. But my dream self also realizes that’s not how I feel, that I still want to nurture her until it is time for her to be born. At least I will be able to meet her and spend a little time with her before she dies. And I will love her in spite of her vampireness. The doctor asks me if I was still going to name her Julia, and I tell her yes, of course, her name is Julia. I ask if there were any symptoms earlier of the disease, and the Dr. said yes, and showed me a paper with all the possible symptoms in pregnancy for the disease. The symptoms I had were highlighted, like back pain. They just hadn't put it all together until today. After that I start thinking of how I am going to tell Robert and then I woke from my dream, very relieved that it was just a dream.

So the dream got me thinking a little. I never expressed it in the dream, but probably the reason I was not completely hopeless after hearing the horrible news was because of the eternal perspective I have as a Latter-Day Saint. No, I wasn’t going to get a lifetime with her, but I was going to get an eternity with her. She wasn’t going to stop being my baby after she died. So that made it okay for me to want to nurture her as long as I could. Also, I love her already, so no matter what she looked like she would still be the same baby that I have been feeling inside of me for months and I would still love her.

Anyway, I'm about 35 weeks now and the time seems so short until we really do get to meet our baby. I have two more weeks of work, so hopefully the last little while without work will let me get some stuff done around the house and finish getting ready for baby. I'm really excited to stop working because by the end of the day my back is killing me from sitting at a desk (and on a bus) for so long and I am exhausted from not getting enough (deep) sleep.

It Won't Be Like This For Long

This song always gets to me when I hear it, I guess the pregnancy hormones help because I usually get all teary eyed too. You always hear be grateful for what you have in your life now, but I think I am just barely really understanding that. We've had a lot of changes recently (like the last few years recently) and I look back at each stage of life Robert and I were in and really appreciate the time that we spent in that stage. It does seem, though, like I was always eager for that stage to end and to move onto something else.

When we were single and dating we (of course) couldn't wait to get married. But we did have so much fun. And being married students felt like it would last forever, but those were good times too. I really didn't like living in apartments, but now that we have a house I sure do appreciate not having so much to clean or having to spend every weekend doing yard work or house maintenance.

So now that we will be entering this new stage of parenthood I am happy right now just to be pregnant and working and appreciate that time while I have it. I will never be pregnant for the first time again and I have loved (almost) every minute of it.(I think I just forget about the bad parts because the good parts are so great.) It's been so much fun to learn about pregnancy first hand as things progressed and to feel the baby moving and wonder what she will be like. Things will be a lot different when the baby is here and we have both looked forward to this change for a long time. But where we are now "won't be like this for long" and I want to enjoy every stage of our lives.

(BTW, I had no idea that Darius Rucker was black-that's cool, there aren't a lot of black country singers- or that he was the lead singer of Hootie and the Blowfish before going solo. To hear the radio version of the song you can scroll down to my song playlist.)

Books

I'm actually quite disappointed I don't have more. I guess I found some new inspiration for books to read while I'm on maternity leave (in just three weeks!)

X means I have read it.

X 1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
X 2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
X 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
X 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
X 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
X 6 The Bible
X 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
X 8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
X 11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
X 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
X 15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
X 16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
X 22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
/ 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy- half an X because I’m currently reading it
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
X 27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
X 28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
X 29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
X 34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lost World - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
X 42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
X 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
X 46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
X 49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
X 50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
X 51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
X 54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
X 61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
X 65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
X 73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
X 87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
X 91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
X 98 The Witches - Roald Dahl
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
/ 100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo- also currently reading

Field Notes

Most of the blog lately has been all about babies, so to change things up a little here is a little snippet of my field notes from Guatemala in 2005 (I was looking through them today and figured why not post some. I have pages and pages of this stuff that only I have ever read.)

Wednesday August 3, 2005
I asked Catarina (my host mother) why she thought grandparents were important. At first she told me that her grandparents weren’t important because they were now dead. So I asked her what about the little kids, like Carlos and Manuel (her two small grandchildren)? She said that she was important because she always loves them, siempre amo a los nietos.Pascuala’s (my host sister-in-law) father and little brothers came over today and sat in her room and then left. Catarina said they came to tell Pascuala that her two brother that had gone to the U.S. had finally called last night at like one o’clock. It had been twenty-two days since they left here and they had only called the week after they left, so Pascuala had been very worried about them. I asked Pascuala where they were and she said that they had made it to Los Angeles. Catarina asked me if it was far from the states, and I told her it was the United States, it was in California, so they had made it there. Pascuala asked me if it was far from Utah and I said it was far, but not too far, not as far as New York. I told them that my husband was born in Los Angeles.
Today it rained really hard. It was one of the hardest thunderstorms that we have had during the day. It used to rain a lot during the night, but not as hard during the day. Lately however we have had no rain. Today it clouded up like it usually did, but then we started to see lightning and then it started raining and soon it was pouring. Catarina came into my room to finish setting up her new weaving project, a panuelo. This week she had been working on a paz, but she finished it today and started on a new project. She has been working really hard lately. She works at night until she goes to sleep because I can hear her pulling on the backstrap loom at night. I guess she has a lot of work to do.I finished my summary of my project in Spanish. It took me longer than I thought it would. I guess I write pretty slow when I am writing a paper anyways, and this was in Spanish so I had to think about what I wanted to write, then think about how to put it into Spanish, and then look up the words that I didn’t know how to spell. I think I spelt most of them right though. The grammar is not perfect but it is intelligible.

I asked Catarina about padrinos and she said her kids do have them, but the only thing they did was present the kid to the Padre when they were baptized. She said that they are from this town, but that is basically the only thing the padrinos are for.
Today we had a lot of visitors. Pascuala’s family came, then a lady looking to buy chickens came by and right after that a guy came over to look at our bulls. It is interesting to see them bargaining with each other because they know each other so they don’t do it really aggressively, but they do bargain. Someone says a price and then someone else says a price and then they comment about something else and then get back to bargaining.

Whew

Today at my doctor's appointment my doctor surprisingly did a quick ultrasound and, among other things, told us that we still have a baby girl. So now I can wash all my baby clothes this weekend and not feel apprehensive that we may never use them if our baby turns out to really be a boy. Rest assured, this baby is a girl.

The doctor also said she could see the baby "practice" breathing. Babies don't breath in the womb, but I guess they do practice breathing by moving their diaphragm, something I had never heard about. So baby still looks good and healthy.

I was really confused why the doctor did the ultrasound though, but it was a pleasant surprise (even if it only lasted a minute). At the last appointment I had specifically asked if they would do another ultrasound and the doctor said only if they thought something might be wrong. But today she said that the baby looked good so I don't know why we had it done today. Maybe it wasn't really considered an ultrasound? It was a different machine than last time... I don't know, but really, I don't care as long as my baby is healthy.

Also today, one of the nurses commented on how small I was, like everyone does when I tell them how far along I am. And the doctor said, "she's not small, she's was just skinny." (talking about me.) Thank you doctor! I have gained the recommended amount of weight and my baby is just fine, so there (to everyone who keeps telling me I look small). And when I think of how much my baby still has left to grow, I don't want to be big yet!

P.S. Thanks for the baby book recommendations!

Photo Tag

I've been photo-tagged. The rules are...
1. Choose the 4th folder where you store your pictures on the computer
2. Select the 4th picture in the folder
3. Explain the picture
4. Tag 4 people to do the same
5. No cheating (cropping, editing, etc)


What are the odds it turned out to be a picture of just me? This was Summer 2004 when Robert and I were dating. I was visiting him at his Aunt Deana's house and he was evidently obsessed with taking random pictures of me.

I tag:
1. Mom & Dad Wheat
2. Lauren W.
3. Mark and Jessica D.
4. Devin and Leslie S.

My Weekend To-Do List

My Weekend
My Month's
My Next Two Months To-Do List

Mail thank you cards
Make more cards
Order prints of vacation photos
Hang remaining pictures
Iron clothes (from last weeks laundry)
Laundry
Prepare Primary Lesson (Valient 10, they are such an easy class)
Move laptop to bedroom so I can type in bed
Wash baby clothes and put in drawers
Check out local consignment stores for baby clothes (dare I try yard sales and craiglists?)
Buy rest of baby gear (most importantly car seat, stroller, and changing pad)
Find a Pediatrician
Hiking in Claremont Wilderness Park
Visiting Teaching
Get library card and check out some books
Prune roses (I really don't know how to do this, but they are looking pretty wild)
Dust
Mop
Vacuum
Wash windows and mirrors
Put museum wax under the decorations on shelves so they don't fall off during an earthquake
Watch the baby DVD the hospital gave us (Wow, can you say product placement?)
Pack hospital bag
Make wall hanging name plaque
Plant flowers in the backyard

Problem is the list keeps getting longer much faster than I can cross them off...

Baby Books

Whoohoo, I'm 30 weeks!

All you mothers out there, any suggestions on good baby books I should read?