Taut as a drum

Week 33. There are 45 days to go, according to our little calendar, and the past few weeks have been so full of activity it's hard to know where to even start.

First there were the baby showers. Hosanna and I can't even begin to comprehend the love and generosity of our family and friends. We received such an overwhelming bounty of love and gifts for the new baby that we are left literally speechless. We don't know where to begin to thank all those who are giving of themselves so selflessly to help us. We especially owe thanks to Tracy, Mike, Jennifer, and Doug for planning and hosting our San Jose baby shower, and to Mrs. B for planning and hosting the Sacramento one. And to our families for their amazing outpouring of support, both material and emotional. We love you all so enormously.

Speaking of enormous... Hosanna is huge. And those are her words, not mine. She went swimming the other day, and she said she floated in the pool, blissfully bobbing around "like an orca." (Again, her words, not mine. I don't make the whale jokes. I just help her get up from the couch. And get her shoes on and off. And open that one window in our room that she can't reach anymore because the keyboard stand gets in the way of her belly.)

Apparently, swimming was the best thing ever - so all you ladies who will get pregnant one day, and subsequently become HUGER THAN MOBY DICK, should take note. To quote The Tick, "Gravity is a harsh mistress," and never more so than when you weigh an extra 25-30 pounds and your bones are all rubbery.

In addition, Hosie's belly is stretched so tight. If you put your hand on her belly, you can practically feel her skin stretching. It's really amazing. But she really is getting uncomfortable now, so of course that's no good. Not just her skin, but now she's getting the pains in her hips and pelvis too, and she's starting to have trouble sleeping. She tosses and turns a lot during the night and is incredibly hot all the time.

Remember the blood tests? Two of the four tests that came after the drinking of the extra-jumbo size of the orange-soda-with-twice-the-sugar-and-none-of-the-fun were apparently abnormal, which caused our midwife to put Hosanna onto a strict regimen of testing her blood sugar after every meal. She had to get a bizarre array of supportive paraphernelia for this effort. First she gets the little auto-finger-pricker dealio and sticks herself with it, drawing up a little bead of blood. Then she feeds it to the device that looks like a cross between a tricorder and a palm pilot, which chews on it for a couple seconds, goes boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-BEEP, then throws out a number out at you. She's supposed to always be under 140. What 140 really represents, we have no idea. But we know she's been consistently under it, so that must be good. We'll find out more tomorrow morning when we go back to the doctor's office.

Hosanna's routine all week long has been like this: Eat. Walk a half mile to a mile. Prick finger. Feed the tricorder-palm-pilot thingy. Write down the number. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. She has to do this for every meal. Today she came home and said to me, "I'm tired of eating. I'm tired of eating, walking, and pricking. I don't want to eat, walk and prick anymore." I just told her that she had one last prick to go and that was it.

Today, though, she really, really made me laugh hard. Apparently she was running a little late to go to work, because she had a late lunch. She didn't have time to go outside and walk around the neighborhood like usual. Plus it was really hot out and that air conditioning felt really good. So she walked around inside the house instead. Up and down the stairs a bunch of times. Around the kitchen / dining room / family room loop about fifteen times. Back upstairs. Back downstairs. I can't explain it but I found this image of her just wandering aimlessly around the house for fifteen minutes terribly funny. I laughed and laughed. Then we ate dinner and watched The Tick (yay Netflix!) and laughed some more. Laughing is good.

Oh yes, and we started the birthing classes. They are pretty good. For the most part both of us aren't absorbing everything there too well, because most of the information seems like you really can't understand it until you start going into labor, or are actually having the baby, but so it goes.