39 Weeks, Oh My!

Apologies for the particularly bad mobile phone/mirror picture this week. Chris came for a snuggle and I didn't want him getting bored and wandering off (his forbearance for being photographed is greater than that of the kitties, but not unlimited). We've made it to 39 weeks, 6 days to go (give or take actual arrival date, of course). I'm hoping to be a few days to a week late but not need to be induced so next Saturday is when I start eating pineapples or spicy food, drinking raspberry leaf tea, and bouncing up and down on my exercise ball all day. Until then, it's lying on my back with my feet up and my knees crossed. Or cleaning the house in preparation for my mother's arrival on Wednesday, whichever actually happens. The sad thing about my mother arriving is that I'll have to move out of the nursery/guest bed and poor Chris will be kept awake all night with my snoring. Even in a non-adjacent room, wearing ear plugs he can sometimes hear me. This is why I try and read for an hour or so after going to bed, to give him a chance to fall asleep before I do. Honest, it's for purely altruistic purposes and not because I'm a bookworm

Speaking of books, Mira Grant's Newsflesh Trilogy has been my latest form of crack. It's about a(n adopted) brother-sister team of bloggers and their crew some twenty years after the cure for the common cold and the cure for cancer got together to turn the recently deceased into zombies and the government conspiracies they unearth. I'm not a fan of the zombies, this and World War Z (has that movie come out yet? I live under a rock) are pretty much the entirety of my exposure to the genre. Oh, I've seen Shaun of the Dead and that movie where the kid has the rules for surviving a zombie apocalypse. Anyway, Newsflesh is as good as everyone said and if her urban fantasy series published under her own name, Seanan McGuire is anywhere near as good, I will be a very happy bunnybookworm.

On the knitting front things are looking less optimistic. The baby blanket/shawl is coming along nicely, I've knit the border along the first side and turned the corner, but everything else is in the frog pond.* The socks for my mother, I'm convinced, are not going to fit. They're a little long and too tight to go over the heel. I can't really try them on because my own feet, ankles, and legs are swollen but I'm convinced they're all wrong. Plan A is to knit the second sock to be the size I think it should be and then when she arrives I can frog whichever sock is the naughty one and reknit it. Chris' pullover otoh just needs to be frogged. I knit a gauge swatch but I'm not happy with the size it's coming out. I had him try on the body and it was quite snug which, combined with the denseness of the fabric, means it'll be too hot and not comfortable enough for him to actually wear. It took forever to knit in the first place, but I don't want to finish a sweater just to have it finished and not be worn. So I'll frog it and go up half a mm on the needles and start again at some vague point in the future.

On the more optimistic side, I have acquired *cough* yarn to knit Ravi Junior which is another Carol Feller pattern. It starts at the 6 months size but I think I'll do the next size up for Little Djinn to wear in the Autumn/winter. Not that a cardigan would go amiss in our Scottish "summer". I also acquired yarn for Snawheid and the matching mitt(en)s, Snawpaws. I don't actually know that I have enough yarn for both, but I'll knit the hat and see how much I have left.

~ * ~

* unravelling knitting is known as "frogging" because the stitches make a small "ribbit" sound as one pulls them apart. This sound used to make my husband cry, but he's become jaded to hours of knitting wasted.

Things are Starting to Come Together

We got a lot done on Saturday. We wandered around looking for a dresser for Little Djinn, both in charity shops and furniture stores, but didn't find anything we agreed on. I liked a squat one we saw in a charity shop but Chris thought it was meh and he liked an almost £400 one in a furniture store, but I'm not willing to spend that kind of money on something that will get treated the way children treat their furniture. So we're still looking. We then went to the curtain place that did the curtains in our bedroom and my FiL's place and made an appointment to get fitted for blackout blinds, both in our room and the nursery. He came around on Monday to take measurements but wasn't able to bring the book of blinds with him as they were being viewed by another customer, so we still need to pick those and curtains for the nursery.

We went to the post office in Tesco's Inshes to pick up the package we missed Friday, which turned out to be from Miss Laura and full of gifts for Little Djinn, including a blanket knit by her mother. Laura also sent us a little stuffed lamb which was on our baby registry which was particularly impressive given that the posting date was before we created the registry. I've always know that Miss Laura has impeccable taste.

We also swung by the new mega craft store in Inshes, though "mega" is a relative term. Certainly larger than anything comparable in the area, though it would be a bit small for a Michael's. I got some sock yarn for Christmas-gift socks (not for anyone who reads this, but one never knows) and some cotton yarn to try and crochet some snowflakes. The secret to happiness here is going to have to be low expectations as the only thing I am less confident in than my crochet abilities is my ability to follow a pattern using UK, and thus different from US, crochet terminology. If only it wasn't the same terms for different "stitches"....

On Sunday we cleaned the house a bit before going to my FiL's for tea (the beverage). He tried to call to tell us not to come as he had a cold, but we'd already left when he rang as I needed to be at work after the shop closed to help prep the shop for a corporate visit which should have happened this morning. My manager was freaking out about getting ready and the only real comfort I could offer was that, given the number of shops they planned to visit in one day, they couldn't possibly stay long. Their plan was to come up Wednesday, visit our shop from 8-10, and be in Aberdeen by lunchtime. Everyone who lives in, and probably most people who have visited, the highlands hears this and blinks. They clearly have no idea the actual distances and travel times involved. Hopefully they'll consider shipping product based on distance it has to travel weighed as a slightly higher factor against volume of the destination store. Promotional material that arrives the day before or day of an event is slightly less useful than one might imagine. Hopefully it went well and my manager can enjoy a highly-deserved virgin cocktail or five (like me, though for different reasons, the poor woman isn't allowed a drink) when she gets home.

On Monday, Chris and I had our first ante-natal class which was mildly irritating in a "why are we using all these silly euphemisms for a straightforward biological event?" kind of way. I'm going to take it on faith that the midwife leading the class (she's not a "community midwife", eg one who might actually be assisting in my labour) did pass courses on anatomy and physiology and is merely operating under the impression that we all failed basic biology. But we got a tour of the post-natal ward where we'll be after Little Djinn arrives, until we're ready to go home. The midwife assured as that being discharged 6 hours after delivery is not SOP here, and that three days is much more common at which I blanched. Three days stuck in a hospital, twiddling my thumbs? Fortunately the recovery ward's own material suggests one day before discharge which seems perfect for learning to nurse and a few supervised diaper changes before returning to the solace of one's own bed and partner.

One of the ladies in my Tuesday night knitting group is also pregnant, a few weeks further along than I am, and her ante-natal class started on Wednesday. The classes normally start around 32 weeks, but they're trying to squeeze us all in before Christmas, so I'm getting an early start.

Speaking of early, they called to cancel my ultra-sound appointment for next week, the one I was so excited about (and impressed to have gotten an appointment notification a month in advance). Apparently it was scheduled in error and they'll send me another letter to reschedule for the week before Christmas. Sadness. Chris suggested we could make private appointment to have an ultrasound anyway, but as much as I love getting to see Little Djinn, I'm not convinced it would be worth it. I'm a lot more used to being poor than he is.

That's the life of a pregnant woman. I'll be 31 weeks tomorrow, with 9 weeks left to go. I didn't take a picture this week, so you'll just have to take my word for it that I continue to look rotund. I'm starting to be exhausted all the time: yesterday I was ready to crawl back in bed half an hour after I got up and I'd actually slept through the night for once. I finished the center panel for the baby blanket I'm knitting for Little Djinn, picked up one of the side panels, and am working my way through the first lace chart (though it's so tiny, I'm using the written directions instead. My kingdom for a photocopier). I also took a picture of the purple blanket I knit way back whenever, blocked and displayed on the bassinet (Moses basket) in the nursery.