34 weeks

Baby girl is 4 3/4 lbs. now and just about 18 inches long. I thought you don't feel babies move quite as much by this point, but she's still a kicker. I'm pretty sure I saw an actual foot today. Gabe feels her kick sometimes just being near me. She also really likes to stick her tush out of my belly as she stretches her legs.

My cold is getting better today and I'm not a zombie like yesterday. (I took Benadryl, and then a 6 hour nap.) My puppy is also behaving now, though we're still going to get a dog trainer. He is snoring on the futon as I write. (The puppy, not the trainer.)

34 weeks is feeling like the beginning of the home stretch. When getting things ready is not totally premature. The idea of putting the carseats in the cars is no longer ridiculous. We should order all the essentials we don't yet have. It's such a welcome change to plan for her homecoming rather than dwell on pregnancy symptoms. It's also overwhelming because I'm not feeling very easygoing about preparing. I want everything CLEAN, and everything fixed that needs fixing, and meals frozen in the fridge, and all the laundry washed and sorted, and her name strung up above her crib, and all my birth planning stuff filed in order, and bags packed and everything bought, a budget done, work plans sorted, etc. But I'm like a type A personality stuck in a body that procrastinates and is tired halfway through the day and hates cleaning and planning. One day I'll learn not to set myself up for failure :)

These belly pictures are the worst. I left my camera in NJ so these are care of my phone. They're blurry and we have no full length mirror in the house. At first I stood on the edge of the tub and took a pic in the bathroom mirror. After realizing how utterly stupid and dangerous that looked with me hanging on to the shower curtain bar, I took a mirror and just propped it on the couch. I included the second pic because my puppy wandered over and tried to figure out who that other dog was in the mirror. So cute.