Zatera Ul

I had a baby shower from our church on Monday, and my dentist appointment on Tuesday, and now I am free except for work (proposal deadline next week, baby permitting). The shower went well, except the Target registry for some reason messed up, and we received four of the same baby carrier. One nice thing is that everyone was talking amongst themselves while I opened gifts, and not watching me, although everything still had to be passed around to be admired. Tuesday afternoon I went through all the gifts and got all the thank-you notes written.

According to the dentist, I can look forward to having sore and bleeding gums all through breastfeeding, and there’s not much that can be done about it except to keep taking care of them. Wonderful.

For work, this has been an odd year; not many projects coming in that fit my skill set, so I’ve been idle a lot, yet somehow I’ve managed to bring money into the company. The first time was last year, when a proposal that I put together, almost at the last minute, surprisingly won funding. Then, we heard for sure yesterday that the next (and much larger) phase of the project is going to be funded–very good news, although to me it feels like success all out of proportion to effort expended. The next phase will start around the time that I come back from maternity leave, on a half-time (and work-at-home) schedule, so I have more interesting and productive work than proposal writing to look forward to.

It’s funny that the larger my tummy gets, the more normal the rest of me looks. In a picture from a couple of months ago, I look more fat than anything else. Now, I look more like my non-pregnant self, with a huge tummy attached. Still not nearly as big as my mother when she was pregnant, though–in one picture, a side view, she looked nearly as wide as she was tall. My sister and I were both nine-pounders.

We made a trip to Peapods in St. Paul–it is a great store, and no doubt will be the place where we buy all the kid’s Christmas presents, but they too don’t have cloth diaper pails (lost their supplier to the more lucrative recycling bin market). MFH found an online store that has a good diaper pail, but it’s closed until “mid-October”. So it looks like we’ll be using the birdseed bucket at the beginning.