As promised here are some pictures from the two baby showers that I had this month. As you can see people are excited about this little girl.
This is Taffy on the drive home after a weekend of two baby showers. She is tuckered out!
The gifts:
The clothes: She will not go naked that is for sure.
I’ll add pictures of the cakes later to this post.
The Chicco Cortina travel system we ordered arrived today! The pattern is called Miro. The infant car seat is the KeyFit 30 model, and the stroller is the Cortina model. It was pretty easy for hubby to put together. And it looks like it is going to be easy for me to get in and out of my car. I’m very pleased with our purchase!
I am a huge fan of my personal space, I’ll go ahead and make that statement upfront. I am not a fan of being touched by people who I do not know. I knew going into this pregnancy that I should expect to have my personal space violated a little bit. I prepared myself mentally to be nice to people. Everybody seems to love a pregnant lady. They want to ask you when the baby is due, how you are feeling, is a boy or a girl. You don’t realize how tired you will get answering these questions over and over and over again every day. But I’ve done good, I’ve remained polite.
I managed to escape most of the tummy touching until now. It seems like in this third trimester my belly has a touch me sign on it. Of course I cannot see the sign, the one I see says back off! Unfortunately I appear to be the only one who can see the second sign.
I had a particularly horrifying experience last week at work. Most everyone who knows me, knows that I work at the same place as my hubby. Makes it very nice for carpooling (and free drop off at the door service!). Last Friday, while waiting on the first floor for hubby to go home, my personal space was violated in a big way. A little background story on this:
There is this girl who works on the third floor. I do not know her or what her name is. She apparently is really excited about my pregnancy. She has to rub my tummy every time she passes by. Now I worked very hard the first couple of times to be polite and just accept that it happens and move on. But I think somehow in her head it’s like rubbing a buddha belly statue or something for luck. Because she continues to do this every time. I finally a couple of weeks ago asked her if I was not pregnant would she be touching my belly, to which the responded no while giving me a funny look. So I told her “then don’t do it now.”
Now one would think that would have been enough to get the message through, right? Wrong! She was at it again last Friday. Only this time I had not been paying attention, I was watching the elevators for hubby. The next thing I know she is rubbing my belly, and her face is right up against it and she is talking loudly saying hi to the baby! Needless to say this behavior not only horrified me, but it startled me as well. Who in their right mind would do that to someone you do not know?! I felt violated and very upset.
Now I’m afraid to go to the first floor. I am trying things like altering where I normally stand to wait. Hopefully this will work and I won’t be in her path out the door. Otherwise we may have an altercation on our hands, or I may have to take out a restraining order, not sure which will happen. Either way I can most definitely say that this pregnancy has been full of interesting experiences!
I had my 30 week check up with my doctor this week. Everything is still looking good. I’m measuring right on schedule, my weight is good, and baby girl has a strong healthy heartbeat. She is a healthy active baby. Even as I sit here drafting this post I can see movement in my belly. Which some might consider to be a little freaky, think along the lines of the Aliens movie. I’m still taking the iron supplements for anemia. I’m not sure if The doctor will have my iron levels checked again before the birth.
We had two baby showers this past weekend. I’m working up a post with pictures on that subject. We came home with lots of clothes and much needed items and somethings that will make life easier that we did not know about. So this week I’ve been working on taking inventory of what all we have and figuring out what we still need. Also this week we ordered the infant carseat and stroller travel system. Once they arrive I think that just leaves a baby bath and infant swing that we will need on the big-ish stuff, and we might be able to make do without the swing. We’ll just have to wait and see on that.
Next up getting the nursery put together, washing the baby items, and stocking the changing tables and diaper bag.
I’m sure my fellow nerds are well aware of “the new ipad” that Apple announced on Wednesday this week. And like me, I’m sure some of you were glued one of the many live blogs from the Apple conference. I personally watched the cnet blog. However, I was less interested in the oooohs and awwws of the new ipad, I was more interested in how the new ipad was going to affect the pricing of the ipad 2. As anticipated the ipad 2 price dropped!
Guess who is now the owner of an ipad 2?! Yup, me! I’ve found that I am pretty comfortable hanging out in the middle or back end of the technology wave. For one, it’s a tad cheaper. And second the bugs are usually worked out by then as well.
Anyway, I must say I am loving my new ipad! I can draft up blog posts, check facebook, watch netflix and I recently discovered that some of the cable stations with tv shows I use to watch now have apps that will let me watch full episodes! So far I’ve downloaded a few apps, but I am pretty sure that I have barely scratched the surface of what I will be able to do with it.
I did find a good app that will let me enter my favorite recipes and add a picture of the finished dish to it. I have lots of plans for this ipad. I see it really coming in handy for organization especially with the new baby coming. Hubby is calling it a “happy new mommy gift”. Basically an early mother’s day gift. I’m very pleased with the purchase.
Today marks 30 weeks in this pregnancy. 10 weeks left. Time sure does fly. As the due date draws near I find myself doing a lot of reading regarding child health and safety. I feel like I am on the verge of becoming a child safety adovacate. For example, cribs. Apparently until December of 2010 the federal regulations and safety standards for cribs had not been changed or updated for over 30 years! That’s a long time to go without reviewing the safety standards. Unfortunately, what prompted the review of the standards was several infant deaths caused by the cribs they were placed in. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission reviewed and performed a major overhaul to the safety standards applied to cribs. It was published into law on December 28, 2010. Some of the highlights are as follows:
-The new safety standards eliminated the manufacture of the drop side cribs.
-Improvements to structural integrity of slats
-Increased severity vertical mattress impact test
-Horizontal cyclic test
-Elimination of wood screws from key structural elements
-Reduction of toehold exposure
-Marking and labeling improvements
Basically, the new standards had four goals: (1) stop manufacture and sale of drop side cribs, (2) make the mattress supports stronger, (3) make crib hardware more durable, and (4) make the safety testing more rigorous.
I found out about these new regulations when my mother in law was explaining that she wanted to offer us the crib that my husband had as a baby, but couldn’t due to the new safety regulations. After reading more about it, I realized I hadn’t seen any of the old style drop side cribs as options while browsing cribs. According to the consumer product safety commission the drop side cribs had been associated with at least 32 infant suffocation and strangulation deaths since 2000.
The reason I am writing this blog post about 2 year old news….it appears to me that a lot of new parents are not aware of this topic. I have been an avid participant in the May 2012 First Time Moms community forum on the babycenter.com website. There have been several discussions regarding cribs, but not a lot of mention about the safety standards and the hazards of accepting a hand-me-down crib that was manufactured prior to the new safety regulations. This is where my feelings of being an advocate for child safety come into play. I feel I would be failing some how if I didn’t try to get the word out there in all the ways I possibly can. That said….here are a couple of links to pages regarding the safety standards for cribs:
Link to the CPSC website news release regarding the new standards:
http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/prhtml11/11074.html
Link to the PDF published by the CPSC outlining all safety standards for full-size baby cribs and non-full-size baby cribs:
http://www.cpsc.gov/businfo/frnotices/fr11/cribfinal.pdf
We are now in the third trimester of this pregnancy. I had my 28 week check up appointment with the doctor. Everything is measuring and looking good. I left my FMLA packet with the doctor for her to fill out the medical portion saying yes she is pregnant, yes she is having a baby around this time, and yes you should grant her the 12 weeks of leave. I’ll pick that up in two weeks when I go back at 30 weeks. I took the glucose screening test…and passed with flying colors. I must say though that glucose stuff they have you drink would have been a little easier to drink had it been cold and not room temperature. ICK! But I got it down, and thankfully kept it down. Although I did develop a horrible headache and have some pretty bad nausea that evening.They did find out in the blood work that I am a little anemic, so we added an iron supplement to the pile of pills I already have to take daily.
I’m looking at the reality of the fact that we only have 11 weeks left until the baby arrives. There are some moments when that feels like a long time, and then there are moments (especially standing in the nursery that still needs to be arranged, organized, and decorated) when it feels like I am not going to have enough time to get everything done! For now, I comfort myself with the fact that I have most of the basic necessities for the first few weeks of bringing baby home. We have the diapers, wipes, a few clothes, and place for baby to sleep. From what I understand that’s about all the day for the first little bit. Eat and sleep and create dirty diapers. I know everything else will fall into place within the next two months. And not everything has to be done right now. But it sure does make you have momentary panic attacks and how quickly this pregnancy moved into the final phase.
Up next on the baby count down to do list is attend a couple of baby showers in Tulsa next weekend, and work on filling out leave slips for my maternity leave. Thankfully I’ll be able to fill out week blocks on one slip instead of having to do a slip for each day! Which reminds me I need to go acquire 12 slips. I also need to fill out the new patient packet for the baby with the doctor we have selected for her. So much to do, and time is not slowing down.
