The Home Stretch

The baby is already 7 pounds 3 ounces says my midwife. I'm not due for two-and-a-half more weeks. They tend to gain as much as a pound a week toward the end. This baby is going to be huge! I'm increasingly uncomfortable, so whenever he's ready, I'd be happy to carry him on the outside of my body for a while.

Brian says he feels confident in his credentials to be a parent even though he has no experience because he can often see children from his house.

But beyond that undeniable resume builder, last Thursday we finished the fourth and final week of birthing classes. We now know when to go to the hospital, how to breathe during and between contractions, a bunch of labor positions, and have seen enough birthing videos that if we were stranded in a elevator or a desert island I feel like we could do it ourselves.

We also took a tour of the birthing center last week. It's really nice. If I'm lucky, I could get birthing room #3 which is a corner suite. On our tour we had 25 people in there with plenty of extra room. It has an amazing view — the Golden Gate Bridge and the Marin Headlands to the North and downtown San Francisco to the East. The other birthing rooms have nice views too and are plenty big, but #3 is the presidential suite of the hospital. So cross your fingers for us.

I have my hospital bag mostly packed and our birth plan is mostly finished. We've decided to go with a diaper service (it's cheaper and better for the environment — win, win) and our first delivery arrives this Thursday. Once we have those, we are all set.

Actually not quite. I was just thinking the other day that this little guy does not have a Brooklyn onesie or any I-heart-NY anything. (Hint, hint.) How's he going to know where he comes from? But I digress.

Yesterday we went to the largest book sale on the West Coast. It's an annual fund raiser for the SF Public Library. It is held in a huge, football-field-sized pier. Over 350,000 books, none of them over $5. It was pretty crazy. I went looking for a few specific titles, but that was a disaster. When books are categorized kind of willy-nilly and not organized in any way within a category, it's just nearly impossible to find anything intentionally. You just have to stumble across things. I did come across a few good finds. Brian found a third copy of Fup by Jim Dodge, a book about a farmer and a duck which he insisted that he did need. However he didn't make it back to the self-help books to look for copies of the 1976 Avon paperback edition of Your Erroneous Zones to add to his enormous collection. Someone recommended decorating the nursery with Wayne Dyer's face. Sounds like a good way to traumatize the kid for life.



Here's another undie picture of me taken two Sundays ago, I think, when I was 36 weeks. (The one at the top is about 32 weeks.) I feel a lot like my skin might rip off my body, like if you tried, I might be able to open up like a cadbury egg with a baby instead of a sugary yellow yolk. Maybe he'll come early.