Week 38

Big belly (red markings around my waist are from the skirt I was wearing yesterday... I guess the elastic waist band is tight!).

Your baby has really plumped up. She weighs about 6.8 pounds and she's over 19 1/2 inches long (like a leek). She has a firm grasp, which you'll soon be able to test when you hold her hand for the first time! Her organs have matured and are ready for life outside the womb. Wondering what color your baby's eyes will be? You may not be able to tell right away. If she's born with brown eyes, they'll likely stay brown. If she's born with steel gray or dark blue eyes, they may stay gray or blue or turn green, hazel, or brown by the time she's 9 months old. That's because a child's irises (the colored part of the eye) may gain more pigment in the months after she's born, but they usually won't get "lighter" or more blue. (Green, hazel, and brown eyes have more pigment than gray or blue eyes.)

(www.babycenter.com)

So as you can see (and I mentioned yesterday), Baby Z is still cooking. Every night as Derek and I go to bed, we say "Our baby could arrive tomorrow!" and it is such a crazy thought... but it's true. Any day now, any moment. I need to head out and go for a walk, but it's just getting to be so darn hot out that I don't want to leave the house. I wonder if dancing around the house would have the same effect? Goodness knows I did a lot of dancing at Mike and Darla's wedding and I was definitely getting Braxton Hicks contractions later that night/next day. Hmm... maybe I should crank up the tunes.

My body has been feeling really tired and I've been getting headaches the past few days, so I'm anxiously awaiting that rumored burst of energy that comes when delivery is right around the corner. My Grandma was telling me that near the end of her first pregnancy she decided to cook spare ribs for dinner, spent all day preparing them and then went into labor with my uncle that very night, before she could even get to taste her hard work, haha! I've been trying to get more sleep since I've been feeling run down and I know I'll be lacking in the sleep department soon enough, but I feel like I've wasted most of my day if I get up late. I guess I could always go to bed really early, or wake up early and take naps throughout the day...

The weekends go by way too quickly. It was super hot here, so we spent part of Saturday by the pool (funny story included below), then we went to see "Star Trek" in the early evening. Good movie!! On Sunday, Derek was so sweet and gave me a card and flowers for my first mother's day. Even if Baby hasn't reached the outside world yet, there's definitely a large baby in my belly that is planning to arrive soon, so that counts! Then later in the day, we had our friend Marshall over for dinner. It was great to see him again, it's been quite awhile since we last got together (he and I were both Geophysics majors and graduated from Texas A&M together). Shout out to him: Thanks for the VERY generous baby gift Marshall!! Can't wait to use it to buy Baby some gender specific clothes... no more of this yellow, green or white stuff, we want blues or pinks! :) Two other shoutouts I can't recall if I made: one to my sissy Kim and one to my sis-in-law Lindsay. Thanks, Kim, for the Aggie onesie for Baby (perfect for football season) and Thanks, Lindsay, for the diaper genie and baby bath tub!! Our friends and family have been so wonderful, and so generous!

Pics below and the pool story I promised:
This is our cat Nova aka. Lazy bones Jones. That's her favorite toy lying next to her. Yes, it's a hair tie :) She throws it, carries it around, stretches it... we don't have to do anything, she can play by herself! We just love her. She is our fur-baby.

So the "funny" pool story... As I mentioned, we went swimming on Saturday because it was a beautiful, HOT day. We floated around in the water for a while, then I decided I wanted to get out and lay on our chairs for a bit. We were on the opposite side of the pool from our stuff and the pool was fairly crowded with people, so I climbed out of the pool to walk around on the deck back to our chairs (otherwise the large, slow-moving pregnant lady probably would have caused some collisions in the water). Derek, on the other hand, decided to swim back over to our side of the pool to get his sunglasses, which we had left sitting on the deck. I reached our sunglasses before he did and was bending down to pick them up just was he was arriving, swimming underwater. I watched as he swam head first into the side of the pool! My poor baby was so stunned, he came up from the water and immediately the top of his nose started bleeding. He'd peeled away a couple layers of skin and the wound puffed up right away, so I made him get out of the water. It looked so painful, but he said what hurt more were his knuckles (he also punched the wall when he arrived). Luckily his knuckles were fine, but his poor nose. It still looks like he got in a fight. When we went to the movie later that night, Derek felt like everyone was staring at him. It was pretty gross looking, I will say that! Now, the reason he swam into the wall was not because he had his eyes closed, but because he was trying to avoid swimming into a little girl next to him. After he passed by the girl, he turned his head to see how far away from the wall he was and... well, let's just say he was closer than he thought.

Wounded Derek after he got in a fight with the pool wall. Derek got off easy, you should see the wall ;) By the end of the day, the wound was really red and gross looking.

Derek's nose as of last night. Not nearly as red as it was on Saturday.