35 weeks

Question for the week: is a honeydew melon bigger than a cantaloupe? Apparently so, but what about those homegrown cantaloupe's that my grandmother used to grow...?

In any case, I'm now 35 weeks, and the Short Stranger's over 5 pounds. And I can tell that the not-so-little guy is (probably) turned in the right direction, because when he kicks, he's literally bumping up against my chest. He's seriously on my rib cage. This can be quite uncomfortable when I hunch, like right now, as I lean over to write this!

In some respects we're ready to greet this pumpkin baby and welcome him into our world, but in other ways we've now reached the point of panic. Mainly because like so many parents we know (and you know who you are!), we decided that the last trimester would be the perfect time to make over nearly the entire house! So while our living room is a lovely new shade of slate blue, it is also empty--which means our adjacent dining room is now a storage room. Ditto goes for the upstairs, where we had to move all of our old junky bedroom furniture into an office to make way for a new bed and dresser set. The bedroom looks fab, Mike's office--not so much. Our whole house has become a kind of rubik's cube: once we get one room into place, we find that the others are far worse than when we started. And did I mention that we badly need to fix a leak in the basement?

But since it's not yet October, and since we still have a least a couple of week's until I'm considered "term," we haven't started hyperventilating...yet. Besides, don't I know a few of you out there who survived just fine in the first few weeks with partially done nurseries...or floors...or bathrooms? ;)

This week, there's little new news on the Short Stranger front, since our pumpkin baby's almost ready for the world. According to babycenter.com:

Your baby doesn't have much room to maneuver now that he's over 18 inches long and tips the scales at 5 1/4 pounds (pick up a honeydew melon). Because it's so snug in your womb, he isn't likely to be doing somersaults anymore, but the number of times he kicks should remain about the same. His kidneys are fully developed now, and his liver can process some waste products. Most of his basic physical development is now complete — he'll spend the next few weeks putting on weight.