Head down

This week we had a most excellent midwife visit.

At 31 weeks, we're getting close to the 36-week "ohmygawd we have to be ready at any moment" marker. At this week's meeting we walked around the house to consider how best to accommodate my desires and demands during labor.

As Ross and I have made tons of room in the house, it looks like there is enough room upstairs in my office/room/baby room for the birthing tub. Which is good, because I expect to labor on or near our bed (in Ross's room, also upstairs) and frequently use the bathroom (lots of laboring mammas spend time on the toilet -- yes, it's a great place to labor/push, feel the baby's head, etc -- and you have to try to pee every hour or hour and a half, so, yeah) putting to use the toilet and the hot water faucets. As our midwife of day pointed out, I won't likely want to march up and down the stairs from but to toilet to bed. So, yay on determining the location of the tub.

Now, must rent the tub, figure out how to fill the thing from one of our ancient faucets (we want to run hot water into the tub as it takes a long time to heat up cold water) and go get the tub. I have an email with info, contract etc.

This week: open email, and agree to tub rental at awesome discount.

Also, I cracked the "what we need to have on hand list" for the home birth. Lots of towels, wash clothes, oil in a squeeze bottle, crock pot to cook up a witchy mixture in which we put wash clothes after which we put on my tired, stretching skin, extra pillows and sheets and onesies and a leetle hat for her, and and and. I will put Ross in charge of getting the contents of the list into bags and ready for use.

This week I will order our birthing kit. And then I will take pictures of if. I think it comes with a net: think of going into a pet store and leaving with some gold fish. The net the attendant used to scoop out the gold fish, I think we will have one for, um, body stuff, that might find its way outta me and into the water of the birthing tub. Oh, reality...

And this week I'm all proud of the little lady, because during the actual exam part of the midwife appointment (they are here in the house for 90 minutes, we talk about the reading for that week, we ask and answer questions, we talk about how I/we feel, review baby movies we've seen, for 60 to 80 minutes. And during the exam part the ladies check my urine -- mostly for proteins = bad -- check my blood pressure -- always excellently low -- and feel up my belly to check on size, location of baby.

Baby is head down! Which they should be by 32 weeks. Go little Ginger. She did it all by herself. I was assigned cat and camel yoga postures and inversions to point her in the right direction (by opening up the space in my pelvis, she'd naturally wanna "head"in that direction) but I didn't do too many. I wanted to see if she would do it all by herself.

She did.

And now she kicks me near the ribs.

And feels like a bocce ball by the end of the day, I mean a bocce ball in between my legs. Which is just about right.

(As for the photos:
--Me: week 30 at Tennesee Trail/Beach.
--Adorable spring dress from Auntie Mary
--Ridiculously small hair brush, also from Auntie Mary (Ross wants to use it as a toothbrush. He does have a big mouth!)
--Freaking cute top from Erica, baby Piper's Dutch Grandma who is here for a month. The shirt blames the baby's birth on papa!)