thirty weeks to be exact.
the top two pics were taken tonight (30 weeks) and yes, my shirt does say "everyone loves a pregnant chick". at this point, i am not beyond cheesy puns if the shirt is comfortable. the bottom two were during our hawaii babymoon last month, so i was 26 weeks at the time. rani is kissing the baby in one of the pictures--she also tries looking for him through my belly button. :)
BT has been doing externally visible somersaults in me for about a month now, and every time the alien invasion picks up speed, rani stares with rapture. or confusion. BT is about 15.7 inches long now and weighs almost 3 pounds (about a head of cabbage). his eyesight still is consistent with legally blind status, but it's developing. we got rani a big magnetic easel yesterday, and for fun i spelled out the boy name we are thinking of with rainbow-colored magnetic letters. it looked right and it felt right, and when rups got home from work, he first smiled at my flight into toddlerhood and then agreed that the name just fit. so i think we have a name. it's not a cutesy rhyming name with rani, it's not very common (we actually thought we'd made it up but it turns out that though it's rare, it does exist), and it's something westerners can pronounce. i hope. the nickname is a unisex name, but those are all the hints you're getting. oh, and it does not start with x, y, or z.
since i'm planning on returning to work a few months after BT arrives, the nanny search has begun. we really liked our first interviewee, but figured we should interview a few more before handing over our babies to her. the second one called to confirm a couple hours before the interview and didn't even show up! no phone call, no email, no response to my voicemail messages hoping she was okay, nothing!! i worried about her all weekend, but then saw that she checked her nanny profile monday so i wrote a very candid one-star review about her not showing up for the interview. other parents should know! we have about three more interviews and then we'll make a decision. kinda nervous--rani's never had someone other than family watch her for more than a couple hours, and even then, a friend watched her just the one time! now i have to hand over my three month old to a stranger...that's going to be hard. any of you want to move to milwaukee and be our full-time nanny?
as for the pregnancy, i'm heavier, i'm clumsier, and i knock over things with my stomach and my butt, of which i used to know the proportions but have long since lost track of. supposedly the clumsiness can be attributed to my new center of gravity, but i don't think that explains the shelf-a**. i do have to say, though, that i think rups is a pretty darn lucky guy. i haven't had any mood swings, crazy cravings, or ridiculous demands that i insist he cater to within four seconds. except for the fact that i may be buying a few maternity clothes this pregnancy, our lives are pretty much the same. our weekends are still ridiculously busy, i still let him go running in the evenings even when toddler-rearing is the most hectic, and i stay up with him to catch up on entourage.
i am getting more excited than i was at the beginning of this pregnancy, which is great. some of the excitement that was wrapped into reading reviews and buying baby stuff is lost, though, since we have pretty much everything we need from rani's first year. i did, however, just buy a double stroller (for the amount of double strollers nowadays, you'd think they'd require car insurance!) which was fun and exciting as far as stroller shopping goes. :) we even went to REI between a wedding and reception this weekend (yes, i checked out strollers while rocking full indian garb replete with sari, bindi and bangles) to test drive them. let's hope the BOB revolution is as revolutionary as it claims to be.
i've already done BT's laundry but we still have several carfuls of baby items (bouncer, activity gym, infant car seat, etc) to bring from niles to milwaukee. he's going to have to deal with some pink fluffy items--they're still perfectly manly if you ask me.
other than that, life is good. we're back in our condo in milwaukee, rups is liking his new job, i'll begin searching for my dream job soon, and i'm just taking it as easy as i can before my life changes dramatically. again.
