Quiet

Maia's asleep, Brian's out playing cards or board games with friends, and the only sounds in the house right now are the keyboard tapping, Mona snoring, and the white noise machine as heard via the monitor in Maia's room. Baby G 2 is giving me some serious kicks in my upper belly (he/she is apparently head down today, judging by the movements), and I'm thinking I might eat a Cadbury Egg before bed. :)

I'm currently spending this quiet time researching some of those decisions we're going to have to make before we bring Baby G 2 home from the hospital . . . am I going to do the Group B Strep test? Are we going to circumcise if baby is a boy? What about the Vitamin K injection? (I've already made a couple of these decisions: no "Gestational Diabetes" screening, and no antibiotic eye ointment for baby after birth.) This is one of the primary ways in which this pregnancy has been different from my pregnancy from Maia; my default position with tests and procedures feels like it's "no" rather than "yes." I did the glucose tolerance (GD) screening last time, did the GBS test, did the eye ointment, all of it.

This is a very satisfying place to be. I love the feeling of making these decisions for myself, even if I do say "yes" in the end (which I most likely will with some of them). I'd be a mammoth hypocrite if I were to teach Informed Consent to the families in my classes every week, and yet not practice it for myself and our own kid. I like spending the time doing this; maybe it's because I love reading research? I don't know. Brian's definitely involved in a lot of these discussions, but I know I get a bigger kick out of reading the research and the meta-analyses of the the research than he does. I'm a nerd that way, and he's not.

We met with our birth doula for the first time last night, and we moved much of the furniture and gender-neutral clothes into our former guest room last week and weekend. Things are quickly moving forward, to be sure. The weather is getting warmer, Maia's summer soccer team starts doing their thing in less than a month, and my belly is starting to really get out there and make its presence known. I'm still hitting the gym three times a week, but man, I can tell that my joints are starting to get loosey-goosey on me. Oh, and I had my first massive middle-of-the-night pregnancy leg cramp on Wednesday. My calf still aches from it. Fun!