36 Weeks

Countdown to maternity leave - 7 more business days!

I'm actually feeling much better this week. I've finally started sleeping again and surprisingly, I'm now sleeping very soundly at night. The back-to-back dreams have been very strange (think being strangled by tigers), but extremely interesting.

Also, we've now got the stroller assembled and the car seat is ready to be installed in the car. I was hoping to already have this done, but Mike's work schedule has been a bit crazy and he just hasn't been able to get to it yet.

Aside from that, we're just waiting patiently for my weekly appointment this coming Friday. We'll have our first ultrasound since approximately 19 weeks and we'll get to triple check on the gender of our little one. Mike's a bit on edge - he's not looking foward to re-painting the nursery if our "big" ultrasound was wrong - but I feel oddly at peace with the uncertainty. I've felt strongly from the beginning that I'm having a girl and I still feel 100% confident that she's still, in fact, a she.

From Baby Center this week, your baby is still packing on the pounds - at the rate of about an ounce a day. She now weighs almost 6 pounds and is more than 18.5 inches long. She's shedding most of the downy covering of hair that covered her body as well as the vernix caseosa, the waxy substance that covered and protected her skin during her nine-month amniotic bath. Your baby swallows both of these substances, along with other secretions, resulting in a blackish mixture, called meconium, that will form the contents of her first bowel movement.