week 33 belly and summer updates

Here's the week 33 belly. That baby is livin' large in there! I am feeling good -- a little more tired than usual. That is, I need to sleep a good 9-10 hours a night and sometimes take a nap for an hour or two in the afternoon. I have to sleep a lot to grow such a big baby! But when I'm up I feel energetic, healthy and happy. I've been taking hikes, walks, going to the arboretum and the park, still walking to campus, and nesting like crazy. Patrick and I have been organizing our apartment and trying to get rid of stuff to make room for the baby.

We spent the whole evening yesterday reorganizing the shelves in the bathroom and bedroom. Next week we'll install the car seat. We are SO excited for all the baby stuff we've been getting for our online shower. It's been so fun to get little gifts at the door each day, and we love setting up all the little things we'll need: washing the clothes, diapers, blankets and sheets, getting to know the stroller, car seat, breast pump, and baby monitor, putting up the mobile over the crib, setting up the furniture and filling it with all the little baby stuff...all so fun! Even though we've tried to keep our list to things we think we'll need rather than superfluous cutesy things we might want, it is still surprising how much gear this little human needs.

We've also been making homemade beer and wine! It's been a really fun thing to learn to do this summer. Our first batch of beer is a clone of Bell's Oberon beer from Kalamazoo, MI. It'll be ready in about a week, so we'll see how we did. The wine is just a generic red wine that we made from two cans of frozen Welch's grape juice. Basically, it's a hobo wine...and we called our brand "Chateau d'Hobo." We even decorated the bottle with a hobo in front of some rolling hills of vineyard. Too bad I can't enjoy much of these alcoholic drinks, but it is a very cheap way to make alcohol!

Finally, we've been tending our vegetable garden this summer. It is taking a while to warm up here. The nights are still too cold (high 30's, low 40's) for the warm weather plants like tomatoes. Outside in the plot we have two kinds of lettuce, onions and shallots -- which are all doing fabulously. We bought some tomato starts that are out in the plot, but we've been covering them up each night and they are still living, but not looking so good. Finally, in the house we started from seed: arugula, broccoli, eggplant, spicy salad mix, baby bok choy, lemon cucumbers and rainbow chard. We'll plant these out sometime next week when the nights look like they're going to begin to warm up.

We're trying to make the most of our last weeks as an adult couple without kids. Patrick is golfing nearly every day, he is writing two screenplays (one of which he wants to shoot for a short movie this summer), we're reading a lot of childbirth books and practicing what we'll need to do a natural childbirth each day, and I have been going to coffeeshops a couple of times a week to finish my master's thesis paper before the baby comes. We can't wait for the public pool to open up June 14th so we can go there during the day (there's even a slide). Yay for summer!!