27 weeks! The last week of the 2nd trimester! It's my goal to not turn into a complete monster during the last leg of this. Being married to the sweetest person in the world makes it considerably easier. :)

Leo, if on track, weighs about 2 pounds now and should measure a little over 14 inches from head to foot--he should gain about 1/4th of a pound and nearly 3/4ths of an inch during the next week. Major activities include brain & lung development and also putting on more fat--were we able to see him now, he'd still seem awfully skinny & tiny for a baby, but during the next few months he will be gaining quite a bit of weight. I myself may be gaining about 11 more pounds during the upcoming home stretch. Oof!

Oh if only I could remember how to crochet.

When I was little, crocheting was a piece of cake but knitting was impenetrably confusing...now it's just the opposite.

Going to give sleeping another shot here in a minute--woke up over 2 hrs ago, this not sleeping through the night business is for the birds. Anyway. We got back tonight from Ty's folks' place--had a very nice visit with them & his oldest brother's family who are down from Alaska. The nieces are lovely girls & are astonishingly well-behaved. It was a very fun trip, but oh it is so nice to be home. And *especially* nice to be out of the car. Harlow acquitted himself very well, although the 4th is a very difficult holiday for him--we'd put him inside of the garage & dosed him with a Benadryl (our vet's suggestion), but the noise was still quite distressing--when we got back from watching the fireworks, he was pacing around and refused to let go of his stuffed toy monkey. Poor guy. Hopefully all of the swimming, barking at deer & extra cookies helped make the trip less traumatic.

Our friend T. very kindly watered our garden for us while we were away. It is astounding how much everything has grown in only 4 days. We really need to take pictures. We now have baby sugar pumpkins, the scarlet runner beans have gotten to the top of the fence, the mystery squash next to the composter is HUGE, the tomato plants have grown into a jungle.... Anyway, it's all much more impressive this year than it was last year. Who knows, maybe we will enter something in the fair just for fun.

Leo is being extremely active--his mom isn't the only one awake right now! Some women get annoyed with lots of kicking but for me it is both amazing and reassuring to get to see & feel evidence of him moving around in there. Even at nearly 4 in the morning.

Unsolicited tip of the day: in general, one should probably avoid telling a pregnant lady how large she is getting, even if it is only innocently meant as a reference to normal healthy belly expansion. "You look great" is pretty much always a welcome thing to hear, however.

OK enough disjointed LJ posting for one morning. Wish me luck in getting back to sleep.

Baby girls are easier to decorate than boys. Boy stuff is generally not nearly so cute.

SIL & niece are staying with us tonight, and so the housecleaning continues. Buh. Do not want. It's surprising to me how gross our little place can get in such a short time...having a prodigiously shedding dog helps that along a great deal. It is rather nice feeling like you are moving, however slowly, from a condition of less to greater organization, though.

For the most part, our little guy is mostly going to be putting on weight from here on out--he is certainly welcome to some of my extra. :P If he's on track, he weighs about 1.5 pounds & is a little over a foot long. The structures of his spine are developing, and his hair, if he has any, which if the wive's tale about heartburn is even partially true he should have in great abundance, will now have color & texture. His lungs are developing more vasculature and are beginning to produce surfectant, a detergent-like substance that keeps water tension from making the alveoli (little air sacs at the terminal ends of his bronchioles) stick together--the cause of respiratory distress syndrome, a very common problem suffered by preemies.

I don't know quite why it's been so tough, but it's taken forever and a day to get my ducks in a row to start this hospital volunteer gig. Finally, all of my paperwork is in--my childhood immunization records don't seem to be available, so they are going to run some blood titer tests, and I'm going to need to get some shots (Hep B at least, almost certainly), but pretty much we are good to go.

The hospital in question is Adventist Health Medical Center--a pretty teeny tiny hospital very close to our house, both factors in its favor. Everybody there so far seems to be really friendly, and almost abnormally smiley--the literature they've sent me home with indicates that it's quite religious, and Wikipedia says that Seventh Day Adventists are sorta mildly earthy-crunchy evangelicals who observe a few deviations from the norm, like Saturday worship. As long as nobody is shoving anything at anybody, however, I'll just appreciate the more positive than seems usual for a hospital atmosphere.

First day of our local market today--it's still pretty small, but there are some new vendors & despite the freaky weather there were plenty of people there. We bought a few *enormous* local cherries, an english cucumber for tonight's dinner salad, and a mess of fava beans, which I've never prepared before. Also a chicken tamale & an apricot croissant. Mmmm!

Off to look for fava bean recipes.

There's a hot dog place in town, formerly the Dog House, that changed owners & is now Franks a Lot, which we think is the stupidest name ever. It also makes me compulsively think of other punny alternates every single time we drive by it, like Franks a Million or Franks for the Memories or, if it were like the hot dog equivalent of a soup kitchen, Franks for Nothing. If the owner ever tired of selling wieners, they could call it Frankly my Dear, I Don't Give a Damn. My two best (or worst), though, are So Long, and Franks for all the Fish, or if they were able to serve beer, Feed My Frank 'n Stein. You guys have anything?

Heavy rains are resulting in water pooling up behind the house and seeping into the crawlspace via small settling cracks in our foundation. We are trying to work through possible solutions for this multi-part problem, some of which belong to the exterior and therefore concern the HOA, some of which we can maybe do on our own.

1. Our gutters suck--heavy downpours quickly overwhelm them, and they are impossible to keep clear for more than a day or so.

2. The area out back is graded towards the house--the opposite direction from where it should be.

3. Our neighbor's back area is not only also graded incorrectly, but additionally they have visqueen down, causing runoff to spill under the fence into our area.

4. The worst of the cracks/leakage seems to be right under the front porch, next to the downspout, which overflows when the rain is really heavy.

So, trying to break it down, we have a gutter/drainage problem, a grading problem, and a foundation crack problem. And also a Ty freaking out problem, because where crap like this puts me into Vulcan problem-solving mode, it makes him really upset & distressed and unable to get a grip. I think the PHC did a little too good of a job in drilling into our heads that moisture is very bad for houses, because from his reaction right now it would seem like we are in immanent danger of washing away, which is not the case. It's just a set of issues that need to be investigated & dealt with.

Cable in living room switched on, crappy decade-old $30 Walmart desk, literally being held together with brackets and glue, moved into living room, computer & printer & wireless router successfully set up. It looks frightful in the nursery-to-be, but now we've got a much freer hand at getting everything moved around and set up. We've picked out some curtain fabric, which will be 30% off tomorrow at Fabric Depot. Now, actually sewing curtains is a whole 'nother thing, but hopefully it's a simple enough project to not come out looking too awful, despite my unhandiness with the sewing machine? Of course I've probably just doomed the whole enterprise by writing that.

Also: anyone want a TV? We've got an extra. Works fine.

This is very big, very important stuff, and does not seem to be getting the media attention here that it deserves. Andrew Sullivan's blog is staying right on top of it...it is well worth reading over.

For future reference. Our chard is really taking off, except for the parts of the bed with volunteer potato plants, which seem to interfere with the greens--anyway, we should soon have enough to eat! Nom.

Speaking of garden volunteers, in addition to the potatoes everywhere and lettuce-blanketed zucchini bed, we also have a lot of cosmos, some squashes, and a tomato.

This year's garden is growing much faster & looks better than last year's--we amended the soil quite a bit & tilled it much better, for starters. Also last year we weren't able to get into our plot until June 15th!

We did run into Tactful Richard again. Thankfully this time he did not remark on how fat I'm getting, and he did help Ty get our last 2 tomato cages in (after accidentally stepping on one of the plants), but geeze that guy can talk your ear off, and he did find it necessary to implicitly criticize where we planted our Walla Walla sweet onions. Hrmph.

23 weeks--for the next four weeks, should (heaven forbid) I go into early labor, his odds of survival increase by about 3% per day. We are a week away from what is considered to be viability, which just means a greater than 50% capacity for survival in the outside world. Hopefully he'll be content to hang tight for the time being, however.

This week's bizzare food-to-baby size comparison from babycenter is: our little guy now weighs as much as a large mango. Don't feel bad if this makes you want to go eat one. Mmmm, mango.

Rickety-ass wall shelves moved from future nursery into living room--video games, DVDs, CDs transferred & semi-organized. Looking significantly more cluttery in here, but it's hard to avoid when you are adding the contents of one room into another. Really the best thing to do would be to move to the book-style organizers and ditch the clamshells entirely, but certain members of the household are not yet ready to quite make that jump. Sometimes it takes a little time & gentle persuasion to be fully converted to embracing decluttering. Example: VHS tapes that we have not watched for years now placed in a bin & ready to move into the garage, where we can continue to not watch them. At least it's a small step in the right direction. Maybe by the next time we move, it'll be easier to just let them go?

But there's good news, Ty will be bringing home a chocolate smoothie from Burgerville. This goes a long way in dissipating my current wish for the rest of the world, especially the part of the world represented by gigantor Swedish furniture stores, to go straight to hell. It's either a total shame or a very good thing that I can't have a drink!!

Interview w/ the volunteer coordinator on Monday afternoon at the smallish hospital down the street from us. It'll be good to have a little more external structure & direction. There is a nearly infinite array of useful occupations for my time around the house, but for some reason once I pass a certain threshold of too much time on my hands, my will to do anything sort of fizzles out to nothing, which makes me feel gloomy and depressed, which further erodes the impetus to get stuff done. Regular indolence is not very good for me. I guess the inverse of that would be that activity begets more energy and therefore more activity.