A Bulleted List of Mostly Unrelated Thoughts

• I think I have been trying too hard in my menu planning and cooking lately.  There must be some kind of disconnect between what sounds good in my head when I am planning my grocery list and what actually looks and tastes good when it comes time to eat the dinner.  My gastronomic tastes do skew to the fancy-ish, but the dinners I've been making seem to require a more refined palate than I have right now.  We mostly give Grace the same food we're having, but some nights I give her a more simple, deconstructed version of our food; Rob and I have recently found ourselves eyeing her versions of food and wishing we were eating it instead.  Part of this might be that we are all in some stage of fighting off or recovering from a cold so food is not tasting very good to any of us.  I am working on a new grocery list right now so maybe I will make something this week that involves a can of cream of mushroom soup.

• I am 33 weeks pregnant today, leaving me only 3 weeks until this baby is considered term and just 7 weeks until my due date.  I'm starting to really contemplate what life will be like as mother to two little girls and feel at times so greedy for the delicious newborn nestling, so happy to soon have the oxytocin high of nursing a tiny person, and so scared of how I'll cope with the acute needs of two.  Jim at Sweet Juniper wrote a while back about adjusting to parenting two and it made me realize how different it will be, how differently I might perceive the needs of the new baby compared with how I felt with Grace, and how much I hope we quickly settle into life as a foursome with a minimum of trauma.  My first weeks with Grace were hard, of course, but they were joyous and exhilarating and I really hope I get that again.

• I am considering dyeing my pink hair back to boring, dull brown and I'm feeling a little sad about this.  I have been touching up the pinkness every 2 weeks or so since I originally went pink back in August, and I've been back to the salon for my brown roots once.  This has been fine in my current schedule and lifestyle, but I don't know how realistic it is to expect to continue this routine after the new baby arrives.  Those first few months with Grace were so intense and I was really happy most days just to shower and eat.  And like I just said, this time I'll be combining that newborn intensity with a toddler, whose response to a new sibling invading her home is totally unknown at this point.  I'm bracing myself for those first months to be at least as draining, if not more demanding, than the first time around.  The pink looks pretty bad if I let it go too long: blondish roots or ends peeking out, the pink fading to a kind of rancid looking coral.  I don't know; maybe I should go back to brown before Violet is born.  I can just see myself 3 weeks postpartum with kind of dreadful looking hair, desperate to get professional hair help, but with a newborn who wants to nurse every 1.5 hours.  A pressing dilemma, no?

• My belly is HUGE!  And the shift in my center of gravity is starting to bother my lower back, nearly every day.  For a while, I thought it was just because I was overdoing it; there were a string of days there where I was cleaning a lot because of company, standing on my feet a lot, or toting around a friend's 8-month-old baby for half the day.  It is starting to happen even on "normal" days where I do nothing more strenuous than go for a walk and cook dinner, though.  Rob suggests Tylenol (the only pain med you're supposed to take when pregnant), but I have a firm belief that Tylenol does not actually do anything.  Seriously, I don't think there are any actual pain-relieving components in there, and the other day when I took some it didn't noticeably help. Conveniently, my favorite online yoga people just did a little short series of postures for prenatal back relief. I did them yesterday evening when I was starting to ache and it was amazing-- immediate relief. Ah, yoga, how I love you...