Well, Here We Are This Week

Still enormous, still pregnant, still thankful that things are healthy and uncomplicated and as we'd wish them to be. I'm now within a week of my due date. At my midwife appointment on Friday, I was 1 cm dilated, which is something, right? I am having contractions pretty much all the time, although just a few an hour usually and not super intense. We had a wild thunderstorm come through Salt Lake late last night and I had a LOT of much more intense contractions while it was storming. I really thought I might be going into labor and started timing my contractions and everything. However, when the storm passed, my contractions did as well and I fell asleep. Dramatic changes in barometric pressure can supposedly bring on labor or make your water break or whatever, so that was a funny thing to experience.

I will admit that every time I have Rob take my picture, I kind of hope it will be the last one of me before going into labor. On the other hand, now that I've made it this far, life would be easier if I don't have the baby until we get through this week and Grace gets slightly settled at kindergarten. If I went into labor today, for instance, I'd still be in the hospital when Grace is supposed to have her first day at elementary school. We'll see! I sort of no longer believe that I am having a baby at all anymore and just figure this will be the way life is FOR ALL TIME.

In the peaks and valleys of energy and motivation and all that, I am in a bit of a valley. I have no attention span to speak of and am having a hard time concentrating on anything or finishing anything, even a thank-you note. It will be some kind of miracle if I finish this blog post and publish it. I am glad that I had lots of nesting energy in earlier weeks and months and got many projects finished. I finally got around to photographing my new and improved pantry to show off.

Sadly, I have now realized that my "before" pictures have been lost in a memory card mishap that we had, making my "after" picture rather pointless. Oh well, I guess you'll have to take my word for it that it is much better. It is a very deep closet-type pantry and it was very easy to lose items back in the far recesses. Our sellers had the shelves spaced differently (in a way that seemed inefficient to me) and it was dingy and dirty. We painted it a nice scrubbable shiny white and bought new white laminate shelves (they did have deep enough laminate shelves at Home Depot for this closet that could be cut to the length we wanted). The wire mesh drawers are from the Container Store and are almost the depth of the shelves; I can fit a few seldom-used things behind the drawers. The drawers vastly improve the functionality of the pantry and make it much easier to keep track of things, and the space is so much more efficiently used that I got the slow cooker and toaster off our counter and into the pantry. Those two bins on the floor hold our glass recycling (Salt Lake doesn't do curbside recycling for glass -- LAME -- so we have to keep it separate and drive it somewhere) and for the microfiber cloths I use for cleaning instead of paper towels.

Taking pictures in our kitchen is a challenge as there is no good light and it is awkwardly shaped/sized. I had to use the FLASH-- OH, THE HORROR. Anyway, while I was at it, I took one of our new refrigerator.

I lurrrrrrrve it. Although it does make me want to remodel the whole kitchen to go with it.