29 Weeks (Explosion Part 2)

Mom, her boyfriend John, and my brother Lloyd came out to visit us in Athens for the first time this weekend. The weather was beautiful and we got to show them a lot of the fun sights around town, like our favorite park and the gorgeous antebellum homes. But they got most excited when a gigantic "Girls Gone Wild" bus pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant where we were eating supper and a couple of girls hopped out with shorts that looked more like undies. This warranted all the cameras to come out (my family has never spent much time in a big college town before). Shortly after that, we took the fam walking through the downtown district, where a drunk guy on the street had fun messing with Lloyd. Lloyd apparently had "tourist" written on his forehead, and has not yet honed the skill of avoiding creeps on the street by ignoring their advances and continuing to walk. It was quite a lot of excitement for our small-town company to undertake in one night!



The baby has been moving a LOT lately and has been getting the hiccups often. On my last ultrasound, she was already head-down, and it always reassures me to feel those little rhythmic hiccups coming from my lower abdomen, indicating that her head is still in the right place and will hopefully stay that way until she makes her exit! Now that I know which way her body is turned, it's fun to make guesses about whether she's kicking or punching whenever she starts to move. Sometimes I swear I can feel a foot poking out of my stomach, and it's really cool trying to detect the shape of her foot through my skin. All of this intense movement can make it tough to sleep at night and sometimes makes it kind of hard to focus on my daily activities because I become so focused on the sensations I'm feeling instead. It's definitely the most awesome thing to ever happen in my body!

I think our little girl is going to have a sweet tooth like her mama, because baked goods have become my biggest weakness in pregnancy. You know how most grocery stores have their bakery tucked away into a hidden corner? My grocery store has strategically designed the flow of the store so that you HAVE to walk between tables of Danish pastries, doughnuts, cakes, and frosted cookies to get from the produce section to the refrigerated section. It's a fatal situation for a pregnant woman with a hound dog's sense of smell! I have to force myself to go out of the way and avoid the whole disastrous set-up by doubling back through the produce. But last week I made the mistake of going to the store alone, and succumbed to a box of six GINORMOUS cheese danishes. (Somehow I am less tempted to buy bad stuff when Stephen is with me... I guess he's an accountability partner of sorts because I want to be a stronger person when he is around.) I wanted those danishes so badly that I squatted ALL the way down to find the freshest ones from the very bottom shelf (this is a big sacrifice since it's so much work to get back up!). Unfortunately, Stephen does not have a weakness for cheese danishes, so I was forced to eat the whole box by myself within two days-- you know, before they lost their freshness. Then my mom brought me a box of Girl Scout Thin Mints, my very favorite cookie from my days of Girl Scouting, and I ate the whole box (minus the one cookie that Stephen wanted), by myself within 24 hours... and paid for all the calories by gaining three pounds in one week.

The maternity jeans that have been so good to me ever since week 13 decided this week that they no longer like my hips. I don't know what my hips did to make the jeans so spiteful, but it's now a full-scale war to get the elastic waistband up over my butt. They just don't want to be friends anymore! Since I cannot live without jeans for two to three more months, I've had to order another pair that will hopefully get me through to the end. I had to pull out the measuring tape to figure out what size to order, and thought I'd take all my measurements just for the heck of it. This is when I discovered that my hips, which have always been a stubborn two sizes ahead of the rest of my body, are still determined to keep up their position at the top (a full inch ahead of my preggo belly). They just hate giving up their spot of honor-- and I just hope they decide to give up on this race soon. They have my full permission to make a big comeback in the delivery room, but they really need to quit trying to keep up with my belly for the time being!