34 Weeks This Weekend!

Baby's now the size of a honeydew!
Baby can recognize and react to simple songs...time to start practicing your lullabies! In fact, baby will recognize frequently sung tunes after birth and probably find them soothing. Less cute news: She now urinates about one pint per day. Get the diapers ready!

(I guess it's time to start playing my favorite Madonna songs on repeat so that Kyra can commit them to memory and be ready to dance along to them!)

It's hard to believe I'll be 34 weeks on Sunday! Time is flying by! I had another good check up at the doctor yesterday - my cervix continues to improve and measured at 3.93cm yesterday (even better than last week) and I wasn't dilated at all. So that's a very good sign that Kyra won't be arriving ahead of schedule! I get 2 weeks off from the doctor, and then I start weekly visits just before 36 weeks. The doctor keeps reminding me that it'll be perfectly safe for Kyra to be born after that point, but I'm still planning to keep her on schedule and closer to 40 weeks (thank you very much!).

The photo at the top is a fairly accurate 34-week view of Kyra's placement inside my uterus, although she's technically reversed (her head is down, her back is facing my left side, and her legs and arms are curled up on my right side. For a number of weeks now, all the kicks and movement I've been feeling have been on my right side. Kyra is giving me fewer big kicks, and instead often presses against my tummy and holds her pressed position for a little while. So you can easily feel a push up against my tummy as she moves around in her cramped quarters. I'm assuming she's been doing a lot of growing in there recently, given that my appetite has significantly spiked over the last few weeks! I've still got 6 weeks ahead of me to get bigger and bigger!

Tomorrow we're taking maternity photos with our friend Becca, who does amazing work! She's also going to do newborn photos of Kyra, which I'm sure will be absolutely, ridiculously adorable!!

We're looking forward to little Jake Balice's baptism on Sunday! I'm sure he's going to be all dressed up and looking adorable, as always! And next weekend is my Baby Shower! I'm hoping to get the last few house chores completed soon so that I can then focus on cleaning and putting away all the baby gifts. We've already started receiving some gifts this week, so THANK YOU to those thoughtful people who care so much about us! Your thank you notes are already on their way! I've washed most of Kyra's clothes and put them away in her dresser, although I'm sure I'll be reorganizing that after the baby shower. A while back, I bought a set of teeny tiny little newborn shirts that barely look like they'd fit around a soda can, but somehow my baby girl is going to fit into those when she's born! I plan to keep those to put on her dolls and stuffed animals when she's older, since she's really only going to fit into them for such a short time. But I enjoy picturing her actually wearing those tiny shirts in the hospital and her first few days at home!

It's a little crazy to think that after the baby shower, all that's really left to do is have a baby (and I also get the fun of helping to plan Shaunna's Baby Shower too!) My list of things to pack for the hospital is basically done - just have to do the packing now, but I think I'll wait a little while longer on that. I'm hoping these last 6 weeks slow down a little so that I can enjoy the rest of my pregnancy. Kyra's going to be here before we know it!