I didn’t sleep well on Friday night worrying that we would miss the alarm at 3:30am. I finally fell asleep around 1:30am to be awoken by choking on a bunch of acid reflux. That is a new one for me. What a horrible, gross, and disturbing way to wake up. It took forever for me to stop choking. I took some Tums, drank a bunch of water, and tried to go back to sleep but then I started wheezing because of all the coughing and the fact that probably some of it got into my lungs so then I had to get up again to use my inhalers. I still had a lot of residual coughing so I think I finally fell back to sleep about 20 minutes before the alarm went off. The very grumpy and sleepy Ryssos left the house about 4:00am to head to the airport. While we waited at the gate for the plane to board, Paul and Rachel worked on their Jonny Quest story while I tried really hard to keep my eyes open. With an unaccompanied minor, she is the first on the plane but we can’t leave the airport until her flight is in the air. That didn’t happen until about 6:45am and we got home around 8:00am. I went straight back to bed but poor Paul was awake by then so he stayed up. I finally got some good sleep which is fortunate because I signed up to work the afternoon shift in the Blood Gas Lab for some more overtime. When I got up to get ready for work, Paul was taking advantage of the nice weather and putting the Christmas lights on the house. He hates this task and his hatred of it was reinforced by all of the problems he encountered. First, only 1/3 of the strand would work and after struggling with it for a while, he decided to just go to the hardware store for new ones. Then he tried to hang the new strand only to find that most of the gutter clips were so old that they were breaking so he had to make yet another trip to the hardware store for more of those. Plus he discovered that the gutters were clogged so he got to clean those as he went. Thus, a half hour job turned into an all-afternoon extravaganza.
Sunday and the rest of the week we began working on getting the nursery painted. My goal is to have it ready by the baby shower that will be at my house on 12/13 which doesn’t give us a whole lot of time but we procrastinators work best under a tight deadline. We repainted three of the walls the same color yellow that they already were. The fourth wall which is the wall you face when you walk into the room is going to be a Winnie the Pooh mural. We worked a lot on the design this week but did manage to get the top half of the wall painted blue for the sky and the bottom half green for the grass. We got delayed a day on our paint buying run due to a lovely blizzard. This weekend Paul will begin the mural portion since I am artistically useless. I am more of a director. I tell him what I want it to look like and he makes it happen.
Lily’s kicks have gotten a lot stronger this week. Unfortunately some of those karate kicks are directed at the bladder. This sends me running for the bathroom even if my bladder is mostly empty. What fun!
News from the womb…
The baby’s brain has reached another milestone. It can now direct rhythmic breathing and control body temperature. This is important because if the baby is born early, the brain can usually stimulate the baby to breath without medical intervention. The baby is becoming mores sensitive to light, sound, taste, and smell. This is preparing the baby to see me, hear my voice, recognize me by smell, and taste the liquid nutrition I will provide. The baby’s eyes are moving in their sockets and the baby is practicing looking. What does it see? Under bright lights or sunlight and without the protection of clothes, the baby’s world may look pinkish as the light shines through my vessels. At night, with clothes, or in a darkened room, it must be dark. The baby is probably aware of changes in light intensity but “pink” is a stimulus that will takes months to perceive since, even at birth, the baby’s color vision apparatus seems to distinguish only among pure reds, greens, and yellows. The surface of the baby’s skin is smoother and whiter as body fat is accumulating under the surface. The fat the baby is putting on is white fat, not the brown fat that is used in temperature regulation earlier in the pregnancy. White fat is insulating and is an energy source.
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