Jazz Hands

I’ll be 39 weeks in a little less than 12 hours. At this point, Max’s movements feel more like pushing and a lot less like kicking or even squirming - it’s getting crowded in there. I haven’t felt any contractions. I don’t think I’ve even felt a Braxton Hicks contraction. Strange. Occasionally, I’ll feel something in my lower abdomen that I like to refer to as his jazz hands, though I think the more accurate term is spirit fingers.

My intuition tells me that I won’t go into labor before my due date. Nurse Lupe asked me if I thought I’d be seeing her next week and I when I told her yes, I definitely thought I would, she agreed.

My doctor has started calling me his easy patient. As it turned out, I didn’t need to be seen by a perinatologist, but it’s certainly been nice knowing I was in expert hands. Usually, he asks if I have any questions, and I generally don’t have any questions for him (thank you internets), but today I did ask how far past my due date he would let me go. He looked at my chart, paused, and then said, “Six months.” Ha ha doctor, very funny. He then said he didn’t like people to go too far past their date and if I made it to next week’s Tuesday appointment, he’d probably schedule an induction for Thursday or Friday of that week.

I knew I’d be having this baby soon, but it’s still a bit surreal knowing it’s pretty much a sure thing that J and I will be parents in two weekends.

Brown-Bagging

J: (After attending a luncheon earlier in the day) I ate the lunch you made me for dinner. Why are those lunches so tasty?

Me: Because they're made with love?

J: Yes, that's it. It must be the love.

Comparisons

MAX AT 37 WEEKS




















Me: Everything went fine at the appointment. They gave me blob like ultrasound picture of his face, he looks like an old man.

J: Like Winston Churchill? All babies look like Winston Churchill.


















Me: No, no. More like Henry Kissinger.

It's the end of the world as we know it.

J is a patent attorney and his area of patent specialty is software and wireless communications. J is one of those rare people that actually has degrees not only in the areas in which he is practicing, but also in areas he enjoys. His undergraduate degree included a computer science component (with physics), and his Masters degree is in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Before studying law, he worked for a few large computer and wireless communication companies.

What this translates to for our relationship purposes is that much of his free time is spent on his laptop researching the latest technologies. These are not cheap items he is interested in, fortunately, he normally researches something so thoroughly that by the time he is finished and is ready to purchase, a new and improved item has been released, which he then must research and so on. Every now and again, though, he finishes his research before the next generation is available and, well, I always tell him we don’t need it or can’t afford it, but that never seems to work.

Today he ordered a Kindle and is very excited for it’s arrival. When he told me about the purchase, I told him that he should not have bought it, that we can’t afford it. He justified his actions by saying we could now cancel a good portion of our cable subscription to recoup the cost as he would be reading more and watching less TV. I told him that was great, but what was I going to do?

According to J, canceling the cable is a fine solution because I’ll have a baby and won’t be reading or watching TV ever again.