36 weeks

I'm 36 weeks pregnant today. Yesterday, I turned the page on my "Pregnancy Calendar" thingee. It's the last page. If I end up overdue like Amber, I won't even have anything to look at. Unfair! There should be a whole slew of stickers for the last couple weeks (and any post-dates days) with things like "Srsly baby, so DONE now" and "Feeling Gigantic" and "Gave in and Drank Castor Oil". But I've already talked about the stickers and their poor reflection of reality.

Today I discovered that my shoes no longer fit. My ankles have been getting progressively less ankle-like over the past week or so. They're kind of square now, and it makes me sad to look at them, and I kind of wish I'd taken pictures of what they looked like when they were shaped like ankles. Now whenever I look at them the Spongebob Squarepants song comes into my head, except it's Laura!Pants! Square!Ankles!

My mom (and possibly my dad) are coming to town this weekend. I'm so excited! I haven't seen my mom since the end of February, and I haven't seen Dad since Christmas. Mom is bringing me the change table and will help me organize the nursery (thank goodness because right now it is a bit of a disaster). Plus we'll hit Costco and stock up on easy-to-cook and easy-to-freeze-and-reheat foods for the next couple months.

Tomorrow is the ultrasound to find the cause of my giant belly. I don't know if they will tell me anything at the ultrasound clinic; more likely, I'll have to wait and get the results from my midwife. I have an appointment the very next day (total coincidence, I promise) so with luck we'll know by then. I'm also looking forward to confirming that Baby B is still in the head-down position (she has been so from about 30 weeks on, and I haven't felt any dramatic movements that I could interpret as a full flip, so I'm optimistic).

Tangent: when I first got pregnant, my mother-in-law fretted and worried that the baby would be breech. Her reasoning was that Chris was breech, and Chris's dad was breech, and Chris's cousin was breech. So in her brain, Buechler babies are breech babies! I was utterly gobsmacked by the fact that she began worrying about this when the baby was the size of a kidney bean and didn't even have a head and so couldn't possibly be in a head-up position. And once I investigated further, the only theory that made sense to me or anyone else I talked to was that if there *was* any evidence that breech babies ran in families, it would probably be the *mother's* side, since perhaps all the women in a family had oddly-shaped pelvises that promoted breech positions. But even that was a stretch. At one point Karen made a little off-hand comment in an email which probably was incredibly well-intentioned and loving, but being deep in the murk of first trimester hormones, I interpreted it as hurtful and insulting. I've waited allll these months to find out what position the baby will be in for birth, and I have to admit (though I know this is petty and a little silly) that I'll be feeling quite vindicated if all is well.