Chinese Cabbage

Third trimester! Woo hoo! That's right, I've hit 28 weeks. Kind of in shock about that. Over the last week or two, this kid has grown downright violent. Several times a day, he gets into this groove where my whole abdomen is quaking with movement. It is kind of cool, but it's also starting to make me feel a bit ill. And my heartburn returned yesterday, after kindly taking several weeks off, and the heartburn really doesn't mix well with the kicking.

It's been an odd week. S is still in Israel, and having a grand time. He's been good about calling me almost every day, though our conversations tend to be only 2-3 minutes long, because using his cell phone internationally is very expensive. Also, because of the time difference, it's usually very late at night for him when he calls, so he's exhausted. So, that's ~20 minutes total that we've spoken in the past week. Is it odd that, in that very limited amount of time, he's mentioned not once but twice that it might be cool to move to Israel? Not that it wouldn't be kind of neat to work in Haifa for a while.... It's just, you know, the timing is probably a little off.....

Our power went out yesterday morning, and stayed out for the entire day. I had to throw out almost everything in the fridge. It doesn't even make sense that it went out -- I don't live in one of the areas of the country that's been hit by storms and flooding lately. Rather, I live in one of the areas that was 90+ degrees for the past week, with no rain in weeks. It's normally very mild here, rarely gets that hot, so we don't have air conditioning. I hate heat that high under normal conditions; experiencing it while pregnant sucked.

The earliest I've fallen asleep all week is 2:30am.

The class I was TAing is finally officially over. I am much relieved. I can now turn my full focus back to my own research, at least for a couple of weeks. And by "full focus," I mean, "as much focus as I can muster, given the kicking and the debilitating lack of sleep."

My nesting instinct seems to occur in odd hyper-focused obsessive bursts. I'll get a particular topic in mind, and then I'll work on just that one thing to a ridiculous extent, neglecting almost everything else. For a while, it was cleaning off the bookshelves that needed to be moved out of the nursery. Then it was researching car seats. The past two days, it's been music. While fiddling with the electronic controls on a bouncy seat, I discovered that I have no patience for the tinny electronic music that seems to accompany all infant gear (swings, toys, mobiles, etc.). It's really annoying. And obnoxiously repetitive. So the obvious question came to mind: why do I have to listen to it? I understand that music can be an important brain development tool for infants. I'm not questioning the importance of exposing a child to music. Rather, I'm questioning the need to expose my child to really BAD music. My mother-in-law has acquired a huge collection of CDs with perfectly pleasant and appropriate music (lullabies for soothing times, nursery rhymes and kid jingles for play times, etc.). I'm leaning towards buying baby Barack his first iPod, loading it with non-insanity-inducing children's music, hooking it up to a home speaker system, and calling it a day. Want to play music while Barack is merrily swinging? Choose a nice playlist and have at it. Want some soothing music for Barack to fall asleep to? Put the speaker system on the built-in sleep timer. The system I'm looking at even has a remote control, so I don't have to walk into the nursery to change tunes or turn it off. To me, other than being a bit expensive (and even then, I have a gift certificate that's been gathering dust for a while and will cover almost the entire thing), this seems like the perfect setup. Now if I could just get myself to obsess about something more important for a change....