Covered

Our second baby shower was Sunday, out at Side Cut Metropark, which must be a great place to go to be alone because it's so hard to find hardly anyone ever makes it there. Several of our guests almost didn't. But everyone showed up eventually, and the site and the party were lovely. We got lots of very nice gifts and cards, including one reading "A humble offering to the most exalted little Evil Overlord. May your conquest be swift and absolute. --Your Most Loyal Minions." I think L.E.O. will be pleased.

She will also be very warm. She now owns twelve blankets, not including, you know, my uterus. It's really making me reconsider the quilt I'm making for her, or any quilt I plan to make in the future for other babies.

Yesterday we went to Babies R Us to spend our gift cards and store money and get the things that I was going to feel slightly insecure until we got: a crib mattress, a changing pad, a diaper pail, and so on. (We also got things like a Boppy cover and car mirrors and a Pack 'N Play, which are not as essential to my mental well-being but are still quite nice.) If we get a box of size 1 diapers, and maybe the diaper bag that Mom keeps saying she'll get us, I think we're pretty much set.

And I went for another checkup today and everything is still looking good, which made me especially happy since I've been a bit stressed out about other things and presumably my stress isn't affecting L.E.O. all that much. After getting it straight with the midwife that Yasmin was the name of my old birth control, not my baby (apparently the student midwife I talked to last time wrote cryptic notes), I asked her something I'd been meaning to ask in childbirth class: what determines whether they'll let me stay at the hospital when labor comes.

"Labor is actually defined by change in the cervix," she explained. "If you're at three centimeters but you're not really progressing and you're having irregular contractions, they're probably going to send you home. If you're at three centimeters but things are really changing, they'll want you to stay." She looked down at my chart. "However," she added, sounding almost reproachful, "you've been doing everything else perfectly, so you probably won't have a problem with that either." Maybe I'm too boring a patient.