The Calm before the Storm

I am almost 38 weeks.  Although pregnancies are usually 40 weeks, they warn you to expect your new arrival anytime between Week 38 and Week 42 (although they may not want me to go much past my due date due to my age).  So our baby could make an appearance anytime over the next 2-3 weeks.  This said, Spud is not showing any signs of wanting to exit any time soon - the baby has not dropped and there are no early warning signs that labour might be imminent. 

At my OB appointment this week, I had a growth scan and Spud is now estimated to be about 7lbs and 11 ounces.  The longer that Spud stays put, of course, the bigger Spud will get (an additional 0.5lb a week) so I am really hoping that this very wriggly creature that lives inside me will start saying goodbye to my innards and start scrunching up into a nice pelvis-dynamic shape ready for delivery very soon - I live in hope!

In the meantime, we have packed for the hospital, stocked up on shelf safe groceries, cooked up some meals and frozen them down for our return from hospital and I think that we are about as ready as we can get at home, without having a test baby to check whether we have things right or wrong.  The baby may have an opinion too, so there are a few things that we are hanging back on until after Spud arrives.

Out of necessity (which happens to work out perfectly with Health Canada's latest recommendations on infant sleeping arrangements), Spud will be sharing a bedroom with us for the first 6 months - 1 year.  So I don't have any pretty nursery pictures to show you - we have simply set up a Spud Zone in our bedroom:

I realise that this all looks a bit sterile, spartan and tidy but I don't expect it to stay like this once the baby arrives!  Like the title of this blog post, this point in time really does feel like the calm before the storm.  I expect this area to look like a hurricane has blown through it about 2-3 days after we are home from the hospital!

You can see our mini-crib reflected in the mirror - it just about fits alongside our bed.  As we don't have a dedicated nursery, we got a cot (crib) system that we can wheel about the house (in case we need to park it in different rooms around the house) and that will size up as Spud grows.  The only drawback is that it is oval - great for getting through doorways and around corners but a bit tricky when it comes to bedding.  The proprietary bedding is both expensive and not readily available off-the-shelf here.  So I bought one mattress protector and one sheet to use as a template and I've been working away in the background on my sewing machine to create some extras of my own.  Not worth photographing but still, it's amazing what you can achieve, cost effectively, with some breathable nappy (diaper) wrap and some white cotton flannel!  I am hoping to whip up some more bedding and and mattress protectors for the full sized version of the cot (crib) before Spud outgrows the mini-crib next year.

The other things that I have whipped up recently for Spud are some baby blankets because I couldn't bear to spend money on inferior ones when I knew that I could make better ones for myself (for the same or less money):

I know - seven blankets is probably excessive but once I started making them, I found it hard to stop!  They are all double sided (mostly cotton flannel on both sides but a couple are cotton flannel on one side only) and made to my usual recipe (which I finally get to test for myself). 

The green tortoise/turtles blanket is slightly different from the others.  I included a layer of the breathable nappy (diaper) wrap inside it.  The idea behind this is to either use it for walks on drizzly days next Spring or use it for baby bottom airing time.  Any accidents and it can be dropped straight into the wash.  I've only made one as I want to see how useful it is.

Although I've been busy on my sewing machine, I haven't made all that much for this baby other than the blankets and the bedding.  Most of the things that we needed have been purchased: 0-3 month starter pack wardrobe as well as sundries like towels, washclothes and 12 white cotton flannel diaper squares to use as burp cloths.   

I haven't done any knitting at all for Spud - for some reason, I am having a block about making things that I know will take me forever to do and only have a very short life span if Spud grows quickly.  I know, I know, I should just make a bunch of baby projects in Big Wool, like this Rowan one.  But...like I said, it's a block.

I do have two other sewing projects in progress for Spud - a quilt and a play mat, a bit like the one that I made recently for my niece, Lorna.  I'm stalled on the quilt (haven't touched it since my MIL died in June and there's no way that I can finish it in time now) and I cannot show the play mat yet because I'm still a very long way from finishing it. 

The quilt is in the same kind of colours as the change mat in the blankets photograph: teals, blues and lime greens.  I am not sure why these colours happened.  But they did.  Interestingly, I've set up a guest room in our basement (as the reno is delayed and so that my parents can stay with us when they visit in November and December) and the colours downstairs seem to be white, navy blue and dark red - I am hoping to reuse some of the guest room things in Spud's nursery after the renovation is complete.  So not sure how I'm going to integrate teal, blues and lime with the navy and dark red.  Mind you, does anything in a child's life ever really match?  I doubt it.

In terms of the play mat, the scope of the project seems to have exploded from a completely plain (and easy) denim pad (i.e. a few hours work) to something much more complicated (i.e. I've spent a whole week on it so far and it's nowhere near finished) because the Fella was worried that he wouldn't know which side of the mat should go 'up' and which side should go 'down' in terms of avoiding contaminating the baby and/or its baby blanket with the gruesome quantities of floor grot that invades our house every single day.  It's okay, I have 2 weeks or so go.  I feel confident that I'll finish it in time...maybe?!

The very last thing that you may have noticed in our Spud Zone is this pile of baby name books:

We bought 3 books, exhausted them without success and then bought 3 more, going for the bulk 60,001+ and 100,001+ titles.  We still do not have a shortlist of names for our baby and now we dread opening any of the books at all as the task has become too overwhelming!

At this rate, we suspect that we'll be taking the books to the hospital and playing a blindfold game of 'Pin a Tail on the Donkey' to pick something out while distracting me during labour.

In the meantime, Spud is, well, still Spud!