37 Week Bump Update

I am both so ready to meet our lil guy and kinda hoping he stays in there another week or two (or three!). The fact that we're so close to meeting him is surreal to me. I'm soaking up our last days as a family of three, and also really excited to start this new chapter as a family of four. I've been looking through our hospital and newborn pictures from Ez's birth, and I get so emotional to see how small he was, and to think that any day we'll be holding another newborn in our arms. 

At 37 weeks my brain is a crazy swirl of nesting and wanting to get stuff done but my body is like "um, no." I perk up over cleaning product commercials and words like "foaming" "disinfecting" "cleansing" and "scrubbing" make me way too excited. I've also recently become obsessed with cleaning random things, like the shower curtain and the garbage disposal. But in case you thought my house was all sparkling and spotless, rest assured - the house is pretty much a wreck. Bending over and picking stuff up is way too much effort. Also, sitting on the couch with my feet up is really appealing. So it's like half nesting, half hibernation over here. Or more like a third nesting, two thirds hibernating...you get the idea ;)

Thanks to some pregnancy insomnia I've been spending way too much time reading birth stories in the wee hours of the morning. This is something I normally try not to do while I'm pregnant, but things that usually seem like a bad idea suddenly seem perfectly reasonable at 3 am. On the bright side, the stories are a great reminder that the pain is all worth it as soon as you hold your baby for the first time. I always get teary-eyed reading about the overwhelming love a mama feels for her newborn baby. But reading about labors that take days, and women who had to push for four hours to get an 11 pound baby out isn't something I'd recommend when you're due to give birth any day. (But if you're not pregnant, or you wanna ignore my advice and read a birth story anyway, Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild, wrote about her 43 hour natural birth.)

In other nesting news, after lots of research we finally picked out a double stroller and infant car seat. It came down to the Graco Ready2Grow or the Baby Trend Sit n' Stand. They each have a dozen seating options and are extremely similar, but in the end we weren't that happy with the Graco infant seats we had with Ez, so we went with the Baby Trend. In our experience (with two different Graco car seats) the straps got tangled very easily and were not at all convenient to readjust. I've talked to lots of people who didn't have those problems, so we'll just chalk it up to Joe and I being overly impatient.

* This post contains some affiliate links for some of the products mentioned.

As you can tell, Ez was really into stroller shopping.

Pregnancy symptoms are just all the mild discomforts you'd expect this late in the game: heartburn, lightning crotch (it's a real thing), peeing every two seconds, and an overall lack of energy. My theory is that all this stuff is meant to prep you for labor by making you so ready to not be pregnant that labor doesn't seem as scary. But in all seriousness, I'm so thankful for how healthy both baby and I have been this pregnancy. Feeling him move around like a little acrobat never gets old and I love knowing that he's growing stronger each day, and that at this stage he will be healthy and able to thrive outside of me whenever he decides to come. We can't wait to meet you, lil man!

And in case you're interested, all of this pregnancy's bump updates are here, and all of Ez's bump updates are here.