Friends and maternity leave and 35 weeks

One of the best things about having company (besides the fun of having company) is that after they leave, your house is still clean! And the best thing about having company when one is almost nine months pregnant is that Boyo is the one who did the majority of the cleaning! Every time, I say "let's not get too carried away with the cleaning this time" and every time we do more than I had really planned, but honestly, the house needed all of the work we put into it just now. It was a disaster zone. It also helped that it forced us to do a lot of Ducky-related cleanup, so we made progress on the room as well. One of my friends from work, Virginia (ha! It is the perfect pseudonym because a couple of people actually call her that--though not me--because she has a duplicate name, and we were discussing it just tonight because it always makes me think of The 10th Kingdom when they do.) and her husband came over, and I believe that the general opinion was "why have we not done this more?" It was a lot of fun. Ducky thought so too, and in the process of enjoying herself mightily with gigantic sweeping movements, she convinced me that she is indeed head down, because that HAD to be a foot. She is, by the way, trying to drop somewhat. She's not so sure she likes the idea, though, so I wake up with her lower in my belly than she was before, but when I get up and start moving around, she pops back up as far as she can. She's still lower than she was for a little while, I think, but not nearly low enough to claim that she's "dropped" yet.

Ellen asked if I had mentioned what my maternity leave plans were, and.. well, I don't really know if I have or not. The official plan is that my last day of work will be May 18, if I haven't had the baby already by then. That's one week before my official due date. If May 18 is my last day, I'll return to work on September 10. If she's early, then I'll start earlier and end earlier but by the approximately same amount of time. That's almost four months. It actually went over decently (so far) at work. I don't have the same manager as I did when I got pregnant, and as it happens, my current manager has had two children while working here. She took about three months off with both of them, so she said she couldn't really say anything about it--but that I was more than welcome to come back sooner if I wanted to. :) This issue.. it is big and complex but I am still not thinking about it too much because I can't wrap my mind around some facets of it. Denial, I suppose.

And mainly what I wanted to say today is that... I am officially 35 weeks pregnant now! That means that Ducky has, in fact, proven her father wrong, just as I instructed. 35 weeks has always been one of the big goals for us. (My personal goal is to still be pregnant on my birthday, which is in less than two weeks.) I believe Dr. Optimism made a comment about it, which M kind of ran with. Babies born at 35 weeks are generally just fine. Two weeks from now, she'll be considered full-term. Five weeks from now is her due date. There's still a long way to go to get from here to there but we're headed in the right direction! I can't believe how close it is now, and how weird it feels to wake up wondering if it's going to be The Day. (I have quite a lot of contractions going on. I know they're not real until they're.. well, real... but it's enough to make you think about it!)