Magrilless

I am officially in my eighth month of pregnancy now, 11 7/8 squares. But the baby is for sure still getting whatever he/she needs, cuz there’s less space inside me now than there was before. There’s less room for food, so the four-meal-a-day plan is no longer sufficient — I’m becoming a grazer. There’s less room for my bladder, so I’m staying closer to home or at least planning routes carefully. And there’s less room for my lungs, so I’m going up the stairs slower than before. But it all means baby’s size keeps increasing, so there’s little to complain about. And I have found that without a pillow between my knees at night (which I know is the proper and approved method for side sleeping) I actually do sleep and don’t wake up with my hips throbbing. Sorry doc, I’d rather sleep.

This week I’m at eleven and three quarters (by my count; 11 and 5/6 by others’ more generous reckoning). The doc is still pleased with my weight gain and the baby’s size gain, so all’s good. And nothing that flops around as much as this critter is flopping can really be stressed.

Since my previous thigh experiment didn’t really work, I’m going back to trying to influence just my belly. My belly button is stretching pretty thin, but is still decidedly an innie. Some people have called me crazy (to my face!) for being excited about the pop-out moment. But really, how many times in one’s life does one get the opportunity to see the bottom of one’s belly button? Meghan downstairs said hers didn’t go until week 38, so I may have to be patient yet. But surely we’ll soon get to meet.

I’m off now to meet Bill in the city. It’s the first time we’ll go to the hospital where I’ll deliver (all my doctor’s appointments happen at MIT). We get to go meet all the doctors who might be on call when I go into labor, thus we get to meet whoever it is who will be delivering the baby. Maybe they pass out their schedules so if I don’t like one of them I can hold it in until they’re off duty?

On Monday we finally got around to doing the one Boston tourist thing that everyone has told us we should do: a DUKW tour (pronounced “duck” — quack quack). This company has a fleet of several dozen World War II amphibious vehicles (DUKWs) that they have refitted as trolley-like sight-seeing vehicles. And each vehicle has a quirky conduktor/driver who tells you all about the places you see along the way.

And there are a lot of places to see along the way. It’s an hour and a half with nonstop information the whole time. There are architecture lessons, Revolutionary War lessons, city founding lessons, urban planning lessons, and lots of jokes and puns. By the end we were exhausted just from listening to so much.

But perhaps the specialest part was where Horace got to drive the vehicle while in the river. See? There he is next to our conduktor happily shuttling us all down the Charles. Oh. Who is Horace? Well, it seems my father has been rechristened by our guide (I’m sure it’s legally binding). Or maybe he’s just been too embarassed all these years to correct us thinking his name is Forrest. In any case, he was a super duper pilot — much more accomplished than the four year old who took his turn first. How many people can say they’ve driven a truck from 1949 through a river?

I’m at 11 and a half squares still. Holding steady (as are my thighs, by the way). And still feeling great. Can still vacuum up and down the stairs on a vigorous day, and still walk up and down the stairs on a slow day. And with two dogs in the household, there’s very little room for cheating on exercise. That makes the doctor happy, even though she orders me at every checkup to drink more milk. Well, there should always be room for improvement in one’s life.

Egad! Only ten more weeks!

Last night we went to Fenway Park to watch the Red Sox cream the LA Angels. My dad got tickets for his birthday, so we’ve waited months for our chance to seat in the old wooden seats and look out on America’s sweetheart of a baseball field. Fenway is the oldest baseball stadium still in use in the country, and there are odd things about it (apparently). For one thing, it’s smack dab in the middle of the city. Really. No vast parking lots for fans. Right next to a thoroughfare. Surrounded by bars and restaurants and office buildings and the same two-lane streets as everywhere else in town. And there’s the Green Monster and the Triangle and Williamsburg and one single red seat in the sea of green ones (look it up on Wikipedia if you’re very curious about the place — too much baseball lingo gets in my way of really understanding a lot of the significance of things). I think it’s neat that the score board is still updated manually by a guy who sits inside, and occasionally walks out to update scores of other Major League games throughout the game.

We took the T down and were fairly carried into the train and then down the street by the hoards of red and navy clad people. At least there was no need to carry and read a map; if we’d wanted to go in some other direction we would have been hard pressed to do so. We made it a true ballpark experience with hot dogs and beer and swapping facts with other fans and crunching peanut shells under foot. And lucky for us, it was a good game too! Well, it was a slow start, but at the sixth inning things picked up with the Sox scoring twice. And we got to see Papi Ortiz hit a home run that broke the record for the most number of home runs by a designated hitter. It was pitcher Daisuke’s first game back after being out with injuries too, so everyone was pretty jazzed to see their boy back on the mound.

In the end the score was 4-1, Sox triumphant. And much yelling and cheering and singing and clapping later, we dragged our sorry butts across the river to the nearest T not mobbed by 45,000 jubilant fans, and fell into bed to dream of a World Series victory. Go Sox!