Squirmy boy, are we ready for you?

Noah's activity is fine. Quite fine. Right now my interpretation of his movements is that he's got his hands around at the front where I can really feel them and he's playing with the uterine wall. Who knows, but it feels like squirmy flutters, punctuated by the occasional (higher) kick.

Yesterday whenever I laid down to do the checks he hit ten movements in under 5 minutes (20 minutes is how long you wait).

Maybe he's just burning the calories? I certainly am not. I never thought I would say this but I am tired of eating. Because he was up high yesterday it was hard to eat anything in a large quantity so I ended up having to eat a lot of the time. It was good food - scrambled eggs, whole wheat bread with hummus, fruit/yoghurt/milk smoothie, chickpea salad (with peppers and onions and olives), halibut (in the approved quantity), cheese, mixed veggie salad, and vanilla ice cream. Today I have a potato-lentil-carrot curry on that, depending on the schedule, I may serve with some dead animal bits, and I think I'll have an omlette for lunch.

It is remarkably harder to hit 3,000+ calories on the contents of my larder and fridge than it was earlier in the week when walking past restaurants. But we'll shop for some high calorie things today too, for the last 3 day push of it. I'm determined that they be high-quality food though: no point stuffing garbage in, or one trip through the McDonald's drive through would do it.

I also had 3 Braxton Hicks today, one of which actually *stopped* me in my tracks. Not quite down in the cervix, but a really good hard clench. Looks like the muscles are just raring to go.

Ah, but his nursery is still a disaster par excellence. It's full of stuff - mostly baby stuff, but some odds and ends we threw in there when the painters were here like, oh, computer monitors. I'm not yet in a huge rush, but I think maybe we should tackle that this weekend, for my peace of mind. Because let's hypothetically say that on August 2 my obstetrician decides that he has to come out to be fed out here. Noah'd be in the NICU of course, but I would be recovering from whatever method of getting him out we chose and probably *not* in any shape to be unpacking. So perhaps we should look at that as a target date for not having to climb through to get the diapers.

It's going to be hard to open all that stuff again - open literally and open emotionally.

People's reactions to this latest not-really-a-crisis have been really interesting - I mean inside/system people. Magdalynn, surprisingly, did two of the activity checks herself yesterday, in a laconic kind of non-panicked way. Lyria's been reading to him and made all the food yesterday taste *really good*. And JJ's read up on babies not gaining in utero. It's almost like the parenting team decided that we had better encourage him, which - I don't know; I don't think it really makes a difference, but it's connection, rather than withdrawal.

It's a good feeling, despite the reasons.