23 weeks

I can't remember whether or not midterm week at work is always this insane (I'm getting worse and worse at remembering from one year to the next). Even if it is, I think that poor planning on my part made midterm week this year a little bit over the top. For starters, I totally underestimated how hard it would be to make up three new exams in the midst of everything else I had going on. And from there it just snowballed. Long hours and committee meetings were the norm every day, and I felt like I was scrambling all week just to make ends meet. By Wednesday night, the workload had hit me so hard that I fell asleep by 5 o'clock, and still managed to sleep until FOUR the next morning. Man, that's like 11 hours. I don't think I've slept that much since 3rd grade. But anyway, besides an absurd amount of papers to grade, the week is now done, and Spring break has officially arrived. Where's the champagne? I think we should toast to that... And then we should take a nap.

Anyway... other than the perils of teaching, the focus this week on the homefront was definitely the pregnancy. Faster than you can say pass the ketchup, V made the swift transition from being "quietly pregnant" to being a potential model for a maternity magazine (see the photo from Saturday). We have no idea exactly when it happened, but there's no doubt that last week marked the last of her being discreetly pregnant. On Tuesday we went to dinner with some friends that had not seen us in months, and to their disappointment, you couldn't tell much from looking at her that we had already passed the 5 month marker in the pregnancy. Actually, it was pretty amazing how small she still was. But by Saturday, when it came time to blow out her belated birthday candles, her stomach was looming over the cake like it had been there all along. It was crazy. It was like, BAM, out of nowhere. I guess we blinked, because we totally missed it.

So with this new belly to contend with, I surfed the web for picture-taking advice and home studio set-ups so that we didn't miss anymore moments... but I found that the set-up I had in mind was way too expensive. And so eventually I just made a trip to see Sam the Man, and got the hook-up when he let me borrow his portable studio set (thanks Sam). I thought we'd have plenty of room for it in the baby's room, but man that thing is huge. But I cleared the room out, and it's up and running now... so let the maternity photography begin! I have no clue what I'm doing, but still I look forward to trying to document V's pregnancy with some photos now that we've got a backdrop to work with. As always, the toughest part will be getting the ever-shy V to relax in front of the camera and not be so shy about her body. I'm all about sharing the miracle that's going on inside of her, but of course that's easy for me to say since I'm not the one who can't see my feet anymore. Anyway, I'm still hoping to convince her that this is a time that we will never get back (1st pregnancy moments) and can never duplicate, and so we've got to milk it for all we can.

As for the baby itself, accordng to our 23 weeks update from babycenter.com, the baby is more than 11 inches long now and weighs just over a pound. V also noticed this week that her feet are getting bigger, which was confirmed by a paragraph on swelling that we read in the babycenter.com newsletter... and unlike the temporary swelling of her breasts during the pregnancy, the swelling of the feet is supposed to be permanent... which at least benefits her because she gets new shoes out of it (good grief).

If only I could pick and choose. The swelling of the feet wouldn't be the permanent one. That's for sure.