30 Weeks!

I'm now at 30 weeks and I think I have reached moose stage. I feel big, but not quite all the way to elephant - I think that will hit at about 34 weeks. From there I think I'll go onto blue whale until I finally pop. But we shall see, I reserve the right to change my mind. I don't remember feeling quite so stretched and sore in my lower abdomen in my last pregnancy, but I have also recently concluded that I remember very little of what my last pregnancy really felt like. I made myself think about what time of year it would have been at this point in my pregnancy with Emma, and I think I'm actually stacking up pretty well. I think I was more tired last time, bigger, and more awkward feeling. So at least there's that (or something). I did get my glucose test results back this week and everything was fine, so at least that's one less thing to think about.

This has been a quiet, slow week. It got hot again and it sapped all my energy away completely. My favorite activity for the week has been turning on the AC and the ceiling fan in my bedroom and retreating there to read stories to Emma and nap. So, yeah, not much going on. I did manage to put together the newsletter for my mom's club this week (which was quite an undertaking!) because the woman who normally does it had a baby at the beginning of September. I'm glad she's only asked me to sub for one month. The creative aspect of it was fun, but trying to get the info from everyone and dealing with all the little petty stuff gets rather annoying. It made me remember what I disliked about working in an office environment and glad that I have the opportunity now to be a stay-at-home mom (who for some reason volunteers for dumb stuff like this!).

Another thing I've been enjoying this week is LibraryThing, a nifty way to catalog books and see how your collection overlaps with other people's collections. I've been keeping track of all the books I've read since I've graduated from college and now I am slowly entering them into the website (yes, I am *that* obsessive). It is quite a lot of fun to watch how my overlap changes as I enter books, and to see what books are common and which are not. I have all of 2004 and what I've read so far in 2005 entered in, and I still have from late 2002 through 2003 to enter from my notebook. The rest are in an Access database and I think I'll wait until the programmer gets the XML import working again before I move those over. If you'd like to look at what is in my library so far, here's my library. I've also added on my sidebar a little bloglet that shows everything tagged in my library as "currently reading". Yes, as you might suspect, these are the books I am currently reading.

Matt and I have spent most of the late afternoon and evening in the kitchen, an activity we thoroughly enjoy. I made a chicken pot pie (using a bird I cooked earlier in the week, and chicken stock Matt made) and Matt made a multi-grain bread using some grains from a batch of beer we brewed a few weeks ago. After eating and cleaning up, we also made cinnamon rolls for the morning. Since they are made with all whole wheat flour, they are healthy, right? :-) Just in case anyone is curious, the pot pie recipe came from this cookbook: Mom's Best One Dish Suppers, which I got recently and have made several dishes from. All the recipes have been good so far, although I've found them to be a bit time consuming the first time through. But at least they aren't just "a can of this, a can of that" which I loathe, and I'm willing to spend the extra time in order to use better ingredients! The cinnamon roll recipe comes from The Urban Homemaker, and I only make a half batch at a time because I do not need to feed an army. While I'm at it, the bread recipe that Matt used for the multi-grain bread came from Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book - a great cookbook for making whole grain breads. Um, yes, we have a thing for cookbooks around here... but at least they do see use! (Well, except for this one, which I think is fantastic and extremely intimidating. One reviewer calls it "My Favourite, Least-Used, Essential Cookbook" and another calls it "Food for the imagination only", both descriptions I'd have to agree with. But I doubt I will ever part with it!)

OK, time to enter some more books in LibraryThing!