The joys and worries of week 16, plus roomies and roadtrips

Introducing, the week 16 official belly shot:



For the most part, I am really enjoying being pregnant now. I love sticking my little (but getting bigger) belly out, especially after I've eaten a big lunch. When else in life do you get to flaunt a bit of a bloat? Now that the Baby can hear stuff, both the Husband and I have started talking to it, which is like a dry run at parenting. This morning the Husband actually tried some discipline when I explained that the baby wanted pancakes! He won, but only because we didn't have any syrup in the house. (Note to self: buy syrup.)

But the hormones. Oh but they get ya! For example, this was an actual conversation today:

Husband: "What's the matter?"
Me: "My hair is making me cry!"

Seriously.

Also, I'm not even quite halfway through the gestation part of being a mom and there is already so much stuff to worry about. We need to figure out if we're going to hire a doula. Then we need to find time to meet some and choose one. There are some prenatal classes that we need to book, but with the Husband's work schedule being completely unpredictable and involving so much time away from home, how do we plan in advance? And the biggest concern for this being who is only the size of an avocado thus far: Daycare!

Sigh. All of my very smart friends who have children in this city keep stressing to me that we need to get on some daycare lists NOW if we want our little one to have somewhere to go when I go back to work in January 2012. So even though I don't know this child of mine - whether it's a boy or girl, what it likes, what it doesn't like - I need to choose the strangers to hand it over to when it's a year old. Oh, and then there's the fact that we have no idea where we'll be living in January 2012! So my laid-back attitude around finding a house is slowly eroding into, "WE NEED TO FIND A HOUSE!"

Don't worry. I'll make it. Deep breaths. (Don't want to flood the baby in my stress hormones!)

On a lighter note, I had a fantastic day yesterday. One of my college roomies and I took a road trip to Welland to visit the third roomie of our trio in her gorgeous new house. It should have taken about an hour and a half to get there, but between crazy traffic, three bouts of the kind of insane rain where you can't really see the road, one hailstorm (!!!), and a few little lost moments, we made it in just under four. Luckily that still gave us time to get in a great visit and enjoy a beautiful summer's evening in her newly acquired backyard gazebo and comfy lawn furniture. And, as always, we snapped a pic to remember it by: