That’s me.  I suppose that’s to be expected for the third trimester.

I feel like I need a nap pretty much every day.  Small outings exhaust me.  I think my iron’s OK, but I should probably open the Floradix that I lugged here on the plane.

The suitcases did (mostly) get unpacked, which I suppose is a big feat.   About half of them are still laying all over the floor, though, now serving as cat beds.  I even washed almost all the baby clothes, hung them to dry, and put them away.  I thought we had enough clothes pins, but then I learned that tiny baby clothes require more clothes pins per load.  So they had to hang in batches.  I better buy some more clothes pins before I have to start hanging out batches of cloth diapers too!

All I can runinate on is how thankful I am that Arp is not pregnant also.  He’s got a lot of energy, hopefully enough to make up for what I am sorely lacking.  He’s out today looking at used cars.  Although we ended up keeping our rental car for an extra week, it’ll be gone on Thursday.  Maybe I’m crazy, but I have deep anxiety about being without a car here.  I know intellectually how cheap taxis are, but  being without my own car makes me feel very trapped.   It’s hard being in a new house and new county and thinking about having to depend on a taxi to take me from place to place.  Another complicating matter is that I tend to get pretty panicked about safe driving when I am pregnant.  This is obviously far more difficult in Costa Rica, where drivers pass each other 3-abreast on hairpin turns.  So trusting a taxi driver is not very workable for me.  Even though Arp doesn’t exactly follow my demands that he drive like an old grandma, he gets a lot closer to it than the average Tico.

Something that seems different about this pregnancy is how much I’m looking forward to meeting and holding the baby.  I think part of it is that I know what to expect, and how holding your baby for the first time feels.  Especially with my first pregnancy, that reality was very hard to imagine until it actually happened.  I also think I’ve been spending more time thinking about my baby and bonding with it in utero.  We went into this pregnancy planning to have no ultrasounds and have the gender be a surprise.  I ended up having one short ultrasound (due to a platelet scare, but that’s another post), and the gender is still a surprise.   I think my decision to have minimal interventions during this pregnancy has helped me to really focus on the present and the experience of  feeling my baby inside of me.  I’m not focused at all, like I was the first two times, on a grainy sonogram picture, or on whether the baby is a boy or a girl.  It’s just me and my baby, wiggling around inside, in the here and now.  It feels good.