38 weeks, pregnancy at its best...

We are now at 38 weeks and are so anxious to get see the newest member of our family. We've spent our last few weekends preparing all of the odds and ends so that when the baby does arrive our list of 'honey-do's' is small.
This weekend Drew's parents came to help out with some more preparations, we made freezer meals, washed the windows, put in the exit to our egress window outside, spring-cleaned our house and put all things in place for baby to be with the hopes that labor will be sooner rather than later (I think I may be nesting just a tiny bit :).

Our last appointment with Dr. Olson was on Thursday and she told us we are at about 2 cm dilated, 35% effaced and at -1 to 0 station. This means, in general he's ready to go and is as nearly as far down as you can be before actually giving birth. We see her again on Tuesday and are hoping for more progress (okay, who am I kidding, I am hoping she'll send us right over to labor and delivery). Then, if he's not here by next week she'll be stripping my membranes to move things along. Now, when I first heard the term 'stripping membranes' I was totally mystified? What the heck was that? It sounds sort of like you are peeling away some sort of skin or something, which paints just an awful visual, and sounds painful. So, just to clear things up, stripping membranes is not breaking your water, or removing any kind of skin or anything else completely violent that you may be dreaming up. Instead, its a process where the doctor attempts to loosen the bag of water from the sides of the placenta to get things moving. The idea is that by loosening things up the baby will start the process of labor and hopefully, it will send us into labor a bit more quickly than if we had left things alone.

Baby Hollman's latest trick, since he's moved down quite a bit, is stretching out his legs and maneuvering his feet between my ribs. This is SUPER PAINFUL, and in combination with the back pains makes me really wish for labor. At this point, I think the labor would be more painful, but at least short lived compared to these un-ending weeks of rib-wrenching.

In light of the end of this 10 month hoopla, we wanted to end the pregnancy with some great memories of this journey- how excited we were to find out we were expecting, how much we've anticipated the upcoming birth and how fun (albeit painful), watching him grow has been. We decided to get some maternity photos taken by our lovely, talented and amazing photographer Jenn Cress. Now, dear readers before you continue reading on be aware that there are photos included that you may or may not want to see. Some have clothes. Some have fewer clothes. You decide if you want to view them (and even with this disclaimer I am sure someone will be sure to let me know that they can't believe I put half naked photos of myself on our blog)- but to be honest I don't view them as half naked, I think they are much more artistic and deserve more credit than half naked, and to top it off they turned out great, so we are happy and excited to share what we'll call the last installment of baby watch 2009.




















Its hard to believe that baby Hollman will be here in a few weeks, or even days since we've waited for him for 10 long months. We can't wait to hold him and see just how he looks, who's eyes, who's nose and all the other oohs and ahhs that come along with being a new parent, as it turns out, even through all of the aches and pains I feel as though we are now approaching pregnancy at its best: the arrival of baby Hollman.