Week Thirty-Six's Baby Bump

The last week has been a whirlwind. We finished packing up all of our belongings from my parents' house and--with the much needed help of Dad Phelps, Josh, Sam, and Marianne--moved to a tiny one-bedroom apartment in the heart of downtown St. Anthony. The first few days were very emotional for me because I had had a lot of contractions and a nurse at Madison Hospital told me to stay in bed for a couple days. We didn't have TV or Internet, so we completely missed General Conference, and I felt like I couldn't move. I thought I would enjoy "having" to stay in bed, but I was miserable. Every time Jon came in the room I'd break out into tears. I'm sure that did wonders for his self esteem. :) On Monday I had my first doctor's appointment with Dr. Meredith in Rexburg (before moving to Utah I had only seen a nurse practitioner), and he said the baby is over six pounds and should be good to go anytime. He assured me not to be afraid of contractions because although I'm still considered "preterm," the baby is big enough and developed enough to make her entrance.

Jon has been a real trouper through all of this. He has set up the majority of the apartment on his own. He won't let me lift anything, and in the last couple days, any moving or lifting of items more than a few pounds has been somewhat painful for me anyway. So I have been finding other ways of occupying my time. We made lemonade the other day and then decided to make cherry limeade ice cubes. I spent several minutes pouring the juice into ice trays and even absorbing some of the juice when it came up a little too high in the tray so that each ice cube would look perfect. Initially the ice cubes in the lemonade looked really fun, but after the ice cubes mostly melted into the juice, it looked more like blood and it lost it's appeal. But there you go. These are the kinds of things you do when you have a time bomb in your stomach and are trying to keep busy.

Even though we won't be in this apartment very long, we decided to hang pictures to make it feel a bit more like home. The apartment is coming together now, and I feel like this has been my biggest contribution to making it "ours."