31 Weeks!

Our weekly count rolls over on Fridays so as of today, we've made it through 31 weeks of pregnancy!  Only nine more weeks until Bagel's expected delivery.  I have 7 more weeks of class, so we're cutting things a bit close, but luckily my colleagues have all volunteered to help out during the end of November/beginning of December.  I am really lucky to work with some really great people. 

Due to some last-minute scheduling issues at the hospital, we're going on our tour of the maternity ward this Saturday (we had originally been scheduled for November).  It should be interesting, although tonight we'll have to cram our online study materials since we've been a bit lax in keeping up with those.  Hopefully there won't be a quiz.

We don't really have much to report.  We spend pretty much all of our time working, with periodic breaks to discuss exciting things like diapers.  There are a lot of decisions that you need to make about babies! 

One thing we've been pretty concerned with is trying to limit the environmental impact of bringing another person onto the planet.  Ever since we saw An Inconvenient Truth, Jeremy has been very concerned with what Al Gore would think about his decisions.  After much MUCH online research, we've decided to cloth diaper at home (day care will only use disposables but baby will be home enough that it will make a difference).  Jeremy's been doing a lot of research about which disposables are least bad for the environment, and we've narrowed it down to a few brands that appear to do the least harm - we'll stick with those for daycare.  They're more expensive than regular diapers, but Jeremy thinks it is what Al Gore would want him to do :)

We've also been looking at all of the cloth options - and there are lots of them out there!  I got recommendations from several friends, but after looking at a couple of the recommended diapers, we realized that the convenience of that particular brand came at a definite trade off in terms of grossness of dealing with the dirties.  We decided to go with a system that has reusable covers (you don't change them every time you change the diaper) and super-absorbent inserts.  This cuts down a little bit more on the laundry since you only wash the inserts every time you change a diaper.  Also, we feel a little better about the laundry aspect of this since we have a super-high-efficiency front loader (thanks to my mom and dad who bought our washer dryer as a housewarming present).  We also wanted to make sure we picked a diaper that had one size covers as opposed to having to buy new covers every couple of months.  Anyway, after checking out many options on the market (if anyone is considering cloth diapers - talk to us, we can discuss your different options at LENGTH), we decided on these:
http://www.cottonbabies.com/product_info.php?cPath=139&products_id=2158
The original diapers we had considered were the Bum Genius by the same company which scored major points for the awesome name, but as previously mentioned had a significant gross-out factor involved (you stuff the insert into a special pocket in the diaper, and Jeremy pointed out that fishing the used insert out of the pocket would be a particularly disgusting task.  I was also considering getting a couple of these:
http://www.blueberrydiapers.com/Products_3/Diaper-Covers_2/b5288_4
But Jeremy pointed out that "comes in cow print" shouldn't really be the criteria that we use for picking out diapers :)

So, that was how we spent last Saturday night :)  Researching diapers online, taking a trip to the baby store to look at diapers, and deciding what kind to buy.  Do we know how to party or what??  I told you we didn't have any "real" news, so diaper talk will have to suffice.

The other big decision we've been trying to make is which baby carrier to buy.  We've been able to get pretty much everything else we need second-hand or hand-me-down, but all of our friends with kids are still using their carriers.  I had talked to a friend who recommended one brand, but Jeremy was pretty smitten with the baby carrier sported by his friend Geoff.  Despite seeing it in action, I was still skeptical.  Then Jeremy volunteered to do research, and he started quoting posts from online mommy discussion boards.  Yes, Jeremy was invested enough in our decision of which baby carrier to buy that he spent an entire evening fact collecting from online mommy forums (I don't even read online mommy forums).  I was pretty impressed.  Not only did the facts he find convince me, but I was really impressed with the overall effort.  Usually I am the one that wants to compile research and make spreadsheets etc etc and Jeremy is the one standing there rolling his eyes yelling at me to MAKE UP YOUR MIND ALREADY (see the post about our near-divorce resulting from a visit to the paint aisle at Home Depot)!  So, anyway, baby Bagel will be sporting around town in the Pikkolo: http://catbirdbaby.com/index.php/pikkolo-info/

So, two decisions down only about nine million more to go.  Who knows what exciting topics we'll be discussing at the Gottwood house this weekend!  We've talked about how becoming parents is really just changing us from "those crazy people that talk about their cats all the time" to :"those crazy people who talk about their baby (and their cats) all the time" :)