38 weeks

We don't know how much longer this pregnancy will continue, as my BPs continue to be high and doctors and nurses continue to mention induction. We're just glad for every new day that comes that our baby can keep growing and maturing inside.

For once we remembered to take a picture early enough in the day that we could
go outside and find a more interesting background than our bedroom wall.

This week is another appointment-filled one. Our doctor is still on vacation until Wednesday or Thursday and we're just hoping that she'll be able to be back before any drastic measures are taken. We know and trust her more than the random on-call doctors that we've seen the past week, and would like to have her opinion on my current blood pressures and the matter of induction as well. My BPs seem to be holding steady at a reasonable (but not great) level when I take them at home with our blood pressure cuff, but whenever I have to go into the hospital for a non-stress test, they shoot right up, which of course worries everybody. Jonathan and I believe that the best way to keep these high BPs from happening would be to either 1) continue going to the non-stress tests, but only monitor the baby and not my BPs, since they only go up higher when monitored at the hospital and that can't be good for me or the baby, or 2) stop the non-stress tests and just continue to monitor the baby at home via kick counts, which is what we have done up until a couple weeks ago, and still continue to do on the days I don't have non-stress tests scheduled. Of course, neither of us are medical professionals, but the logic seems to point to the hospital and my white coat syndrome as being the trigger for the very elevated BPs. When I come home again, they go back down to my "normal" level.

Moving on, we now have one more fairly vital piece of baby gear, a changing pad. Our second bathroom has a long countertop and we're planning to put the changing pad on the counter in there for easy access to water while changing baby's diapers. We might adjust this as we go along, but for now that's the best place we have to put the changing pad as we're not planning to get a dedicated changing table and so far we haven't yet found any dressers (for ourselves or the baby) that we like. Yes, the majority of our non-hanging clothes are still in suitcases... No, this isn't ideal. Yes, we should probably just get any old dressers and get our clothes put away before Baby G arrives and more chaos ensues. No, we probably won't because apparently we're pretty picky about dressers and nightstands. But I have faith that someday our bedroom will be clean and tidy.

That about wraps up this post. We'll see if there is another weekly post next week or if our baby has come by then. :)