Well, it's not much but it's progress. Technically we got possession of the house on April 12th but didn't actually "physically" move here until about April 19th. Between April 19 and April 30 our focus was shared between this new house and cleaning our old apartment to ensure we got our $800 damage deposit returned to us. Basically we spent 11 solid days using Vim and Windex on two residences =P Kind of an obscene amount of cleaning.

Last Monday we completed the cleaning on our apartment and were assessed by our landlords. We were awarded back our damage deposit on Friday. Since then. we have concentrated our efforts solely on our new house. In the last few days we have (I think) made some more obvious progress. We had a large scrap wood pile in the backyard that John spent most of today pulling apart, chopping up into manageable pieces and burning half of. He fixed our weedeater and trimmed about half the property and got our older self propelled lawnmower moving for me so I could attempt a few runs at the front yard. (I refuse to even try to pull start a mower after my midwife told me someone recently went into early labour doing so) Also managed to pull some of the ivy out from under the front porch, which will likely be an ongoing battle unless we figure our a way to keep it under control. I feel like we have done as much as I wanted or expected to in a couple weeks. I'm ok with the pace we are going at. Tomorrow we'll continue the burning pile (finish it off), finish the lawn mowing, finish the weedeating and *if* we're lucky we may possibly get another third of that ivy pulled out from under the deck. Later this week we can fix our closet that fell apart (the whole shelf in our walk in closet collapsed! Only one bracket was holding it up, NOT screwed into a stud. No wonder it ripped out of the wall...) and put the nursery together a bit more. There's admittedly a good list of things to do here but I'm just not feeling rushed to get them done and truthfully, I want the sense of accomplishment of DOING these things rather than having them done..!!

In baby news, I am at 34 weeks and a few days. the home stretch! Around week 20 I had some testing done that didn't mean anything at that time, but suggested that towards the end of my pregnancy I have further testing done/ monitoring for the baby and me to ensure that everything is going right. This means from now forward I have weekly testing at the hospital to "listen" to her in utero and ensure she's ok. Yesterday was our first check up. For 20 minutes I was hooked up to some machines and a print out of her movements and heart rate spits out. They look for how many times she moves, how she acts when moving (is her heart rate up?) and will measure her growth as we go. So far in the past month she has grown from 3lbs 8 oz up to 4lbs 12 oz yesterday. Likely she is growing at about 5oz a week based on the past month anyways. If that's true and she delivers at 40 weeks (or in 6 more weeks) her gain would be 30 oz, or 1 lb 14 oz ... sooo... (not that the ultrasounds are exactly accurate anyways!) a good guess might be 6lbs 12oz.

Meanwhile I had my first very fun baby shower last Saturday. Quite an amusing game- girls had to cut lengths of ribbon long enough to stretch around my belly, based on how long they THOUGHT it needed to be to stretch around. Pretty hilarious! Three people were really close, and the other six apparently thought I was large enough to pull in small planets to my orbit =P Fun stuff. At least we can all have a laugh at the crazy bulbous pear shape that I've assumed =) We'll see how much larger this gets in another 5 or 6 weeks!!