Moving Week!

When you're 35 weeks pregnant and trying to move, you don't do it all in one day, even if you're me - and Lord knows our moves have not always gone according to plan, so I'm not a shining example of how to do an organized, well thought out move. We'd hoped to change that when we moved out of this little apartment, but life threw us a curve ball and we're kind of throwing it together as we go.

This weekend we're working on moving the big stuff - furniture, electronics, cleaning out the storage unit, all those big boxes I can't carry or even help with an end of these days. Today is a cleaning and packing day to wrap up all the loose ends we need to get together before the Crew of Awesome shows up tomorrow to help John with the big stuff.

My next doctor's appointment is on Friday, so we'll probably take a load of smaller things down then, and then on Saturday morning take the rest of it. That will still give us four days after work if we need to do any last minute cleaning before handing over the keys. I refuse to do what I did when we left Dallas and forget to clean out the oven - that was $35 I felt stupid about losing because I'd even closed and locked the oven to run the self-cleaning function and flat forgot about it.

On the baby front, things are going well. I'm dilated 1cm (which I realize doesn't mean much, and I could be dilated for weeks with no real progress) and Sarah is head-down and assuming the position. My Braxton-Hicks contractions are more frequent these days, and they tend to last a little longer, but that's to be expected. We went ahead and made appointments through 40 weeks, even though we will probably not need them all - it's a lot easier to make them and not need them, and making these a week out can get difficult. We've also got our ultrasound scheduled for October 1st, and we'll get a better idea of how big she is, how she's positioned, and what's going on in Casa de Uterus.

I also feel better about work, since we found someone to take over the web store, and I've been reassured about having a role at the new corporate office when I get back from maternity leave. The only real worry right now is finding good child care that won't break the budget - we're looking at a good bit more in that area than we were planning on in Livingston, but I guess that's to be expected. Hopefully my year review will yield a bit of a raise, and that will help offset the added cost of living. I'm still excited and happy about all this, just trying to be practical. (And reading every coupon blog I can get my eyeballs on.)

So, big week for us, and hopefully everything goes smoothly. We'll have our 'net up at the new place on Sunday, so my blogging habits will probably pick up a bit when we get settled down more in the new place. So much stuff is going on, I don't want to forget a moment of it all.

You Dropped a Bomb on Me

So Thursday, John sends me a text asking if I want to go to lunch. Says he has "news" - of course I ask for hints and get nothing.

Turns out our corporate office is moving from Livingston to Humble; about 45-50 minutes south. It will be about five minutes from Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston. Under normal conditions this would be a fabulous thing for us - neither of us really feels like we fit in here in Livingston and we'd talked before about moving in that direction, so on one hand we're both thrilled to be moving back to "civilization" (translation - bookstores, Starbucks, and actual choices in dining out.) On the other hand, I was just turning 33 weeks pregnant, which means our moving timeframe is kind of limited.

Fortunately, things are working out better than we could have expected. Mom and Zane drove out here Friday night and were okay with going to look at apartments with us on Saturday. We wound up liking the first place we saw, and after some additional looking decided it was worth it to us to get our pre-approval done, get a hold on the apartment we wanted, and fill out the online application Saturday evening. This week we'll get all those details ironed out, and will try to take possession around the middle of the month so we can move over the course of a couple of weekends and keep our moving costs down.

At my doctor's appointment on Friday, she told me that because of the gestational diabetes, she will not let me go farther than 39 weeks, but that we'll do another sonogram at 37 weeks to determine her size and positioning, and will probably start making decisions about inductions (or the need for a cesarean section) at that point. There is a possibility, and what that possibility is we don't have any way of knowing, that she could even come at 37 weeks. Dr. Z said that is considered full-term, so if that possibility happens, Sarah will be healthy and able to do all the things she needs to do "on the outside."

You understand my nervousness that we'll move, vacate this apartment in Livingston on September 30th, go to the doctor on October 1st and find out we're having a baby that weekend. (Because seriously, considering how things are turning out for us, it would not surprise me at all.) Either way, we will be holding Sarah next month, which makes me so happy I can't even explain it.

If things work out the way it looks like they will, it will let us move down to Kingwood, be nearer the hospital, and get settled in so that once Sarah comes, John can focus on the office move. That will take a lot of his time in the weeks to come, and I'm hopeful we can get our personal stuff out of the way and have a bit of a routine going so he can give that huge project the attention it needs. The office move should be the week of November 15th - worst case scenario puts that about a month after Sarah's birth, so things should have settled down by then, and we'll be near the new office so he can shuffle back and forth during build-out.

So that's where we are now. Moving personally and professionally before Sarah comes and trying to get everything all sorted out so we can make a smooth transition.