No rest for the wicked

I woke up last night about 2 am and couldn't get back to sleep. I have a rash on my left arm that looks and acts suspiciously like poison ivy. We got a notice from the city that we had to clear out some brush next to our driveway two weeks ago so over the long weekend we got out there and did it. Josh mowed over it and I cleared all the stuff the mower didn't get. I'm thinking I must have got into something then. I'm using some stuff called Zanafel that actually works pretty well but overnight I wake up to me itching it. I'm also taking Benadryl but obviously can't do that during work because it makes me sleepy. Hopefully I can get in to the doctor on Monday to see if I can get it cleared up before I go into labor. I can only imagine having to lay in bed for hours after getting my epidural and having to concentrate on not itching. :p So I was up until 5:30 knitting on a baby hat. It was COLD last night. The temperature got down to 12 degrees according to our thermostat and I guess we've learned the limitations of our geothermal because it couldn't keep up with the temperature we wanted. No big deal, it has an auxiliary heater for just such an occasion! We just had to set the default to be at 20 degrees instead of 5 degrees. It's already warming back up in here and I still think we will see way better performance than last year with our old horrid gas furnace.

We had a bit of excitement on Friday night. I was driving home and saw these huge wheeling, circling black clouds around the highway. At first I thought they were oddly behaving flocks of birds but then realized they were bats...thousands of bats. So I got to the house and we were just settling down to watch some Will & Grace episodes that had arrived when I saw something swooping down in the kitchen. A bat had followed me in the house! We quickly herded the dogs into their cage so we could have the doors open and give him a chance to fly out. No go, he just flapped and dive bombed around and then disappeared. We closed off the upstairs and bedroom and began our search of the house to find him. Josh wielded a broom and I, a Maglite. We methodically searched high and low but no sign of our batty friend. Finally just as we thought he might actually have gone outside, Josh spotted him in the living room and gave him a whack with the broom. Then we couldn't find him again. We searched in the general trajectory his body would have to have gone but to no avail. We had given up again thinking that he had eluded us and made for the door so I started putting away piles of laundry that were on the coffee table. I moved Josh's pile of clothes and heard a hissing. There was the little bat, wings spread out and perched atop my Victoria's Secret catalog. He seemed a little dazed but otherwise unharmed. Josh tried to get him with a handkerchief but he bared his teeth and wing flapped so we got a bowl and a trusty D&D Players' Handbook. After he was thus entrapped Josh took him out back, flung him away and ran for it back to the house. There was no sign of him the following morning so he either dragged himself away, flew away, or was eaten. Of course after he put him out I thought darn, I should have taken pictures for the blog. He was kind of cute in that freaky sort of bat way.

I've been working diligently on Christmas knitting and baby knitting. I'm almost done with a pair of hand warmers and need to work up the coordinating hat. I also finished another pair of baby socks though these will probably fit when Maegwin is a little older since they are longer than the newborn ones I have knit.


We have some progress in the slow and painful slog towards labor. I've dilated a bit and mostly effaced and the wee babe is head down and engaged. I was having random contractions last week but those seem to have tapered off more or less though I do feel a bit crampy this morning. Josh and I are both just anxious to meet her. I organized all the changing stuff yesterday into some bins and it looks really nice. Mom bought us some more Bum Genius diapers. Yay, Mom! We have 25 now so that should be ok until I need to start dropping her off at daycare. While I'm at home I can do laundry more often. They are a bit pricey up front but totally worth it. We also got some flannel and bamboo baby wipes so we can see which we like better. They are both pretty soft. A diaper sprayer came accidentally though I'd thought about buying it a few times so we just called them and had them charge us for it. We also got a pretty cool diaper pail. It has a washable liner (we got a spare), a place to put a carbon filter in the top, and a place to put deodorizing discs in it. I'm so happy to have found the Cotton Babies website and that cloth diapering has become so much easier. I read something the other day that I found disturbing. A disposable diaper takes 100 years to biodegrade so if you think about it, every single disposable diaper that has ever been used on a child is still out there. Mind boggling...