All quiet on the western front...

Baby is still internal, so my guess for the birth date (yesterday) was wrong wrong wrong! We're got our first phone call from an elderly friend "just checking" to see if the Stephanie and baby are doing well and to see whether the baby had been born yet. Baby and Stephanie are doing just fine, but are still bundled as one. My brother arrives on Thursday, so maybe he'll get his wish of arriving before the baby after all!

Stephanie had some mild crampiness yesterday evening but otherwise no signs of anything getting started soon. We're going for a long walk just as soon as Stephanie gets off the phone with her grandmother, with the ultimate destination of Top Pot to use a free doughnut coupon. (Okay, I know that sounds bad, but these received "best doughnuts" on a national scale and deservedly so. They're just as delicious as I always imagined the doughnuts in the Homer Price Books as being when I was little, only they're "hand forged" and not made by an out of control machine.)

(Man, I used to love that book!)

(Side note: are there any children's books, any age, that you remember as being your absolute favorites? We're definitely interested in building a library of excellent kids books, and with more warning we can keep an eye out for used books and library sales.)

Anyway, we're not yet so desperate as to go buy some castor oil... Stephanie is still very comfortable and there's no reason for baby to make an exit anytime soon. Cool birthdays coming up past the due date include July 4th (for reasons of being our Independence Day, international readers, plus fireworks!), and also July 8th, because it would be a pretty easy to remember birthday at 07.08.09. :) But ultimately the baby will chose and whichever birthday it is will be an excellent one.

I just hope it's before our 8 am 42 week appointment on July 13th, because 8 am, seriously, that's unkind in how early in the day it is.

In anticipation of the happy event happening sometime in the next two and a half weeks, I worked on making a mock up of our birth announcement (except for the relevant information and photos to be pasted in, of course)! Our address list is also taking shape, and we may possibly print them on labels ahead of time so that we can get the announcements out very swiftly with little fuss when the baby arrives. We'd love to mail a postcard birth announcement also to any blog readers whose addresses we don't have: just send me your address at philyre -at- gmail -dot- com.

I also made two boppy pillow slipcovers which are vastly more attractive than the original slipcover and vastly more inexpensive than the cost for purchasing separate slipcovers ($25 for a pillow cover, seriously!). I used this pattern and it was pretty simple! I swapped velcro for the zipper because I don't like zippers. That involved extending the top piece about a half inch further so there was enough overlap for velcro. I would highly recommend the pattern to anyone else, because there's so much more variation out there in fabric than in the premade Boppy slipcovers.