BabyPalooza

For baby-obsessed people, the recent months of pregnancy and Lyme exhaustion have been remarkably devoid of small people. We more than made up for it this weekend!

Friday night we had dinner with Liza and Jill, fellow bloggers we'd never met in person, who were in town for their baby shower. We ate at Coppi's and upped both Liza's and my fruit and vegable counts with yummy squash and braised grapes (two different dishes).

We haven't spent much time with our friend Giggle Girl or her baby sister (we'll call her Charlie Chaplin - she's the silent type) but their mom is getting ready for a big exam so we hung out with them for most of the day Saturday. We had fun pretending to be a big lesbian family getting ready for #3! Then Conchita and Josie joined us and Josie had her first ice cream cone ever...

This morning we went to brunch with friends where I got my first ever "You're HOW far?!?!" comments, repeatedly (though it was the same two people who kept repeating it). We got to meet little Levi (one of whose moms used to do karate with Jen... the funny thing is, I only heard he was born through Liza's blog!). I got to spend some quality infant time with him and swap hospital stories with his moms, in preparation for BabyPalooza part 4, the hospital tour.

We were both reasonably impressed with the hospital. We had expected that they would be far less flexible, but their basic policies aren't as stringent as we feared. They don't put in precautionary IVs, they do intermittent fetal monitoring, and they don't take the baby away, ever, unless you request it. Ooops - I almost forgot the best part. When asked whether food and drink were permitted during labor, the tour guide cheerily assured us, "You can have ALL the ice chips you want!" Hospital birth still isn't going to be our first choice, but we'd be quite happy using this hospital as back-up. (Stay tuned for the hurdles we have to go through to make it our back-up, but that's another story.)

To wrap everything up, we made our first trip to a baby mega store, Buy Buy Baby (better known as Spend Spend Baby, according to our friends). Basically, we were overwhelmed. But it was fun to look at all the stuff and think, hey, we could be having one of these baby things, and "needing" to get all these other baby-related things!

And now we're totally exhausted again, so we're getting a head start on the newborn sleep deprivation thing....