Early Morning Ramble

Well, it's 5:57 in the morning here, and I've been up since about 4:15 am. I finally decided that if I was going to be awake, I might as well do something - thus, here's a new blog post! We're in a bit of a heat wave here in Southern California which has made falling to sleep initially difficult, and for me anyway, third trimester pregnancy has meant that once I wake up (which usually happens sometime in the 4 o'clock hour), I can't fall back asleep again - at least not until about 7 or 8 o'clock, which is when I have to get up anyway.

Other than my sleep deprivation issues, things here are going pretty well. Baby is kicking and moving around like a madwoman right now, which I always figure is a good sign of health and vitality. Work is going well enough. I've noticed a slightly decreased interest in my reference questions lately - I don't seem to be enjoying the research quite as much as normal - but I think this might just be a reflection of being distracted by other non-work life events. For example, school is being a bit of a bear: I'm taking a web design class which I thought was for beginners, but 80% of what the teacher said in lecture yesterday went completely over my head, so I may have been misinformed about that when I registered for class. The information is interesting though (we're learning HTML and CSS right now), so even if I'm facing a monstrously steep learning curve, that helps. Unfortunately, I'm having to spend about 4 hours a day in homework on this class just to try to keep up at all - and I'm not even sure that's enough (since the last lecture was mostly gibberish to me). Normally this situation would stress me out to the extreme, and I definitely have felt some serious stress at moments, but on the other hand, it's my last class before graduating, it's more of an elective (not essential to my job so anything I learn is a bonus), and there's a reasonable chance I'm going to have to take an Incomplete for it anyway if Baby comes on or before her due date. All good reasons not to worry too much I figure. Although it sure would be nice to have some free time for other things.

That's about it for my life here at the moment. Pete's enjoying his job and getting to work with some new colleagues. He has a really great group of chaplains for next year. And he's starting a drumline which both he and many of the kids are excited about! We've enjoyed a couple of great baby showers recently and feel so appreciative of all of our kind, generous, and supportive family and friends. Peter and a few of my friends even conspired to fly my mom out for the baby showers as a surprise - it was wonderful being able to see her and have her present for those events. I feel very, very blessed. If I can get it to work, I'll post a picture of me and my mom below (so you can see my big pregnant belly). It's crazy to me that we only have about six weeks left before this baby is actually here...