the to-do list

Week 41 was all about checking things off of my pre-baby to-do list. Steve's parents were arriving the next Monday, and while I had no indication of when I would go into labor, Monday was kind of my unofficial deadline for getting stuff done. After that, I told myself that the baby was allowed to come anytime. (I went into labor two days later.)

That weekend, we wrestled with getting the car seat installed in our car. We weren't entirely successful on Saturday, prior to our Macy's trip, but we had better luck on Sunday. That's when we managed to find the other LATCH system attachments in the back seat of the car. (The middle ones were hidden differently than the side ones, making them more difficult to spot.) We went back another day and added a towel underneath the foot of the seat to perfect the leveling, but this shot from Sunday is pretty much how the car seat ended up looking.

281/366 car seat: check

Then on Monday, I decided that the time had finally come to take the official "after" pictures of the nursery. We had finally received all the things I had ordered, and everything was in place. I just had to get out my widest angle lenses and make pretty pictures out of it. I intend to do a full post on the nursery and its inspiration one of these days, but I'm not entirely sure when I'll get around to it.

282/366 into the nursery

Tuesday was a baking day. I made two loaves of pumpkin chocolate chip bread from the Baked cookbook. With the gestational diabetes, I was trying to avoid eating a lot of baked goods, but nothing was stopping me from freezing them for post-baby! This way, I knew I'd have my tasty fall treats on standby when I was allowed to have them again.

283/366 pumpkin loaves

The next night, Steve and I decided to go out to dinner at Contigo for the last time before the baby came. We got our usual selection of tapas (pictured below) and some other small plates. We also got to say hi to Brett (the chef), as well as Elan and Tilden (his wife and their 1-year old daughter) who stopped by briefly. It was a good last night out.

284/366 last meal

I had taken note of a jewelry store display featuring owls on the way to Contigo on Wednesday night, so I decided to go to Noe Valley again on Thursday to take some pictures of it. I needed to go to a Walgreens anyway, and the Noe Valley one gave me a better walk than the store closer to us. It seems like I also might have stopped at Whole Foods on that trip and bought some snacks to pack for the hospital, but those walks were frequent enough that they all tend to blend together a bit now.

285/366 owl tree

I did a few more detail shots of the nursery on Friday, since I noticed that I didn't have many from Monday that weren't wide angle. One of the pictures I wanted to take was of the Sharon Montrose animal prints above the shelves. After all, the baby deer picture was one of the first things I picked out for the nursery.

286/366 animal prints

On Saturday, Carmen and Elsa came up for another little photo shoot in the baby's room. Carmen wanted to take some pictures of Elsa with me and my belly, and since that ended up being my last weekend of being pregnant, the timing was perfect. It was challenging to wrangle Elsa for the pictures, though. Her usual interest in my belly button didn't last very long, so we had to put stickers over it to hold her attention. We eventually managed to get a few cute shots, and I took the below picture of Carmen and Elsa during a break in the action.

287/366 nose kiss

And so ended my last full week of pregnancy. In the next installment: a wrap-up of the third trimester.