Flippy.

Good News! Baby is now head-down! Hopefully it will stay that way for the next 11 weeks or so. It's pretty weird, I can usually feel now where baby's butt is and I can feel when it turns it's head and all that other squirmy stuff. Of course I still get all of the crazy punches and stuff that keep me up at night. Baby is almost as long as it will be at birth. According to my books, baby is about 16-18 inches long right now. So it only has a couple more inches to grow. However, it still only weighs about 3 pounds, so it still needs to fatten up and double that before birth.

I think I have decided where to put the birthing tub in the house. I was nervous about having it downstairs because I thought I might want to be on the same floor as the bathroom, but yesterday Katie and Anne (our midwife and her assistant) assured me that they will probably be making me do a lot of stair-climbing anyway and that if I'd be more comfortable with the pool downstairs then that is probably what I should do. Other things we did / talked about at my appointment yesterday: drew some blood to check my hemoglobin, measured fundal height, checked baby's heart beat, and scheduled our next appointment. From here on our appointments get more frequent. We are now starting every other week visits and in about 6 weeks we will be going every week.

Tonight we start birthing classes with Anne (midwife's assistant and also a doula). She is going to come to our house and teach us everything we need to know. Of course she won't teach us everything tonight, but we'll get a start and then we'll meet with her several more times over the next month or two. I think tonight we will be starting with talking about early labor and stuff and she is also going to give us some bios on some of the doulas that she works with. We are pretty certain that we are going to hire a doula now, but we don't really know any of them very well. So hopefully after tonight we'll at least have a lead on someone whose personality would mesh with our plans/goals.

Other fun news, I'm done with orientation at work, so I'm now only working a 0.8 instead of 1.0... with equates with 2 extra days off per pay period. So hopefully that will give me enough time to get the house cleaned up a little before the baby shower (which is in about 3 weeks!).