garden news

Not a lot got done this weekend, and a fair amount wanted/needed to get done. Excuses include pouring rain Saturday and vagaries of what The Child wanted to do Sunday.

To do:
mow side (desperate!), back, trim needy places
thin sprouted carrots and beets
plant dahlia
bring calla lily, amaryllis, ficus out from indoors
build bean trellis and plant pole beans
acquire tomato seedlings and plant (we missed the farmer's market Saturday)

Many things happened despite my lack of activity, however:
The later producer of peas I and II is blooming.
The earlier producer has 2-3 inch pods, not yet fattening.
We ate a small salad of baby spinach and mesclun. Unfortunately someone of the rabbit variety got there before me, or it would have been a bigger salad.
Iris are blooming; of course the biggest and showiest are the ones I like least (5-inch yellow bearded iris). They suffered some in the rain and wind, and from Casper's complete inability to resist touching/picking flowers.
Tulips, dogwood, anything else previously mentioned is gone by, except a few straggling azaleas. The oak trees have fully leafed out and I'm packing away the sweaters and calling it summer.

pregnancy news; baby names

28 weeks tomorrow; Had the glucola appointment this morning (i.e. the "I drank the Kool-Aid test" - where you drink a nasty sugary drink, they wait an hour and take your blood, and see if you have gestational diabetes.) BP 100/62, weight 160 (so BACK OFF mother), fundus measurement normal, baby heartbeat normal. Now we go to every two week visits.

mr. flea begins to be worried we are not doing enough to prepare this time around; I told him to go re-read the book from our childbirth class. He wants to hire a doula again, which except for the expense seems like a good idea to me, as it was very valuable to have someone there with us last time (even though the someone there doing most of the support was my mother and not the doula). The doula is really to spell mr. flea, but I think the L&D nurses would have been more involved and supportive last time if we hadn't had my mother and a doula. We need to talk about it in more detail.

A woman at work I don't know well had her daughter, Charlotte, by C-section at 37 weeks on Friday; they did a section because they were worried the baby wasn't getting enough nutrition through the umbilical cord, and indeed at 37 weeks she weighed 4 pounds 11 oz which I think is on the small side even for 3 weeks early. I think the baby may be in the NICU still but seems okay and just needs to gain some weight and figure out how to suck.

We discussed baby names in the car on the way to the appointment, and mr. flea's gut instinct of the moment was David, and mine was Eddie. Either would do, though there are a ton of other things in contention (Theodore, Charles, Marcus/Mark, Anton/Anthony, Idris Elba...)