36 weeks and progress is made

So even though I'm a day and a half away from 36 weeks I'm going to call this my 36 week post. It just makes it easier.

Things are going well here in very big and pregnant land. My belly size is starting to even surprise pregnant women. I had dinner last week with a friend who is 2 weeks behind me in her pregnancy and she was shocked at the size of my belly when she saw me. Apparently I'm carrying this girl very much out in front of me and and not in my torso at all. In some sense this is nice because literally I'm all belly and haven't gained too much weight in other body parts, but this also makes getting up, bending over and most mobility almost impossible. I simply do not know how woman carry more than 1 child in their bellies!

I had a check up yesterday and I'm slightly dilated - about 1 cm, but still very thick. I've been having occasional contractions the last week so things are starting to progress. She's still breech so we'll see how that goes. Next week I get an ultrasound to see her size, position, and to make sure she's ready for the world. If she is still breech then we'll be talking to the doc about our game plan.

This last weekend we had a fabulous weekend in Atlanta. We wanted to have a get away before the baby came but could not go that far away. Atlanta is only an hour and a half from us so off we went. Friday night we checked into our fabulous hotel and chilled for a little while. We took a short walk to a restaurant that a friend recommending and had a wonderful dinner. I splurged and had dessert too. :) Then Saturday we had room service and headed out to Atlantic Station around 11. There was an art show type thing in the park area of AS which was cool - I got some jewelry and we had yummy Italian Ice Cream. We went to a few shops there and then went over to Ikea. Ikea was cool but we didn't find anything we couldn't live without. Oh, except some ribbon... I found some really nice ribbon that I got. Then we headed back to the hotel because I wanted to go to the pool. Lots of people have been telling me how wonderful it is to swim when you are pregnant so I really wanted to do this while we had a pool. Upon check in Friday they told us the pool was closed Saturday but they were running a shuttle to there other location to use that pool. I was disappointed, but figured it was no big deal. Well when it was our time to take the shuttle it was on an extended trip so they paid for a cab to take us to the other hotel. Again - not as planned but fine. We got to the hotel and I almost started crying when we saw the pool. It was so small and packed with people. It looked like a big hot tub with a bunch of skinny, tan, 20 somethings all drinking their beers and margaritas... not really a place for a giant pregnant lady to have a nice swim. But considering the work it took to get to this pool we decided to make the best of it and found a small corner and hung out it. It did feel very nice and luckily the people close to us were a little older and more understanding of how I felt. We were there for about an hour and half when we decided it was time to try to head back and get ready for dinner. Then the real trouble began. This hotel was not going to pay a cab to send us back to the other hotel and again the "shuttle" was on an extended trip and could not take us back. So we were told to tell the cab driver that the hotel would pay them when we got to our destination. Cab driver #1 was not interested in this game plan and really ticked me off. We waited forever because we thought a cab was called specifically for us despite the line of cabs that was waiting for anyone who needed a ride. After more waiting we found cab that agreed to the arrangement and later told us that the other driver was not suppose to have denied us a ride. That paying upon destination was perfectly acceptable. Anyway, this cab driver was hilarious and helped me forgot about how upset I was. At this point I was in tears. I was huge, my makeup was off because we were swimming. I was in clothes but wet underneath since my swimsuit was under them, I was tired, hungry, and I just wanted to go back to our room.

Finally we got there with only 20 minutes to get ready for our very nice dinner that we had reservations for. Amazingly I managed to shower, blow dry my hair, style it, do my make up and get all dressed up in 20 minutes. Luckily the dress fit that I packed but had never tried on and got to wear some of my new jewelry I had bought.

Dinner at The Melting Pot by the way, was incredible. It is simply one of my favorite restaurants and we had such a wonderful meal and evening. I felt more full than I ever have in my life afterwards, but it was so worth it.

Sunday was also a bit of an adventure. We again had room service but just a simple coffee and croissant breakfast - with our favorite Pain au chocolate... yum! Then we checked out and headed to "The Underground" Atlanta. I had been here once before but it was a long time ago. We were so disappointed. We walked from one end to the other and decided it was time to leave. It was nothing but cheap kiosks that sold junk, and nothing interesting. We did stop by the dairy queen there and I got a blizzard though... :)

So we talked about options, did some research online and decided to head to Little Five Points atlanta. Another shopping artsy area that I had been to when I was back in school. Again, we drove through the area and knew it was not what we wanted to do. Maybe this was all cool and fun when we were in school but it just looked like a bunch of junk to us now.

So we talked about options, did some research online and decided to go to our old standard The Lenox Mall in atlanta. We knew we would not be disappointed by the Apple store, Banana republic, Crate and Barrel, and a few other favorites... and we were so right. It was wonderful. G got some clothes and BR, I got some jewelry, a cool (and non-maternity) t-shirt at jcrew, a lamp for our patio and a few other odds and ends. It was fabulous! We stayed at the mall until it closed and then headed home.

It was a wonderful weekend and I avoided going into labor (which was the goal). :)

Since I'm not wanting to do posts without photos anymore here is a picture of some earrings that I got at BR.

And in case you missed my tiny little post below... Ella Grey is my little girls name. :)