Week 34: Just because I haven’t posted this week…

33 weeks, 5 days.

I’ve meant to post this week, seriously I have, but I’m been busy and tired and um… busy and tired. I’m nearly 8 months pregnant, people! Cut me some slack!

The week started off busy and hasn’t really let up – Sunday morning, I woke up to the following view from our front door (this was actually taken later in the day, when some of it had melted – as always, click to embiggen):

It was actually coming down pretty fast and furious in the morning, which made me think about the remains of this year’s garden. See, Christian had salvaged the last tomatoes before the freeze the night before, but we still had pumpkins out there which we were waiting until the last minute to harvest. I didn’t know if one freeze and some snow would do much to them, but I figured we ought to take the (mostly) ripe ones inside and start processing them anyway.

Now, keep in mind that pregnant women past a certain point cannot bend over. So me trying to get pumpkins out of the snowy pumpkin patch that took over our garden was um… probably pretty entertaining for the neighbors.

Also, in case you didn’t know this, pumpkin vines and stems are thorny and those little buggers are really hard to get out of your fingers. Just FYI – consider it a public service announcement.

Anyhow. So the following is not our entire year’s pumpkin harvest (I know of at least 4 other pumpkins that have gone to loving homes so far, and there are still some green ones on the vine in the back which may or may not be usable) , but this is what this big ole’ pregnant lady picked and cleaned up on Sunday morning to save from Jack Frost – click to enlarge:

That big one may look pretty diminutive with no context, but it’s larger than the Small Monster belly and will become our Jack-O’-Lantern.

The rest were destined for pumpkin pies and such, and I spent most of Sunday cutting pumpkins open, scooping out seeds and pulp, separating seeds for delicious roasting and eating pleasure, and roasting and pureeing pumpkin flesh to be made into pies, breads and soups.

That’s a whole lot of pumpkin, and sadly, it makes much less eating pumpkin than you might think. Nevertheless, I conquered all but two of them (the two greenish ones), and our freezer is now stocked with containers of fresh yellow-orange pumpkin.

And after that, I was exhausted. (Also, I dropped painstakingly separated and cleaned pumpkin seeds all over the floor, which in my exhausted and hormonal state made me cry, but I thankfully have a lovely husband who knew I needed a hug before we got it all cleaned up…)

The thing about being pregnant for me is that I never feel, upfront, like a task is going to make me want to pass out. And then I perform said task and find I can’t do anything else that day. And often then next.

And so Monday, I did nothing for most of the day before going to a talk in Christian’s department from some folks at Boulder (a very good talk, I might add) and then out to dinner with them before heading off to a coffee place to finish my German homework. (Note: while my German homework isn’t excessive, pregnant brain makes concentration really hard, and so it takes me a lot of extra time to read some of the texts…) Then I went home, watched the usual Olbermann with the snuggly evil German, and passed out. I think.

Tuesday I had to get up early for class and did some cleanup around the house and some laundry and cleaned some of Small Monster’s new toys and… gah, who knows. Was exhausted by the time I was done. Watched Olbermann and crashed at the end of the day.

And then there was Wednesday, which involved some more cleanup and organization and stuff I can’t remember, but whatever it was, that tired me out too. Oh, yeah, I finished putting Small Monster’s new clean clothes away and getting his co-sleeper in order, which consisted of the the surprisingly exhausting task of getting the bed linens and mattress pad on. I swear, they made that damned thing as hard to assemble and use as they humanly could. Went to Catechumenate and then came home and passed out after Olbermann. Are we seeing a theme here?

Thursday – up early for class again. Came home and started work on finally finishing the raising and lowering mechanism on the remaining roman shades in the living room which I made nearly a year ago. I still need to make bedroom blinds so that we can keep light out in the wee hours when Small Monster arrives (and, also, so I can stop entertaining the neighbors with views they really shouldn’t have , but it takes so long and involves so much work on the floor (remember, pregnant women don’t bend…) that I’ve been putting it off. It needs to happen this week, though… ugh. Just sewing the rings onto the backs of them takes me forever (I’m not very coordinated and I get bored, plus they have to be sewn on very well so as not to come off when raising the shades, so it took me about 5 hours to get 30 rings sewn on, which, with bending over to do it, left me, you guessed it, exhausted), and, well, I’m not really much of a seamstress.

Let’s face it – I hated Home Ec. (And my 8th grade Home Economics teacher, Mrs. Willis, pretty much hated me, I think…)

Anyhow. Now it’s Friday, so I’m going to get those curtains hung and the drawstrings attached and do the final big cleaning on the upstairs.

At the end of this all, I will be, you guessed it, exhausted.

But for the record, Small Monster is doing wonderfully – waking me up with kicks and flutters and hiccups. I can’t believe he could be here in as little as 3 weeks and still be just fine…