33 Weeks

Saturday, October 17th, I was thrown a baby shower by three of my friends (K, L, and A). We had rented out a local restaurant called Blue Marlin and had them cater. My friends provided the cake, decorations and fun. It was cat themed so each of them had fuzzy cat ear headbands on when I arrived, and a pair waiting for me. The cake was a bright pink cat cake (homemade by A and L) that was chocolate inside and raspberry frosting outside.

The table decorations were rubber duckies used as photo holders with pictures of me, T and the cat. Each table had a healthy supply of Kit Kats and sparkles. It was all very cute.
We ate some food, socialized and then I opened presents. There were no silly baby shower games, which you have to love. We received amazing presents. One of the most memorable was a collection of onesies K had made that had different designs on them that were unique. There was a cat, a rubber ducky, a got maps (with a picture of the part of England we were in), a future Rock Band shredder, and one giving the pronunciation of our last name. Another great gift was a collection of Mother Goose rhymes that the giver H was read/ learned to read with when she was a child.

I refused to read the messages in the cards because I did not want to cry at my own shower. I was so touched though that it was really difficult not to, but somehow I managed. Having all of my family thousands of miles away becomes more apparent when you have moments like these, but then I realize that I have a very large group of friends here that I would consider family, and I feel very blessed and lucky to know them. Needless to say, I made it through the shower and clean up without bursting into tears, but there were misty eyed moments and I did cry on the way home.

The other thing to happen this week was work related. I was supposed to travel down to my research site, but being this far along, my OB and I had some hesitations being somewhere where medical assistance would be more than an hour away. I contacted the site manager to let him know that I could not travel, but neglected to specifically say that it was due to the pregnancy. We had been restricted from travel from the university last spring, and he assumed that this was the same case, and so he fired off an email to my supervisor to complain and hopefully force the university to let us travel again. This made my supervisor jumpy that the site manager was not pleased with the progress made on the project, and the whole thing just blew up in a matter of minutes. I spent about an hour on the phone with both of them getting it all cleared up and getting confirmation that the site manager was in fact pleased with the project so far. I felt so stupid for not being more specific during my email and chalk it all up to the fact that I have been trying to act as if I am not pregnant during this semester because I didn't want it to cause problems such as this.