35 + 3
We're finally starting to see the light at the end of the renovation tunnel. Today I painted that bit of hallway that was replastered after D had to cut a chunk out of it to put in wires for a thermostat. Tomorrow I'll paint the study. Once we get the study furniture and bookcases back in, the upstairs will start looking like home again.
I climbed up into the loft and started rummaging through a box of baby clothes. B and M waited under the trap door and had a pretty fun time picking up the clothes and other paraphernalia and playing with them. M was especially interested in items that B hadn't worn first, because nearly everything he owns is a hand-me-down from B. I especially enjoyed showing him the purple socks that jollymiller had bought him the day after he was born - our little joke, because I had once commented that it was so hard to find purple for a boy. Everything has been washed, dried, folded and arranged on the top shelf of the bookcase that lives in the upstairs hallway. I also found the Baby Bjorn that D's cousin sent us during my first pregnancy. Not really my carrier of choice, particularly after the first few months, but D always got on particularly well with it, so I washed that as well and now it's ready for him to use. I still have to get organized about a sling for me - I've never been happy with any of the hand-me-down ones I've had and have been looking at various unpadded ring slings. I was given a padded one after I had M, but the padding was just plain annoying.
The kids also had a fun time walking around pretending to burp a baby - each of them had a newly laundered spit up cloth over the shoulder with a doll resting against it! It was too funny.
I've also been in the throes of the whole GBS issue. In the UK GBS isn't something that pregnant women are routinely tested for and I wouldn't have bothered myself except that it's something that came up in the postmortem a year and a half ago. I wasn't sure what to do about it, but was nevertheless afraid to go to the midwife with it. Because I know that everything I say can and will be used against me. I decided to take one of my many doctor friends out for lunch and pick her brain and what we came up with wasn't half bad. It included a regime of garlic (internally, that is) and ordering a test kit for GBS - not the one available through the NHS, which has a high percentage of false negatives - and then deciding what to do if it comes up positive. I did the swabs this morning and am hoping (praying, actually) for a negative result. Of course, there are options other than IV antibiotics in labor if the test comes up positive. But I think D really freaked out when I explained last week that GBS is a possibility, no matter how slim the chances are that our baby will be affected, especially if he or she is born in water.