Two more things can be checked off the Baby 2K7 Preparation List: a crib and a stroller!
But before I delve deeper into that scintillating topic, we can also check off doing something about my failing eyesight (by the by, for those of you interested, I spelled "scintillating" right on the first try!)
Actually, you know what. That story isn't all that interesting, other than finding out, while my pupils were nice and dilated and the doc was shining a very bright light through them, that the periphery of my retina is so perfect that it's "textbook". So between that, being dentally boring, and having a kid with a perfect nasal bone, I pretty much have it made in the shade.
Speaking of shades, I had to wear my sunglasses the whole rest of the afternoon, thanks to that whole thing with the pupil dilation. For a while, I even had to wear the disposable Grandma shades they gave me to put under my glasses. Most embarrassing.
So after my adventures in eye dilation, we went to get a stroller and crib. Consumer Reports liked one of the strollers Graco makes, so we looked at that. A lady with her little baby girl happened by and gave the stroller a glowing firsthand review, so we settled on that one.
Next, we got a salesperson to hook us up with the crib we picked out the previous weekend. She gave us the dimensions of the box, we told her that we were going to put it in a Toyota Corrolla, and she told us, basically, that we would need to find another way of getting the crib home.
As luck would have it, my brother got an SUV last fall. I called him up to see if he could come by the store sometime in the next 30 days, the maximum amount of time that they would hold the crib for us, and he said that having an SUV means having no reason to ever turn down such requests. Furthermore, not only could he do it, but we happened to catch him at the precise moment when he could come right away.
So we bought the crib, loaded it in the SUV, and got it home, all in the same day. My brother = teh awe50me.
The actual construction of the crib would have to wait another week. We'll get to that in a bit. I'm doing this chronologically, y'see.
The next day, we had our tour of birth place at the hospital (I believe that's what they call it there - The Birth Place). They walked us through the various stages we would go, up to and including the delivery room and the post-partum room. The delivery room was much nicer than the post-partum room. It was bigger, newer, and had a DVD player, so we can watch Firefly while the baby is being born. The nurse said that the second floor was getting upgraded, so by early April there could be post-partum rooms that are as nice upstairs. (pending 2nd floor upgrade). We'll just have to hope.
Not surprisingly, we didn't get a tour of the NICU (Neo-natal Intensive Care Unit), but we did see some parents come out of there while we were looking at the nursery where babies go right after they're born. They looked sad, but upbeat. I hope to not get to see what the NICU looks like.
After the tour we gathered in a conference room and had the exact same cookies we've had at every single other class. While she was handing out informational stuff out to us and giving us important phone numbers while M was clearly still digging around for a pen (said M, "Omigod, she did not just do that!"), we watched the readouts for every delivery room on the big screen. Lots of rooms had such a screen, where each impending baby's heartbeat and contraction activity can be viewed. So if something is amiss, it's a safe bet someone in the Birth Place will know at a moment's notice and come a-runnin'!
This past weekend, we put together the crib. We had been warned by a seasoned crib-constructing vet (my brother) to make sure that we didn't put anything on backwards. So far as I know, we successfully heeded that warning. But it wasn't exactly easy. The directions not only lacked much in the way of text, but they were also glued to the mattress support board, which made carrying them with us, as we went from one side of the room to the other, pretty much impossible. But we got the job done, and it looks very nice in the baby's room!
And since I delayed this post until after Saturday's 7:30 AM non-stress test (even though I wasn't anywhere near done at the time anyway), here is the update on that. Baby 2K7 was extremely cooperative and got nice and active when activity was called for! It probably helped that M ate breakfast during the test. And because it was so early, before any receptionists had shown up, the nurse gave us a free parking pass, instead of the usual $2 pass. Not that it ultimately mattered, since the parking attendant hadn't shown up yet either.
By the way, I came up with an alternate title for the previous post: "March in Baltimore: Comes In Like A Bipolar Lion, Leaves Like A Confused Lamb"
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