35 & Honeydew-sized

Jack keeps telling me our weekly baby updates must say "watermelon-sized" this Sunday because my belly is huuuge, but, to his disappointment, I remind him they compare only the baby's size to fruits and vegetables, not my whole belly.

Had a 35-week checkup on Friday - first one since that inconvenient mixup last time with "number of people accompanying" me (my minor children) due to Covid. I have to admit how nice it was to go on my own, though. All is well and ticking along fine, and next week, doc would like to get one more scan in because just sitting on the table with the measuring tape, this baby "might be a beast!" Measuring a little ahead of schedule / bigger than 35. We shall see!

School ticked along well this week! Paul's motivation will pick up a smidge once we get in a full, regular routine (and then break it with baby's arrival...), Ada's work ethic is phenomenal, but I can't say enough about how great a little student Jack is turning out to be! It's like he just needed or wanted the specific reason of "this is now school" to jump in, try hard things, and accept the challenge to even improve himself. It's only been 7 days, how can he already have improved?! But he has, and it's so cute. Lil Ms. Pip is as spitfire as ever, but she's enjoying being with all the school kids, too. I'm thinking it's just the novelty of school starting, but she definitely wants a book and pencil, too; so I've had to fish out an old preK book of Jack's ... and, quite frankly, and completely unsurprisingly, she's probably going to be with us for real before too long. Stinker. 

Dylan has been a busy bee, indeed! He's been working on a dreamy built-in bookshelf for the classroom, which will eventually consist of two large panels flanking the window, a window seat, and an across-the-top section over the window and large panels. But Stage I has included getting one side panel ready for all the schooling materials, and after only one week of being "displaced" in our dining room, we get to start in the classroom tomorrow - yay!

 

So, Pip likes bugs. She's a bit afraid of them if they jump out or do something unexpected, which is why, perhaps, her faves so far are snails, but she takes a liking to all the lizards we see from the front porch, our tons of butterfly visitors, cicada "shells", saving sidewalk worms, the works. She even found an actual dead cicada, not its molted casing but the real bug, and played with it for a couple of days; even named it Ben. So Paul thought she'd be interested in seeing this huge dead cockroach he found while poking around the front gardens. Oh, she was interested, alright! She picked it up and brought it in to show me. Paul was in stitches swearing he didn't think she'd bring it in the house, and after many calm oos and aahs, I encouraged her to bring it out to the back patio, where she placed it carefully down and said, such a pretty red-brown - bye bug!

Spent the Feast of the Assumption of Mary feasting indeed, and it was such a lovely family day, one the likes of which we haven't had in a while. We went to Mass, had a big bacon and egg brekky, Dylan setup the kids' (Jack's bday) blow-up pool + shade canopy, built the second part of the bookshelf, had homemade donuts, made personal pizzas, I weeded a bit, and we set up the classroom for tomorrow. Sometimes I can do a ton and feel totally normal; other times I do almost nothing and feel uncomfortable and exhausted. I may never understand.

Oh, and Dylan took another PCR test just for kicks; still negative, praise God!

Oh, and just in case Covid wasn't enough to worry about before our planned Braud-family beach week in Galveston next week, there's this sneaky Grace to consider, too: