baby update and other good stuff

32 weeks (that means 8 weeks or 56 days left....holy crap!)

By now, your baby weighs 3.75 pounds (pick up a large jicama) and is
about 16.7 inches long, taking up a lot of space in your uterus.
You're gaining about a pound a week and roughly half of that goes
right to your baby. In fact, she'll gain a third to half of her birth
weight during the next 7 weeks as she fattens up for survival outside
the womb. She now has toenails, fingernails, and real hair (or at
least respectable peach fuzz). Her skin is becoming soft and smooth as
she plumps up in preparation for birth.

Also, we've definitely felt pointy things poking my belly. I'm not
sure if it was an elbow, hand, foot, or knee, but it was very pointy.
Also, my sister found a free stroller in her NYC apartment building
and it should get here today. I'm excited. I have another dr. app't
monday. (I'm up to every two weeks--have i mentioned that yet?)

Here is a link to be able to download talks from Jackson-Summer RUF,
including an excellent one by my husband! I mean, you can tell he's
still got some baby-preacher kinks to work out, but while I was
listening to him preach, I started to be afraid he'd be really
successful and we'd end up at a mega-church! (Yes, I know...my fears
are bizarre.) Roy loves the gospel.
http://www.fpccollege.org/GenericPage/DisplayPage.aspx?guid=5F11845B-35A7-4A42-97E7-F712BE161906

My first batch of wedding pictures came in. Yay! You are welcome to
come and see them, though since they were taken by my
bridesmaid-sister, there are a very few of the actual event and more
of the entire weekend, as well as shots of the mississippi country
side and horses.

the site i am using (yorkphoto.com) is having free shipping for orders
over $35 until august 8, so i'm hoping to be able to upload all the
rest of the pictures before then, since last time, half the cost of my
order was the shipping--but it was still pretty affordable. And the
pictures have white borders around them, which just looks cooler.

We are also seriously starting to work on clearing out space for
Iris...I've been goign through drawers of stuff and my filing cabinet.
trying to be good about throwing stuff out. I had years and years of
receipts. Some of them, i saw and thought, "gosh, that was from a trip
to Jackson just before I met Roy! I should save it." I did throw that
one out, but I did keep others--some of them from the grocery store
effectively function as a recipe! ...It's kinda funny...I have a lot
of stuff from freshman year (one of the happiest (pre-roy and
pre-counseling) years of my life), and then a lot from senior year +
grad school (also a mostly good time in my life--therapy started
working! and at the end, I met Roy). [Those of you who have known me
through college know that the years in between I was dating someone...
I'm finding it kinda ironic that those years appear like a giant blot,
both in my own memory and in the stuff that I kept. I guess that's
good, really. I want to have plenty o-room to make memories with Roy
and Iris. But I guess it's indicative, too. Anyways...off that track.
] I also still have all my notebooks from all my college and grad
school classes. I'm kinda afraid that I even have my stuff from
highschool squirreled away somewhere. I REALLY loved school and going
to class (I know, I'm a dork). And I still don't want to throw them
away. But I don't think I need to keep them in Iris's room, either.

Roy and I are both just sentimental packrats. He has a whole box
(large shoe box) full of stuff, too, that he calls his "memory box"
and I...well, right now, our whole spare room bed is covered with
stuff that I still can't bear to throw away. So I think we are going
to have to turn into scrapbookers, though not the cutesy kind with
special scissors. We've also saved all the cards from our wedding
gifts, etc., etc., etc. Did anybody else keep them? if so, what did
you do with them? I save all the wedding invitations and christmas
cards I get...I just love feeling _special_.

Of course, we are also coming to realize (at least I am especially)
the importance of filing non-emotional but important stuff--like bills
for having a baby and stuff that we'll need for taxes, and other
bills...right now we don't really have a standardized spot--though I
think we are doing pretty good about paying bills. But this lil baby
coming is certainly making us take stock of all the excess stuff we
have.

Tomorrow will be an epic quest for plain ol' cheap scrapbooks.

Also, Roy has been playing NCAA09 not quite non-stop, but a lot. He's
been playing with Mississippi State (yay! best husband ever!) and as
he finished his season last night, he only lost to LSU, one of our
players came in second in the Heismann race, and another won the Jim
Thorpe award (I think that's right). and he beat wisconsin in the
Capital One bowl. I don't know how much of that is related to our team
and how much to his video game skills, which are pretty amazing, but I
thought it was encouraging. I'm counting down the days to football
season as well as to my daughter's birth--only 29 more!

Okay. I need to go get a ride home.

I hope ya'll all have fantastic weekends!

Emily-n-Irie (our nickname, which is apparently Rastafari slang for
"positive emotions or feelings, or anything that is good. Specifically
it refers to high emotions and peaceful vibrations."