fall changes

Lots of changes going on around here. The summer was swamped with home-improvement projects, including getting j's room done and the baby room completed. We still have a bit more to do, but I'm feeling much better since we were able to throw out and give away a lot of clutter.

j began kindergarten last week; I can't quite believe it. He seems to be doing well and enjoying it, though the first day he had a meltdown getting *off* the bus, when he demanded that he stay on the bus and in school forever.

It's hard to tell, but we think he's been doing fine in the class. Apparently there's a system displayed in his classroom where each student has either a green, yellow, or red card to indicate the quality of his/her behavior. j informed me that "Green means you're good, yellow means you're kinda good, and red means they call the police." I assured him that his teacher probably wouldn't call the police, which he initially refuted, but the next day he told me that no, "they" would just call mama and daddy if he got a red card. He claims, however, to have been "green all week," which means today at school he gets a prize.

I'm still pregnant. 33-34 weeks, though I haven't been keeping track of everything as assiduously as I did last time. As I did with my pregnancy with j, I've developed gestational diabetes, though I do think that rowing so much--until 6 months pregnant--kept it at bay for a while. I was negative for GD at 20 weeks, but borderline at 28 weeks. So now I get to once again track my food, pee in a cup every morning, and check my blood sugar four times a day. It seems harder to control this time so I'm trying to monitor it closely. The midwives I'm with have been pretty good about working with me on it. I'll have another ultrasound next week to check on the baby. Since I haven't had one in three months, it's not a bad idea, though I'm trying to keep the interventions to a minimum so I don't get labeled as a high-risk pregnancy.

I'm not teaching this semester until the baby arrives, which gives me time to monitor all this crap (fun!), but also time to do some writing. I'm working on trying to finally get some things published, so we'll see how that goes.