So I went back to the doctor on Friday for a regular check-up. Baby's heart sounds good, I dunno whaddafuk's up with my weight (I may just stop looking at the scale for a while), blood pressure is still excellent.

I tried making a crack to the doctor about being allowed to wish the baby would come, now that I'm past the 37-week mark (which is what the medical world considers officially full-term) and she kind of rolled her eyes at me and said something about wishing they could tell people their due dates were a week later than they actually were, so people would be happy when the baby came on time.

I must conclude that she's either never had a child, or that she was heavily sedated for most of her last month. How can you be this big and this awkward and this uncomfortable and not look forward to the end of it?

She also prescribed me an ointment for a rash I've got on a somewhat sensitive area. My books had all told me to expect some itching in that area, so I hadn't thought about it more than to chalk it up to yet one more annoying thing about being pregnant, but I thought I'd ask her about it if only to see when she thought it might stop, and she decided it was a rash.

I'm torn between thinking Thank the gods it's not supposed to itch that much normally, and worrying about what'll happen if it's not gone by the time the baby shows up.

Matt and I went on Saturday to the wedding of our friend Becky. Everything was beautiful, and if there were any of those last-minute hitches that always occur, I didn't notice them particularly.

(Well, one. The clubhouse hosting the reception didn't think to put "reserved" signs on the tables reserved for the close family and wedding party, so at one point they had to ask some people to move. But that's pretty minor, in the scheme of things, really.)

And, luckily, there were enough people there that Matt and I both knew that we got to spend most of our time chatting with friends rather than pretending to be interested in Uncle Earnest's earwax collection.

I'd been afraid that my back would give me trouble and force us home early, but by the time we left, I was more tired than in pain, and lots of other people had left before us.

A few brief notes about the actual wedding ceremony:

For a twenty-minute ceremony, there was way too much praying. A prayer to start out, a prayer to bless the rings, a prayer to bless the marriage, a prayer to close things off... It's only a twenty-minute ceremony, for petesake!

I haven't exactly been the most delicate of flowers in my late pregnancy. I'm prone to grunting and making "oof" noises when the baby kicks and squirms. But I managed to make it entirely through the ceremony without making any weird noises. Matt commented on it, too - he'd been envisioning the perfect scene: "Let us pray..." "OOF!"

And it's a miracle I managed not to grunt or huff at the baby, too, because she apparently was furious about the organ music. Every time that sound started up, she not only squirmed, but writhed. I spent the whole ceremony stroking and patting my belly (but not grunting!), trying to get her to calm down after the wedding march, and she finally relaxed just in time for the recessional music. (Not that I can really blame her...)

After the wedding, we met up with the Brandts for dinner, and then went over to their house afterward to relax and chat. (Well, as much as one can relax and chat with a toddler in the vicinity.) But we managed to talk a little between reading Emma books, and wearing her as a hat, and watching her utter delight at being carried around on Matt's shoulders. ("Emma UP!")

Sunday was the Day Of Errands. We went to the bank and the comic book store and Target and Babies R Us and the Bath and Body Works at the mall.

I was so proud of myself, before we set out, that I'd made up a list of everything we needed to buy, and what we needed to take with us - and then we walked into the Babies R Us and realized we'd forgotten to bring our bag of things that we need to exchange. Bah!

Oh, well. It's not like we won't be going back.

But I think that we now have everything we really needed or wanted to have on-hand before the baby's birth. I'm sure it won't be long after we get the baby home that one of us comes up with a variant of, "Oh, shit! We don't have [insert absurdly necessary baby item here]!" But for the moment, I'm pretty sure we're set.

I say think because, when I was flipping through our registry and writing down necessary items that we hadn't received yet, I noticed that there are a couple of items listed as purchased that we don't have on-hand. Neither of them is something we can't do without for a little while, but because of our problems with the online registry database, we were left wondering whether we should buy them anyway and then return the duplicates when/if we got them, or if we should wait until after we got home with the baby to get them.

We decided to wait. We were already buying a lot of stuff, anyway. (Oh, our aching checkbook...)

And speaking of the aching checkbook, it's going to get hurt even more pretty soon, I fear. Our AirPort is now completely and officially dead. When Matt plugged it in this morning, it flashed nothing but red lights, and he said he could here a sort of hissing noise coming from it, which simply can not be good.

So he'll call Apple back tonight and see if they'll actually replace it, since it's less than three years old, or if we have to bite the bullet and buy a new one ourselves.

We've still got the PC hooked up to the house line, and both of our laptops have internal modems, so we can check mail and such occasionally, but for the little bit, we probably won't be online very much during the evenings, and e-mail has suddenly become a much less reliable method of contact.

(Nine days until I begin my maternity leave!)

--Liz