HPSP: Day three...

... brought to you by my in-laws who have Small Boy for his regular Wednesday visit to The Farm.

I spent most of the afternoon hunched over the loom and have finally reached the actual weaving stage of weaving this baby blanket. I've always been slow at the mechanics of dressing my loom (warping the loom, threading the heddles, slaying the reed, and fine-tuning the tension) even without an enormous belly getting in my way, but boy the belly really slowed me down this time. Even under the best of circumstances, dressing the loom for a project of any size, say for example a 30"x30" baby blanket, will easily take me as long, if not longer, than actually weaving the project off. It's frustrating, and there must be more efficient ways to do what I do, or maybe I just don't weave often enough to develop a good fast repetative motion. At any rate, the grunt work is done and now I can move on to the rhythm of throwing the shuttle.

In baby news, I had an appointment with Dr. Fantabulous this morning - 36 weeks 2 days. Baby is continuing to grow, I have ample amniotic fluid, urine dip and blood pressure nothing to worry about, see you in two weeks. I need to think about if I want to be tested for Group B Strep (testing isn't standard here and we didn't do it in the Small Boy pregnancy) at my next appointment. Basically my chances of losing a baby to a GBS infection (in Switzerland it's 6 fatalities per 80,000 births though rates of non-fatal complications are of course higher) are about equal to my chances of going into anaphylactic shock - and thus endangering my life and the baby's - as a result of the IV penicillan I'd be given should a swab turn up positive. I have an allergy to erythromycin - this always confuses the heck out of my doctors because erythromycin is the drug of choice for people allergic to penicillan and they always think I've got it backwards - and although I've never experienced and allergic reaction to penicillan I also haven't taken penicillan in about 20 years. This would be a pretty sub-optimal time to discover that I've developed a cross-allergy/penicillan sensitivity in the intervening years. I didn't give not getting the test a second thought in the Small Boy pregnancy and I can't figure out why I'm less certain this time around.

Ach je! I hate making decisions like this.