One more month

There's a song Tom has been listening to a lot lately, it's called "Growing Up" by Mackelmore and Ryan Lewis. It's about his thoughts about becoming a dad when he feels like he himself is still growing up. The chorus goes like this:

I'll be patient, one more month
You'll wrap your fingers round my thumb
Times are changing, I know
But who am I if I'm the person you become
If I'm still growing up, up, up, up
I'm still growing up, up, up, up
I'm still growing up

Needless to say, we've both had it in our heads lately, and that's because we've officially reached the one month mark before the official due date of our little kumquat. Here's the 36 weeks "bumpie" taken one day late since I was on a 24 hour shift on the official 36 weeks date. It was my last 24 hour call shift before she arrives! 

 

Going back a bit to catch up for the past month (since the last time I posted I was at the 31 week mark)--we had an amazing Thanksgiving celebration with friends! I was working a busy rotation but Tom really wanted to host Thanksgiving so we decided to go for it. I, of course, broke into the pre-thanksgiving pickles a bit early in anticipation of the feast

 He had the option to stay and work from home the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, allowing him time to prepare the bird!

The day before I had boiled down our pumpkins from the garden to make pumpkin puree for our pumpkin pie dessert

I came home from work on Wednesday to an amazingly delicious smelling home, with a beautiful bird in the oven!

We tossed on some potatoes, made some gravy and anxiously awaited everyone else to arrive

The rest of the residents in my class joined in with all the classic side dishes

We were all sooo excited at the quality of Tom's cooking 

Everything turned out beautifully and we all gathered around the two tables put together and dined like royalty

We toasted to the success of  our class getting almost half of second year of residency. And toasted to our joys of Ali being born one year ago, kumquat due in less than 2 months, Julia due just a few months after that --and Andrey and Diana announcing that they are expecting in June! It's gonna be a baby-full class of residents and we couldn't be more excited to be growing up together as adultts, doctors, and parents

Somehow this is the only group photo we got the whole day. despite it being a bit blurred, it's one of my favorites we've ever taken

 More milestones for the pregnancy passed with each passing week. And each week I feel just a bit larger and larger....

 After our Friendsgivin I worked the night shift on Thanksgiving day and then we were off Friday morning after I got off of work for my favorite activity of the year--Christmas Tree Hunting!

We knew it would be the last adventure in the truck before we switch over to our family car. We drove to Vermont and arrived at the Forest Service Station just in time on black Friday for us to be able to purchase our $5 tree permit, just like old times

 Then we settled into our home for the weekend. It was a gorgeous (and ridiculously spacious) home in Rutland, Vermont. $89/night was never so worth it!

 

It made us wish we had coordinated more with our friends and had a whole crew of us go up together! Look at our cute view out of the dining room window:

 

 We enjoyed not being out in the craziness of black Friday shoppers, instead, enjoying time together as we reached another milestone in pregnancy - 34 weeks!

We thought at first we would have to use a wifi hot spot to be able to get the UW husky game (and not just any game, the Apple Cup) streaming, but it turns out they just didn't advertise on VRBO that the home came with wifi!

The next morning we were off to find our perfect tree.

It turns out, it was MUCH harder than we thought it would be. We started with a hike because we thought we would have better luck right off of the trail because we were literally told "just go to the woods, you can cut down a tree from anywhere." Without any sort of direction, we weren't sure where to start.

 

 It was not strenuous or a hard climb but it was a forest full of maple trees rather than coniferous ones. We thought maybe this was going to be our best bet:

We found one downed tree from a storm that was one of the only pines around. 

Thinking that we might not get an actual tree we took some of the bows off of it for wreath making, just in case we didn't find our tree (you can tell I was getting hopeless)

 

Finally, after driving around the green mountains, and starting to think we weren't going to find one (and it had started to rain with heavy clouds that made it feel ominously dark out), we came across a patch of trees that were ripe for the picking. 

They were taller than they should be....but we were starting to get desperate 

We found "the one", which was about 20+ feet tall (shh....don't tell anyone that we broke the 20ft rule). 

We got it down, then we had to trim it to size before hauling it to the truck

I was grateful we had the truck, it's going to be very different without it. 

We got quite a few funny looks from people driving by when we brought it across the road

But we were both incredibly pleased with our find!

At this point it had started to rain quite heavy. We got back to the truck and enjoyed our traditional cocoa, wheat thins, clementines, and skittles 

Then we ventured up to Burlington, Vermont to have a little post-hike snack

Ben and Jerry's started in Vermont after all.

Downtown Burlington is pretty picturesque

 

 Including the tree in the center of town

We wandered around like tourists and then decided to head "home" to Rutland to catch the downtown tree lighting. For reference, the tree above is in Burlington. And the tree below is the tree for Rutland....

A little less anti-climactic don't you think? Well, it didn't matter. We made it home in time for the Apple cup. We snuggled up with some tea in the living room and settled in for the night. 

We explored Rutland a little before driving home, including one of the cutest little coffee shops we've ever been to called the Yellow Deli

And on our drive back to Rhode Island we stopped in to catch some breakfast at another adorable diner

It was cold, but it was pleasant :)

Then we got home with enough daylight to get the tree put up (after a trimming of course...)

And the wreaths made

 

And one of the best parts was knowing that we got to dine on my favorite post-thanksgiving meal: grandma's turkey bisque soup!

The lights in the home make the house so much warmer and welcoming

The finished product turned out pretty great as far as we are concerned

We have loved snuggling on the couch, soaking in the season

We've got ourselves quite a few "booms" (the name for our tree ornaments we make from the trimmed edge of the christmas trees

 Once we got back from our Vermont get-away (baby-moon as some would say), we were back to the daily grind. But, we did get a very pleasant surprise one morning after hosting one of the UW medical students who was interviewing at Brown for OB/GYN residency. She too grew up in Montana and left us with these amazing Montana gifts!

It certainly made gong to work that morning a little easier. Once I hit the 35 week mark, we also got to celebrate by going to see "Finding Neverland" with some of my co-residents at the Providence Performing Arts Center

 

Other things that made it easier to be working a crazy schedule was knowing that holiday parties were around the corner, to add to the festivities! We recreated a photo we took last year with my co-residents Leanne (left) and Meri (right). Although I look just a LITTLE BIT different this year :)

 Tom was able to make it down from Boston in time (alas, I missed his work Christmas party because it was in Boston from 4-6 PM) the night after my work christmas party....so we had to celebrate enough for both parties in one night :)

It's so fun to be able to feel our little kumquat more and more each day

 Our biggest end cap to the last 5 weeks: the arrival of our new car! When we ordered it a while back we were told it likely wouldn't get here until January 5th...a date we both have been thinking about a lot lately, and knowing that we wouldn't be available to go get a car most likely! We purchased a Subaru Crosstrek to replace the truck. 

 

And I'm not sure we could be more pleased with our decision to go with a subaru!

 

I honestly can't really believe that I was able to "convince" Tom into it. But it seems like he isn't in need of convincing

It's been a wonderful and simultaneously rough month this past month....particularly this past week. I worked Sunday through Friday with Friday being a 24 hour shift. All in all I think this week capped out at about 94 hours of work. Hard to believe in retrospect. If someone had told me I'd be working a 90 hour week while 8 months pregnant, I probably would have laughed. But it's real. It happened, and I'm tired but doing better than I might have expected. I am so grateful to have had such an uncomplicated pregnancy and I look forward to my final month on a much lighter rotation with much fewer hours.I'm not sure when I'll post again...it may not be until our little kumquat arrives. How crazy is that?!?!?! Merry Christmas to all!