Five Weeks [as] a Balloon

Yesterday marked 35 weeks, which means I am five weeks away from my due date and two weeks away from full term.  My belly is officially too big for comfort!

I rang in the 35 week mark by getting asked if I was carrying twins.  When I told Billy about it, he said "I bet people think that because your belly is so big, but you don't look ready to deliver because you're not big anywhere else."  When he says things like this, I mentally award myself life bonus points for choosing him as my husband and father of my child.

In case you were wondering how the belly got to this point, please see below.  It creeps me out to see this many images of myself in one place, but it is funny to see the belly grow little by little, and it captures visually my sense that I have been pregnant for a very long time.  For quite a while, I didn't recognize myself when I caught a glimpse of my profile.  Now, I hardly recognize myself when I look at old pre-pregnancy photos, so I guess I have gotten used to my ever expanding midsection.  At this point, it's hard to imagine the belly going away, but it's nice to think there will come a time when I can sleep on my stomach again.

Now that almost everything is ready for the baby's arrival, I have been devoting more time each day to my schoolwork.  I'm hoping that keeping myself occupied with brainwork will help distract me a bit from the growing bodily discomfort I'm experiencing while also helping me pass the time without getting too anxious.  We'll see!

Speaking of school, the most exciting news of the day is that my good friend Katie passed her comprehensive exam this morning!  There are several big landmarks in the trajectory of our program-- finishing coursework, passing the comprehensive exam, getting the dissertation prospectus approved, and then finally writing and defending the dissertation.  Katie's been reading and studying furiously for the past several months, and today's accomplishment means she can now boast being the first member of our PhD cohort to win the prize for the best PhD paper, the first to be awarded a merit-based fellowship, and the first to pass her comps.  Congratulations, Katie!

I'm one step closer to clearing the comps hurdle, too.  Each student has to recruit four professors to serve on her exam committee, and I set the goal of locking in three professors for mine before the baby arrives.  Today, the third professor I hoped to work with agreed to work with me, so things continue to progress according to my plans!

(Five Weeks in a Balloon is a novel by Jules Verne, more famous for Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days.  The publisher apparently claims its a satire of other adventure novels.  I just thought the title (with a slight modification) described how I feel at the moment.)