Pregnancy: Week 36 & Panama City

I'm sitting in bed on my last night of my 36th week. Dog on one side, cat on the other.
Tomorrow I'll be in week 37 and you know what that meeeeans.
A FULL TERM VIOLET.

This week has been pretty good to me. Still uncomfortable, but what's new these days. I had a doctor's appointment on Monday. She asked if I would like her to do an exam and I immediately said yes. I've been curious if my body has started preparing. No dilation (as expected) but I was happy to hear that my cervix has already thinned 50%. Violet has dropped some, but she still has a ways to go. I've carried her really high the whole pregnancy, which lost its charm weeks ago when she grew large enough to battle it out with my ribcage.

I've got my hospital bag packed and ready to go. Now that I have less then a month until my due date I'm kind of twittling my thumbs a bit. I'm so ready to meet this little girl!

Ben and I are only about an hour from the beach and I've really been wanting to go before Violet arrives and our world gets turned upside down. We've been so busy over the past few weekends, but we finally made a point to go today. The weather was perfect. It was about 78 degrees with an amazing breeze coming off of the ocean.

Last week I found a bucket list that I made several years ago. It was fun to read everything I wrote and really fun being able to mark several things off. One of the things on the list that I still haven't done is catch a fish, so I really wanted to try to catch one off of the pier. We went to Panama City Beach so we could go to Pier Park and I was excited to try to catch something. By something... I mean a cute little fish. I wasn't wanting to catch anything grand. So, I was pretty shocked when we had been walking on the pier for three minutes and a guy caught a stingray.


He couldn't reel the stingray in with his fishing pole, so a pier attendant had to come retrieve it with a big hook (right side of the photo). It did quite a number on the stingray's side fin, or wing as I kept calling it. After removing the hook they threw it back into the water, but the whole thing had me afraid to fish. Looking over the edge of the pier you could see groups of stingrays cruising around and I was terrified of catching one. Ben fished for a while and had no luck catching anything. According to all of the old men hanging out on the pier the wind was blowing the wrong direction to catch anything (except stingrays apparently). So we decided to spend the rest of the day relaxing on the beach and try for my first fish in the lake here on Fort Rucker. After all, there were people using fish the size I was hoping to catch as bait on the pier... Sheesh.




I really enjoyed sitting and relaxing on the beach. I admit the day was a bit tiring. As if walking in sand isn't already difficult, throw in being pregnant and I was moving at the pace of a glacier. Walking around caused some sexy feet and leg swelling. I've gained 30 pounds now and carrying the weight around makes me want to nap perpetually. 




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