Waiting...

Since passing 37 weeks, we are at the point where the baby is full-term. The due date (July 14) is still over 2 weeks away, but I don't really feel like leaving the flat to go anywhere. Today we even missed church, mostly because now my feet only fit in flip-flops, and the journey to church is about 45 minutes each way with half of that being walking. This will sound funny, but it is also so HOT here! What happened to that London rain? Oh well.

Washing baby clothes - so much more colorful than our clothes!

Drying baby clothes in the kitchen.

We have gotten nice gifts and baby gear from family at home, and some women in our ward gave us a "borrow" baby shower. Since we can't take a lot home on the plane, they let us borrow things we would need here, like the cute Moses Basket. Also, they got together and bought a gift certificate (in dollar$!) to Target - I love Target. Not sure how they knew, but it was perfect.

Baby shower with the Hyde Park Ward, June 20

To get an idea of when the baby might come, I asked around to my older sister and my mom. Although usually extremely helpful people, they are not helpful when it comes to predicting through family history when a baby might come. Here's what I mean: Ang - two kids, two planned C-sections 7+ days before her due dates. My mom: 1 baby right on the due date (yes, apparently Angela has always been perfect), 1 baby 5 days early, 1 baby 3 weeks late, 1 baby with C-section before the due date. No patterns there. So we'll just have to see.

Something borrowed... the Moses basket and some gifts from home.

Health-wise I have been really blessed. Since we don't have a car here and I've been walking everywhere for a year, my blood pressure is actually down a good 10-15 points from my norm. In general everything is good, just some average pregnancy complaints, and they just kicked in the last few weeks. Ben says I am the best pregnant person ever. But it's pretty easy to be that when he is willing to do practically everything for me that I can't do myself. Husband of the year award goes to... BEN!

Ben's favorite shower favor/decoration - the "nappy" (British for diaper) cake.

Here is a picture of super-pregnant Heather. I don't love it, but people have been asking. This is the night we went to see Hamlet. It was great. But I knew then that it was the last time I could sit through a play being this pregnant. We were smart enough to grab a fan on the way to the show.
One last thing: people are asking if we have chosen a name, and the truth is we are just going to wait until we see (her?). But we have some good ideas...

To be!

Hooray! Ben went to the (very long) ticket line for Hamlet yesterday, and the box office traded him tickets for this Friday night straight across for our tickets. I'll tell Mr. Law you said hi.

Yes, we are in school

We haven't posted a lot about the reason we came here - school. But yes, we are actually studying... especially lately. Ben and I are both working hard to finish the final step for our master's degrees - our dissertations. Here's a little info about them.

Each of us is in a different "school", so we have different topics that we need to cover in our dissertations. We have been attending workshops all year to learn how to put them together. We each have a dissertation supervisor, and we meet with them every time we get a new section of writing finished. We both like our supervisors and they are very helpful to us (though I had to switch mine halfway through because the first one assigned to me wasn't that helpful).

There is a maximum length of about 20,000 words - we are supposed to write up to this amount, but not go over. Page-wise, that's about 60 pages of writing, double-spaced. We also each need at least 50-60 references - books or articles that we have found and read on our own that helped us shape our ideas and writing.

My dissertation due date is the end of August and Ben's is the end of September. Ideally, we would be taking all the time allotted to us to finish, but we have to finish a couple of months early because of our baby's due date. I'm actually glad about that - it will be nice to have the work over and done with. When the writing part is finished, we will be binding the dissertations into a book - like the one in the picture. (Actually, exactly like the one in the picture - I stole that from the website of the company who does the binding. :) )

And our topics? I am writing about the expectations of the roles of teachers and parents and how they can best work together without either one feeling they have to take on too much of the other's tasks. Ben is writing about the connections between the industry of theatre during Shakespeare's time and the Golden Age of Hollywood and the movie industry.

And we only have 4 more weeks to finish them!!! Wish us luck!