A good read: Baby Bargains Blog. I have not got the book yet, but I will now. Very interesting stuff, I’m subscribing to the RSS feed.

A good reference: The Z Report: BPA in Baby Bottles. Lists all major brands and all bottles and whether or not they have BPA in them.

Which is giving me a pause. After doing significant research of which bottles would be best for my child, I singled out the BreastFlow bottles. Good for nursing babies, reviews were all excellent. But… they have BPA in them. So I’m not quite sure what to do. I did want to try the MAM Sassy Bottles, and they are BPA free. There’s also the Born Free bottles, which is a company dedicated to BPA free products (but expensive). So more research, I guess. I hate it when that happens.

Not that I think BPA is going to immediately strike my kid dead or anything. But I’m starting from scratch here… I have a choice. Why not err on the side of caution? I’ll have to think some more.

Also, there’s a similar article about BPA in pacifiers.

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Today has been an interesting day. First, thanks to the paving going on across the street all morning, my sleep was broken at best. This led to me refusing to get out of bed until I woke up and realized it was 1pm, I was still exhausted, and I was supposed to be at work already. Doh. I ended up getting to work by 3 and not leaving until after 7. That’ll teach me.

I didn’t have a lot to do, however what I did have to do took me a long time to complete due to being restricted to a snail’s pace all day. I’m feeling a ton of aches and pangs (not pains, just pangs). It’s freakin bizarre, because I didn’t have this last week. My stomach just felt so… uncomfortable all day. I guess baby is sitting on my bladder, because I felt like I just wanted to pull my pants elastic away from my belly all day – and they are NOT tight pants. I’m also feeling aches in my left side that I swear to god is my ovary. It may still be tender, and is obviously also getting squashed now. It’s still aching on and off right now. And only my left side. I find that odd.

My hips are feeling a little… weird. I was wondering if this is the start of that ligament loosening they talk about. I haven’t felt a thing up until now, but now my hips ache here and there. Standing, bending… something just feels “off.” And maybe that sound retarded, but I know when things feel 100%, and something just doesn’t feel right. But luckily I have the kind of job where I can just sit on the floor when I feel like it and play with kitties for 10 minutes before going back to what I was doing – and no one looks at me funny. Sometimes they even join me. Did I mention I love my job?

Speaking of my job… my supervisor and I were talking a little about how I’ll handle maternity leave and coming back to work. She asked me what is “normal” for maternity leave, and she said I should definitely take the “normal” 8 weeks. (My employer is a non-profit, with a handful of employees, and I’m part-time with no benefits. Needless to say, I get no official “maternity leave” benefits or anything – however, they have no rules on vacations or leaves. People take what they need, and we all just kind of work together to make sure everything is covered. So I could take as much as I wanted, really. I just wouldn’t get paid, of course.) I mentioned how we won’t have childcare available, and she thought for a minute and said I could probably bring the baby with me to work, depending. I suppose it all depends on how baby reacts! We’ll double-check with the big boss-lady (we run everything by her), but it would be really nice if I had the option of bringing the baby to work with me.

Granted that only works until the kid gets to the crawling stage. No way baby will be crawling around at a cat sanctuary! Hells no! But as long as baby is happy with being in a carrier? That would be totally cool. And it would make the whole how-to-feed-baby-while-I’m-working a non-issue… my boobs would be right there and handy.

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I’m at my laptop again tonight – okay, that probably didn’t need to be stated, since I’m ALWAYS at my laptop EVERY night. But as usual, I’m seated here propped up with pillows, typing away on my laptop. Den comes in and sits beside me, as he often does. (He likes to pop in here and sit with me for a few minutes, to ask me what I’m doing and basically to allow me to talk his ear off. I swear I store everything in my head until he does that, then I release it all in one stream-of-conciousness, he comments appropriately and goes back to what he was doing. What can I say, it works for us. He’s like my living sounding board.) Well today he flopped there and then said, “Oh my god! You have a basketball!!” And then he cracked up laughing. (Luckily it was happy, giddy, my-wife-is-sooo-pregnant laughter, not the making-fun-of-me laughter, because everyone knows how long he would have lived.) But no, he was totally giddy, staring at my belly with a big goofy grin on his face.

I really don’t know if tomorrow’s picture is going to show much though. It seems it goes away in the morning, at least to me. But I’ll let you decide tomorrow.