In January Chad and I were restlessly and eagerly awaiting the birth of our child, due in early February.

We tried to go for walks as much as we could. The weather was mostly bleak, but there were a few nice days and we took advantage of them.

Taking advantage of the nice weather turned out to have been a good thing, because February was a very, very rainy month, and there were all kinds of floods and stuff.

There's this park in Santa Clara, oddly enough right by the Kaiser hospital I hated so much, where there is a duck pond and good paths for walking.

Well, or for slowly waddling along the paths, which was more what I was up to.

You see, my feet were very swollen. I had to sit down and put my feet up a lot. It drove me nuts, but helped some.

And like I said, mostly the weather wasn't so hot. And I didn't even have the energy to keep doing jigsaw puzzles. It was also hard to sleep, and hard to find the energy to go anywhere. So we did little.

Lazing around not doing too much wasn't a big challenge for Inanna, though.

Chad would goof off every time he knew I was trying to take a picture of him.

He'd do silly things like hide behind his Diet Pepsi.

Chad likes Diet Pepsi.

As for me, I just kept getting huger and less able to move around. I mostly tried to rest, in between getting the last few things we needed to have in the house for the birth.

We figured we were all organized. We had this changing area all set up in the master bathroom's vanity section. There was a changing pad and a warming pad underneath it and the cats kept snuggling up there. After a while, we realized the heating pad had been on warming the place up, and Anath and Inanna thought it was snuggly. I guess it was!

We had stuff all ready for our baby to be born. This is the portable crib and several animals and so on, and although we didn't know it at the time, this is the very spot where the birth would take place!