"You studied for prison?"

Total steps yesterday:  13,620
Exercise plans for today:  strength training

There are various things on my mind today, so I think this is going to be a bullet point kind of a post:

• I got home early from work yesterday since I had an afternoon doctor's appointment.  I took the opportunity to give little Zoe a bath (sadly, no pictures of that adventure) and then took her on a really long walk.  It was good for both of us.  She got to dry off and work out her post-bath crazies, and I got to relax and clear my head a bit.  Growing up, I remember my dad taking a walk or run almost every day after work.  I didn't think much of it at the time, but now if I don't get my post-work walk, I definitely get cranky.  I am my father's daughter, I suppose. When I was unemployed and living at home for a bit after college (yay recession!), I would join my dad on those walks, and it was always a good chance to talk a bit (or just ignore each other and work on conquering the massive hills of the northern Nevada desert that we walked through).  James and I have found that the walks are probably the secret to a happy marriage for us.  He stays home while I walk.  We both get a bit of decompressing time after getting home from work, which is definitely needed for a couple of introverts.
• This article was posted on Slate today and the article description literally said, "If you are pregnant, do not read this story".  So, naturally, I immediately clicked on it.  It's an interesting, if occasionally graphic, look at the history of maternal death during childbirth.  The most interesting fact, for me, was that it focused on the late 19th and early 20th century, when there was a spike in deaths related to doctors stepping in to take over childbirth from midwives, leading to a variety of unsafe practices.  It carried a lot of echoes of today's home birth debate, which the author gets to in the last part of the article.  I have various thoughts on home birth and other aspects of labor that I'm going to save for another post on my birth plan.  Suffice to say, I see both side of the question, and as long as you don't mind some rough imagery (related to the past, not modern childbirth), the article is an interesting read.  It also made me realize that I read everything ever about pregnancy because I can't just relax and enjoy the process - I  have to study every little aspect of it, which is pretty much how I live my life.

Everyone should watch Orange is the New Black.  Except my parents.  You guys wouldn't like it.

• My body seems to be more pregnant in the last week than before.  My bump is definitely more noticeable.  According to the doctors the baby is almost to belly button height, where I guess it will hang out for the next few months.  I have to get up multiple times a night to pee, and tend to unconsciously make cliched pregnant woman grunts as I'm forced to enter and exit the bed.  I'm also slowing down just a bit more, and have started hearing from various other runners that they had to give it up entirely sometimes between 27 and 32 weeks.  That means that I could possibly only have 8 more weeks of running in me, which isn't nearly enough.  I'm starting to ponder what I'll replace it with, if anything, and thinking that this might be my chance to take up swimming.  Since I'm not racing right now, I've been living vicariously through my friend at The Trigirl Chronicles, who just completed her third triathlon of the season.  She called it her tri-fecta.  How cool is she?  Anyway, she's made me think that triathlons could be fun, but I desperately need to work on my swimming, and what better time to start than when I'm pregnant and can't run?  We'll see how that goes.
• Lil W has been jumping around like House of Pain all morning (I think I just dated myself with that reference) and it's been awesome.  
• I need to take more pictures so I have something other than a wordsy wordsy words blog.