Another sleepless night update

Here I am awake in the middle of the night again, same old, same old. But I do seem to have such a hard time writing entries that this seems like as good a time as any.

Things are still really busy, but I'm less stressed than I was last time I wrote. First of all, we ended up finding another place to rent in the summer at Ca.pe C.od. Actually, it is the cottage right next door to the one we wanted originally, and it turns out that we really lucked out. I did not realize that the one we wanted at first actually has another house right in front of it, blocking a direct view of the ocean, whereas ours is the last house in the row of cottages and does not have a blocked view. So it seems that this situation turned out for the best. It is still a long way off, but I'm so excited about our first little vacation as a family!

On the hiring of two people to teach for me in the fall, we are making progress. A dismal job market in academia in general, and even more so in my field, is bringing out lots of people who are desperate to work. I feel really bad about that for them, and it really sucks that we can't pay them more money. But I do think we'll end up finding a couple of people who are willing to take the jobs. I hope we can take care of everything before I'm done for the semester, but if not my colleagues will finish up the process without me.

In terms of finishing the semester, I am now done with the actual teaching - have covered all the material that I needed to cover and am moving on to final presentations from the students. This is particularly good because it means that I can sit with my feet up for the next three class days, which will be my last. Yes, I just have to get through 3 more days over the next two weeks! I will most likely go out to campus at least one more day though, to wrap up loose ends and possibly meet with job applicants, but I am almost done.

Our due date is in three weeks! I am 37 weeks as of yesterday and therefore officially full term. I truly can't believe that we have made it this far - it seems so surreal. And it's even stranger to think that we really are going to have a baby in this apartment soon. This weekend we are working on final preparations - our glider arrived the other day and needs to be put together. And we got a narrow, tall bookshelf to put in a corner to provide some additional storage, so that also needs to get assembled. And then we will work on getting everything put away and the room all tidied up. I still haven't gotten any curtains or a rug - who knows when that will happen! We are going to make a list of all the final things we need to buy and will take care of that over the next week or so. But even if the little guy arrived tomorrow, we would be fine - just need to run out to the 24 hour drug store around the corner for some diapers!

That's it for this late night update. I hope I can fall back asleep soon, but at least I can sleep as late as I want to in the morning...