We’re about a month away from my “official” due date, meaning that we hope to meet little Baby Jungwirth in anywhere from two to six weeks! We had a wonderful surprise baby shower thrown by our parish family last Sunday, and we’re getting closer and closer to being as ready as we can be. My midwife is coming for a home visit on Thursday and will check to see if we have all the requisite supplies. My last day of work is supposed to be August 7th, as long as Lentil stays put that long! Of course, we could very well be waiting until the end of August, since babies don’t tend to pay much attention to the date.

I’m sure you’re all ready to learn whether Lentil is a girl Lentil or a boy Lentil. I assure you, no one is ready to know more than his mama and papa! At our rehearsal dinner, the family that I nannied for gave a great little series of gifts, including an icon of the Holy Trinity and a pregnancy test :) Of their seven children, two have the name Mary (Mary Grace and Mary Catherine, plus an Anne Marie), and two have the name John (John Mark and John Luke). They got us these two boxes of socks to remember them by: “Mary Jane’s” and “Johnny’s.” We’ve got both boxes out and are waiting to see which will get used. You can see that my baby belly got in the way of the photo:

Speaking of which, I will finally give in to the demand and post a picture of me with a great big baby belly:

In other news, I have discovered that my dear devoted husband is even more talented than I thought. I made mention of the fact that our closet that we use for general storage (tools, laundry soap, vacuum, etc) was a big mess, and the next thing I knew, he had built shelves in the closet and organized it. I said something about the wasted space between the kitchen counter and the wall (a mere eleven inches wide) and he immediately drew up plans and this is what I soon had (there are more shelves below that go all the way to the floor):

The other day, I was getting frustrated with the fact that I was getting all this baby stuff, but truly had no where to store one more thing. Our closet was chock full, our bookshelves more than full, and even under the bed was packed full. Not only did he totally reorganize a bunch of stuff (getting rid of our hundreds of CD cases, for one thing), but he was off to the hardware store again and built yet another set of shelves up above the closet, giving us tons more space! I sure married a good one. There’s another shelf above what you can see in this picture, holding extra blankets:

Since we’ve been so delinquent in posting photos lately, I’ll end with a few photos from the last few months that we never put up:

Pascha! These pictures were taken at about 3:00 in the morning, after the midnight Paschal liturgy:

Paul has started brewing his own beer, and it’s been turning out really good! He’s finished and bottled his second batch now. Here’s a photo from the very first batch:

It looks really gross when it’s being boiled, though:

When he’s not building shelves and making beer…