The date is set! Well, sort of.

"You can't be pregnant forever," commented our day-by-day baby development book. (These post-full-term paragraphs are pretty lame.) Today that came into focus just a little bit more, with our one-week-past-term visit to the doctor.

The doctor appointment was a bit of a marathon session, clocking in at around 2 and a half hours (I know, only slightly shorter than a Lord of the Rings film). We got to find out more about Ziggy's current status, which is happy and very active!

After visiting with our doctor, we got stuck in an air traffic control delay waiting for their fancy new ultrasound machine to be freed up. Our doctor has been very excited and proud of it; apparently it makes julienned fries, though when I inquired, there's no "post to YouTube" button on there. Not yet at least; maybe my suggestion will make it into the next model?

Anyway, the ultrasound was a little hard to see since Ziggy is now at full term. We actually got a printout and still can't tell quite what it is that we're looking at. Care to venture a guess? (Yes, the original is indeed that dark.) But back on the live-image screen, Ziggy was clearly moving his/her head around quite actively, and even looked to be sucking his/her thumb (apparently starting dad's bad habit pretty early on). Everything was looking good and healthy.

Next we were moved to a room where they could monitor both the baby's heartbeat and Meredith's status on one seismograph-looking printout machine. Ziggy happily chugged away in the 120s with a few spikes (that's apparently what they were looking for) before s/he went to sleep. Meanwhile, Meh's readings had a few spikes of their own with some braxton hicks squeezing, nicely spaced out. Eventually we were able to get Ziggy to wake back up and do a few more variable heartbeat things to make the doc happy that s/he is responsive and healthy. It was interesting to see such "old" technology as a long printout; I'd think they'd be all digital now so you could just scroll back and do statistical analysis to figure out if Ziggy as a stock ticker item would be a good blue chip investment (though regardless of what the financial advisors might say, we're buying!).

So, that wrapped up that. Based on our conversation with the doctor, we're scheduling to induce on Wednesday. So the baby might come then, if not:

a) Sooner (if things happen tomorrow), or
b) Later (if they induce and things take a while, or if the hospital's maternity ward schedule fills up and they elect to reschedule us for the next day)

That's about the status from here for now. We've been enjoying our time with Meh's parents, with lots of good food (tasty Italian for dinner this evening), watching movies, and light activities around the city. Of course, we'll let you all know if any other news occurs; Meh is getting e-mails saying "Well, I know you simply must have had the baby by now." Don't these folks follow our rambling, long-winded, blow-by-blow, day-by-day blog descriptions? :)