Poor Patrick! You can click to see what he's been working on this whole afternoon, while I got to hang out on the couch playing with final line edits for KbS (based on his excellent notes) and begging Latin translations to fill in my last few bracketed bits. Yes, there are definitely some advantages to being visibly & heavily pregnant...the IKEA deliverymen didn't even think of asking me to carry any of the boxes, and I've been completely let off the hook for all the hard construction work. But oh, it is great to have more bookcases! I came in at the end to admire the final product, and immediately got distracted by all the books that had been unearthed from our monstrous piles and stacked neatly in the shelves...some of them were books that I'd forgotten we even owned! I wanted to re-read them all, immediately! It was a very near thing, but I did finally manage to stop myself from completely emptying out the new bookcases only minutes after they'd been filled. How cool, though, to feel like we've just been given a bunch of new books - it had been years since I'd come across some of them!

(But I felt very, very virtuous for the fact that I managed to take two of my books off the shelves to put in our pile of charity shop donations - see, I can help reduce the chaos in our house, too! Of course, over the past month, between Norton Award books and my own purchases, I've brought at least 35 new books into our house...but hey, at least I'm balancing it out a little bit, right????)

(And ohhhh, I am so jealous of the bookshelves in Christopher Rowe and Gwenda Bond's study.....)

Poor Maya, though, is NOT pleased by any of this. First we left her all morning while we went to our prenatal class (today was all about how to say "no" politely to medical professionals, and what exactly to do at the end of labor when you're suddenly presented with this tiny, helpless creature and expected to take care of it!)...then we came home, moved around all of her familiar Stuff (those piles of books have been there since before we got her!), AND we both ignored her for our own separate pursuits! Poor puppy. She's going to get a lot of attention tonight and tomorrow to make up for it. But she is still dissatisfied with the whole house reorganization. Just wait until she gets next month's Big Surprise! (We keep telling each other that she will be happy about the baby. Eventually. Maybe when he/she is about 2 years old or so...)