29 weeks

Well, I survived 9.5 days of my mother visiting. We had the usual mood swings and she showed zero interest in the hypnobirthing lessons we went to. I'd hoped she'd read the textbook while hanging out bored at our apartment, but nope. Now I'm worried that if we let her into the delivery room, she'll not be all that knowledgable about how we want to do things. I guess she'll get kicked out pretty quickly if she's there and misbehaves.
I also told her that we want to have the first week at home to ourselves to settle in together. I figure letting her be at the delivery and be in town while we're in hospital will be OK, and then away she goes after that. After about 3-4 weeks (depending on baby's arrival date), she'll be away for a month on vacation, which might have been more when I'd be needing her help as DH gets busy busy at work again. Guess we'll play it by ear.
Our car seat is waiting for us to pick it up at the post office. And I'm sad because the great deal I found on the Up.paBab.y isn't so great - if purchased in the US, the warranty isn't completely valid in Canada. If there's a problem, you have to pay for shipping of all replacement parts across the border. I'm not sure if that's a big issue or not, but it has me scared enough that we may have my Dad buy it for us here, even though it's way more expensive. If they declare a value on replacement parts and we have any issues, paying the shipping, customs and taxes could rapidly add up.
As far as the house stuff goes, we're meeting with the first contractor to provide a quote tomorrow morning to sign a contract. He was very nice, seemed reliable, and does a ton of work with our designer and our realtor and her clients. So that makes me think that if anything's not up to par, he'll have real incentive to fix it, since future work will be on the line. He can also start a little sooner than the other contractor, which might give us a hope of getting things done before the baby arrives. Unfortunately, the second contractor's quote (which we waited over 2 weeks to get) was over 20% less than the first guy's. But at this point we don't trust him to follow through on things or to get things done in a timely fashion, given the way this has dragged on. If only we'd gotten a third quote like I wanted to do - DH insisted two quotes would be enough.
I can't decide if we should ask my mother for a dark brown stained or a white-painted crib. Here's a shot of the bedroom as it currently is (current owner). Crib will go against the wall with the headboard on it. I'm planning to use one of our current dressers (Ikea beech colour) in the nook between the closets and the doorway. The floor is a warm dark brown, the blinds more cherryish in colour. I like that you can see the grain of the wood through a dark stain, but I wonder if white might not look better given the white trim, white closet doors?? We're not getting fancy with bedding - white sheets will be on the bed. And where he's got that long low dresser, we're going to have a twin bed for future use, or for me to sleep on if I ever need to stay in with her. What do you think?
This is the crib we like, though we'd get plain white or stained brown, not the distressed antique white.
Other than that, I think we've got most of the initial baby stuff we need.
Here's the 28w (left) and 29w (right) sucked-in belly shots. I couldn't figure out how to download them from my new camera last week, so I'm posting two weeks worth at once today.
Thank you God for getting me to 29 weeks with a long and closed cervix and a healthy baby!