34 weeks along, as of yesterday! I am still feeling really good. I am actually sleeping through the night! Not even getting up to pee and only changing positions once or twice during the night! For those who don't know, that's a pretty big accomplishment for the 3rd trimester

Ultrasound
Thursday was my 3rd and final ultrasound. The doctor was really great and showed me a bunch of different body parts (little hands and feet!) and explained everything to me while looking. He said that everything looks normal and that baby is head down
ETA: I forgot two things. First, the tech showed us HAIR! You could see little fuzzies around baby's head. And the tech also checked out the genital region for development...he turned the monitor away before checking because he knew that we don't want to know. It was weird to think that this random guy sitting next to me knows the baby's sex and we don't!

Baby Prep
I am starting to feel nervous that I have nothing prepared! I see these other ladies on my "birth club" forum who have their nurseries perfectly decorated/organized and all the baby clothes washed and folded. I have a suitcase full of baby things. It's hard to find a balance between wanting to be prepared and wanting to respect my SO and his culture. In Mali, you don't prepare for a baby- you don't buy clothes, or diapers, or a crib. That would be like counting your chickens before they've hatched. Most people just send family members out to buy the essentials while they are at the hospital recovering from birth. Eff that...I need a bit prep time!

My SO is working on getting a closet made and once that is done I can have the clothes washed and organized. Then he told me that this week, we can go look at cribs and car seats. Originally, I wasn't going to get a crib because we were just going to use a pack n play that my MIL is sending over in a container. Well, turns out the container is on Africa time and will come a month later than expected. So looks like we'll end up with a crib and a pack n play.

I hope that a car seat doesn't turn out to be too expensive. It's so rare for people to have them here, usually someone just holds the baby in the back seat. I mean, you see newborn babies tied on the mother's back with the mother sitting on the back of a moto. So safety obviously isn't top priority here! I think we might be the only family that makes our child wear a seatbelt.

Name decisions
I think we've finalized our name choices. For a boy- we're sticking with Idrissa. It's funny, I asked for opinions on the names on a different forum and everyone thought that Idrissa sounded really girly, I guess because it ends in "a". Oh well, if it sounds girly in America, we'll just make sure to call him Idris!
Girl name- talked to my mom and she (as a lover of languages/names/sounds) totally understood why Sara wasn't going to work. My SO and I talked a bit about the alternative names (but not too much because...you know...superstitions). And we decided on Amina. I really love the nickname Mina as well.
So there they are!
ETA: We decided not to do a middle name. My SO doesn't have one, neither does Rokia. When we were discussing middle names, my SO kept getting them confused with nicknames and then I realized that lots of people here would do that and my kid might end up always being called by his/her middle name. So I'm throwing them out!

Pics!
Okay, as your blog-reading reward, I'll leave you with this belly comparison picture. On the left is 26 weeks and on the right is 34 weeks (sorry, it's a bit blurry!).


And Ms. Rokia on the first day of school