My due date was yesterday!

And I'm still pregnant, no big shocker.  But here are pictures of me on November 22nd, for posterity.  

 I think I actually look smaller than I did last week, because I've dropped quite a bit.  Plus, the pattern is slimming. 

We stopped by temple spontaneously yesterday, to pick up dreidels and gelt for the Hanukkah presentation my mom is doing at the kids' school on Monday, and the cantor told me that my beachball belly looked fake, it was way too firm and round.  I laughed.  Go Squishy!  I think it's ironic that I gained 70 lbs with Xander, 50 lbs with Ari, and as of today, exactly 60 lbs with this one.

(Also on an interesting side note, the massage therapist told me that she could now fit her thumb in between the two separated sections of the symphysis pubis bone.  Ick.)


BUT... I'm really happy because I finished my big novel before the baby came, The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett.  It'd been sitting on my shelf for a while but I never read it because it looked too intimidating at over a thousand pages.  But OH MY GOD IT WAS AMAZING.  I gush over it in the same way I gush over Chabon, but the two books are so different, it's like comparing apples and oranges.

Follett's novel is a sprawling historical novel of building a cathedral in 12th century England.  That's never really been my time period of choice, but he made it fascinating.  The characters came to life, and the relationships between the serfs and the nobles, the church and the royals, the laity and the monasteries, England and France, all of it, was so carefully researched that I felt I was spying on other people's lives.  It follows the same group of characters over about 40 years during a time of political tumult before King Henry II, and also reflects the change in architectural style from Romanesque to Gothic.  He actually goes into quite a bit of detail about the exact building of cathedrals... and contrary to what I was expecting, I loved it!  I learned so much about architecture, it was quite fun to go on Wikipedia after and look up all the new vocab words and see the structures which have survived until today.  It was also just a rollicking fun read: love, lust, betrayal, murder, conspiracies, etc.  I couldn't put it down.

So in sum: I've nested galore, decorated the house for Thanksgivukkah, and finished my book.  Baby, whenever you're ready, come on out!