Weekend notes

We had another OB appointment on Friday. We are now at the point when the appointments switch to every two weeks instead of every four. I passed my gestational diabetes test by a large margin, which was comforting. The baby's heartbeat was strong and in the normal range, but the nurse practitioner wanted to try to hear it with a little less static or something. The baby didn't much care for this continued pushing on him with the microphone-like doppler, so he started kicking up a storm and fidgeting. It seems we already might have a stubborn little guy on our hands!

We think we have decided on a crib from the same collection as the dresser. We have a furniture coupon from Babies 'R' Us, so we will probably be ordering it (or picking it up, I'm not sure if they stock cribs at the stores) in the next few weeks. We have also been researching daycares and I toured one on Friday.

We had the wonderful opportunity to see master violinist Itzhak Perlman in a sold-out concert at the Folly Theater last night. He is celebrating the 50th anniversary of his American debut, which had led me to think he was older than he actually is, and for this reason, I really wanted to see him perform while I still had the chance. It turns out he made his American debut at age 13(!) and is only 63 this year. The Folly was a great place to see this concert- it's rather intimate, with good acoustics, and from our seats in the right balcony, we had an excellent line of sight to see Perlman's fingers flying over the strings. He had works by Leclair, Beethoven, and Stravinsky scheduled, and for the last quarter of the concert, he and his pianist brought out a stack of music and he chose shorter works on the spot, giving short introductions and telling jokes as if there were 20 people in the room instead of 1100. He is a very expressive musician and made even the most complicated passages seem absolutely effortless.

The next few weekends will be pretty busy. Next weekend, we're going to the annual steak fry at Dave's grandma's church and then painting the guest room. The following weekend, I'm flying out to Cincinnati to spend a few days with my college roommates. One will be flying back to Cincinnati on the same day with my beautiful little goddaughter Elli, whom she & her husband are adopting from Taiwan. They fly out this Wednesday, so please say a prayer for their safe travel & smooth final adoption proceedings. Dave & I are headed to Dallas the weekend after that for a visit with some of his friends from college, and that will be the last traveling for quite a while, as I'll be under doctor-mandated travel restrictions until the baby is born.

Straight Outta Osborne

I'm not one who's big on the whole "Buy Local" concept ... with one notable exception. The family-owned Shatto Milk Company of Osborn, Missouri (about an hour outside of Kansas City) has provided my milk of choice for the last six years. Their skim milk tastes better than the higher fat varieties produced by the large dairies, and they produce excellent flavored milks as well (especially the chocolate milk, a surprisingly good root beer milk, and, around Christmas, eggnog). Since moving back to KC, Emily has become hooked on Shatto milk as well, and it's a given that one or two distinctive Shatto glass bottles can always be found in our refrigerator.

So, considering how much we like the milk, you can imagine how excited Emily and I were when we learned that the Shattos had started making ice cream. Unfortunately, it didn't appear that our nearby Price Chopper was carrying it (yet, if we have anything to say about it). Further investigation revealed that only three area grocery stores currently carry Shatto ice cream. Undeterred, we made the twenty-five mile journey to Lenexa, Kansas, and came home with these:



Needless to say, it's just as good as we'd hoped. And, no, we're not sharing.