7 months, 2 to go

A lot of things happened last week...at least a lot for someone on bedrest. I reached my 31st week of pregnancy, and had an ultrasound last Monday. The ultrasound showed that my cervix is still shortened, but the good news is that it hasn't shortened more since a month ago, when my bedrest started. So, I'm still limited to 10 minutes of on-feet activity per hour. The doctor at the ultrasound was amusingly apologetic that he couldn't take a photo of the baby's face. The baby's head was down (about which I have mixed feelings, given my risk of preterm labor), but facing my spine.

Nikita also turned 2 3/4 years last Thursday. Here are some new things I've noticed in the month I've been on bedrest:

• Potty training. Nikita sits on his potty when he wants to do #2, but with his clothes on. Igor doesn't think this is progress, but I certainly do.
• Reading. Nikita underlines words with his pointer, as if he were reading. He can also identify the following letters (in decreasing order of reliability): O, W/M (he loves turning the W around to see the M, but doesn't do the same for M), V (which he calls "uncle V"), T, C, Q, E, B.
• Play. Nikita will now sort things by kind, e.g. building only with Legos of a certain color. Our living room table also has remnants of Easter seals that he sorted by flower. Thanks to Igor, he is also obsessed with elevating parts of his train track with blocks. And I am fascinated by the way he can put together his 100-piece puzzle. He knows it so well, that he quickly puts pieces where they belong, and doesn't bother trying a piece out at other locations.
• Sleep. Nikita now insists on sleeping "a side to Mommy" (on the other side of Mommy), which means that I sleep between Nikita and Igor. This past week, I started getting him to sleep at most 2 hours (instead of 3) in the afternoon, and lights out before 10 (with the ultimate goal of 8 pm) because it was getting really crazy with Nikita waking up from 5-6 pm and not falling asleep until at least 11 pm (with us, of course).

Since he turned 33 months on Thursday, Nikita has developed the additional habits:

• Know the phone better than me. I'll let Nikita play the game "Number, number" on our cordless phone, in which he repeatedly presses random buttons. So, the screen will be filled with the number 1, or worse, the pound sign. But now, Nikita's favorite game is to access the answering machine and inadvertantly record a memo, neither of which I knew I could do with the handheld phone.
• Call me "maka". This is an example of Nikita's general laziness (or difficulty?) with language, maka being short for mamushka. Another example is Nikita's favorite word (other than "why"): smatree, or "look" in Russian. Nikita will say instead "matree", which is awfully close to what he used to say for smetana (sour cream in Russian) - matee - because he still cannot roll his r's.

I started and finished the Reversible Lotus Blossom hat from Cat Bordhi's Treasury of Magical Knitting. I used Cascade 220 Quattro-Kauai for the Moebius hat band, and Magenta for the crown. Igor thinks the hat looks a bit crazy, but I think the colors work fantastically with my traffic light-green parka. You can decide for yourself if I ever get around to posting a photo of the hat. Although given that I recently updated my knitting journal and yarn log (the last entry for both was over a year ago), it might be quicker to visit me. I'm thinking of making a pair of mittens with the rest of the yarn, but first will make a pair of socks for Galina. Both projects will be constructed according to Simple Socks; the socks will use the simple stitch pattern from Twisted Socks.

I also started Zoli; we'll see if I actually finish it. I'm still hoping to read The Brothers Karamazov (perhaps a chapter a day?), but doubt I will finish The Emperor's Children. The latter is too flippant. I recently flipped through The Practical Cogitator, and may buy a copy. The book isn't what I expected: more than just an anthology of quotes through the ages, the selection is as individual as the two editors. The editors are (sadly) deceased, which may explain why the latest edition of the book was published in 1962.

Yet another book to add to my library reserve list: How Novels Work by John Mullan. Here's the description from the Financial Times review:

Written with the book-club member in mind, [Mullan] pitches it somewhere between academic lit-crit, a book review and the way ordinary readers talk about books. The result is wholly satisfying, and a great education for book-lovers and would-be novelists alike.

Another thing I picked up from the FT review is the McLuhan test for choosing books: read page 69. If you like that page, buy (or in my case, borrow) the book. Zoli didn't pass this test with flying colors, but I'm giving the book the benefit of the doubt for now. We'll see if I was wrong to do so.
And. with that, I'm off to bed.