Rats with Pin Worms = YUCK!

My freshman year of high school I had an eccentric biology teacher that spent a month teaching us the 'ins' and 'outs' of parasites. Perhaps with my adaptive memory it just felt like a month, but needless to say we exhausted the topic of parasites and it was traumatic. So traumatic in fact that I became a vegetarian for 3 years. Although I recovered from my meat ban, I never completely got over a fear of acquiring worms of some sort. All my worm neuroses have resurfaced this past week when it was determined that our lab's rat colony was somehow infested with pin worms...GAK. Luckily, rodent pin worms are species specific and can only be transferred between rats, mice and rabbits. Thank God because they are highly contagious and the eggs can actually become airborne...double GAK! Anyway, all of our animals either need to be sacrificed or quarantined for 6 weeks. This makes finishing up the lab work I wanted taken of before the baby arrived impossible. Oh well.

In other news, Drew and I started child birth classes last Thursday. It was about what one would expect, 15% helpful and 85% useless/obvious. We go every Thursday evening for 2 hours until April. Also, Drew's dad came for a visit. It was great to seem him. He helped us out by purchasing the last few items on our baby gear list, including a car seat. We also went for a hike in Saguaro East, which was incredible because there was water in the washes. Here are some photos.





On the pregnancy front, I am 33 weeks on Wednesday. I am still feeling OK, but I am done jogging. Everything just started to hurt when I would run so I was worried that I might cause an injury that would impede me getting back in shape after the baby is born. My weight is up by 28 pounds and my belly is 42 inches in circumference. Only 7 more weeks to go and I am feeling ready.