Last scheduled doctor's appointment; for this 20-minute observation interval I'm having longer & stronger but less regular contractions. Everything else looks about the same. I let them talk me into scheduling an induction for Thursday night, despite rather wanting to throw fits about how I'm fine, and the baby is fine, and I have no genetic history of problems with this, and why do people keep fussing at us about this anyway. I'm not doing so because a) I don't think the advocated course of action is likely to cause actual problems, and b) I don't think it will matter to the kid in the long run. Which means I'm trying not to put my own preconceived notions about pregnancy not being something to *worry* about, darnit (and how am I supposed to experience what real birth was like in a pre-industrial world if they're busy pumping me full of chemicals, anyway? I mean, this may be my only chance at field research!)... ahead of what my doctor thinks is safest for everyone concerned. I'm not convinced that her concerns are relevant to us, but I don't have any less self-centered reasons to argue about it. And we've still got a day and a half to do this on our own; after being poked and prodded at earlier, my stomach muscles seem to be vaguely considering it.
Yesterday involved waking up and wondering why it had not occurred to me to look into getting some sort of Taweret amulet months ago; after a search which turned up a
fairly nice one on Etsy that ships from Hungary and an appealingly
rough likeness in the Met's collection (She's facing to the right: the three bumps on top are the hippo face and the ones down the front are breast, hands over belly, and legs) I decided that if I actually wanted a luck charm [read: thematically appropriate jewelry to fidget with] in time to give birth, I ought to do something with the reindeer birthing goddess instead, as cross-stitch sounded easier than impromptu carving or sculpting. (This may or may not be actually true.)
Of course, wherever the handout from Luceta di Cosimo's slavic embroidery class has got to, it's someplace Very Safe, so I spent rather longer than I'd intended searching down pictures on the internet and wondering why google seemed to think that the pony in the beflowered hat was an embroidery motif. (It came up in all my image searches.)
(The motif is first seen in stone-age carvings by pre-Slavic reindeer herders, representing twin reindeer-antlered goddesses who live up in the sky over the arctic circle someplace and continually give birth to everything in the world. Or so I'm told. At some point, the motif was transferred to the traditional red & white weaving & embroidery designs, which slipped under the radar of anti-pagan cultural suppression by virtue of being some thing women did that obviously wasn't that important. Over the centuries she has mostly morphed into a flower pot, which was briefly replaced by the Romanov double-headed eagle when that was in season. You didn't know the Romanovs had anything to do with pagan fertility symbols, did you? The black & white picture
here (scroll down) has a few different incarnations of her; once you get a sense for it you can spot her all over.)
Here's what I ended up with:

The design I used is the left half off the graph paper, as the one I was mostly working from (second one down on the left side
here, from
this useful if irritatingly formatted site) sort of skipped the antlers, and once I'd added them back, the hand design needed tweaking. So the right side represents attempt #1, and the left got cleaned up better.
Counted cross stitch in sewing thread over 2 woven strands of linen (I would have done half this size, but the fabric wasn't even enough for it.) Grauwulf points out I'm nuts, but at least this is for me, so he won't be able to go around explaining to people that it's my first [X style of embroidery] or trying to say that it's too nice to use, as he does with the blackwork white scarf I made him. This was made by me for me, and so I have tied it around my neck with a faded red ribbon that I probably picked up while working faire and shall proceed to sweat all through it, I'm sure. I am experiencing no compulsion to start embroidering things for dolls, so I think that's enough of the counted work.