This morning Jodi went to the doctor. She is at 36 weeks, and so it wasn't much of a surprise when the doctor said that the baby is already in the occiput anterior position. From Web MD:

"Most Common Position
Ideally for labor, the baby presents head-down, facing the mother's back, with its chin tucked to its chest and the back of the head ready to enter the pelvis."

This means that the baby is ready to come out. Since this is the first child, though, it will be another couple weeks before it makes its grand exit/entrance.

One issue we ran into this morning is umbilical cord blood banking. A representative of some company approached Jodi, gave her a pamphlet and an offer to store our child's umbilical cord blood for RMB 6400 the first year, and RMB 600 each year thereafter. Of course Jodi was excited by this, but to me it sounded fishy. 果然 all the non-commercial web pages I find on the subject recommend against private blood banking. They say that private blood banks are expensive and a bad investment because the odds of being able to use your own child's blood are very, very low if you are a low-risk family. The only families who are recommended to save their child's umbilical cord blood are families with a previous child suffering from leukemia, and in that case the hospital would offer to arrange the procedure and store the blood themselves. Resorting to an outside private blood bank would not be necessary. Jodi and I arrived at the conclusion that it would be better all-around to inquire about donating our child's umbilical blood to a public blood bank. The most legitimate cord blood bank in the region seems to be AsiaCord, but they only have representatives in Beijing and Tianjin. The Shanghai Cord Blood Bank, the organization that approached Jodi, makes miraculous claims typical of get-rich-quick schemes and their flippant dismissal of other cord blood banks in Shanghai leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I don't think we'll be giving them our "business".

So, just some FUD to watch out for in case you run across the same offer.