38 Weeks, 6 Days
I'm not in labor, and haven't had the baby yet. I basically start off every conversation with that statement these days. Especially phone ones with my family.
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Things people have said to me that I should get an award for not punching them afterwards:
1. Excuse me, your water just broke.
2. Oh my god, you're Huge!
3. You're gonna pop any day now. (2 months to go at that point)
4. Wow, you're really waddling. (From an engineer, almost excusable)
At least I've been spared the comments about how-there-must-be-two-babies in there, or questions about how much weight I've gained, or other mom-to-be pet peeves. Turns out, you should be very careful talking to pregnant women. Some of the best conversation starters that people have used are open-ended questions: how are you doing/feeling/etc. This lets me either talk about being pregnant or not, because sometimes I get sick of talking about it all the time.
Our doula is semi-new to the doula-ing, but she's also a current yoga teacher, so the two prenatal visits I had with her were combination visits/private yoga instruction. It didn't help my pelvic pain like I was hoping it might, but I did realize that yoga and birth are very similar. (I'm biased because I'm actually don't like practicing yoga, though I do like the results: increased strength/flexibility/balance/etc) In my mind, they both involve holding uncomfortable positions and breathing through the muscle burning and thoughts of "I want to stop doing this now". So, good practice for birth.
Last night was a bit exciting - I had a decent run of contractions pretty close together around 6am. But then I got up and ate a NY bagel with an indecent amount of cream cheese on it, read the internet for a while, and went back to bed. I will forever be grateful to AK for making me realize that I don't have to continue using a middle-school-girl amount of cream cheese on my bagels, because 1) it makes no damn difference to my weight and 2) it makes an amazing amount of difference to my happiness.
Being on pregnancy leave has been awesome so far - I've made it through a bunch of books, played too many games on the iPad, read a lot of the internet, had fun lunch dates with friends, and haven't even started Portal 2 yet. I haven't driven myself crazy with boredom yet, nor nested myself into exhaustion, so it's been better that I thought it would be. Turns out that I can still find things to procrastinate besides work, which makes everything else more fun. Though my houseplants are possibly suffering, because now I procrastinate paying bills and watering my plants. Hopefully it's making them stronger instead.
My nesting keeps taking on weird forms - it's way more theoretical than actual. I'll think about something a lot, then eventually do it and forget about it. I've already made quite a few Goodwill runs, but today we pulled out everything in the guest bedroom closet and re-ordered it, found more things to donate, shoved our dusty hiking/camping/climbing gear in less valuable closet real estate, and now I'm going through the piles of clothing trying to marshal them into some semblance of order. I've been thinking about doing this for 3 weeks at least, planning out where things should go, and trying to figure out what the daily routine will need.
At first I was convinced that we didn't have enough clothes for Baby-G and needed to buy some, but it turns out that people totally give you stuff, both new and used, so she has way more awesome/cute clothes than I do now. (Thanks awesome people!) And people with kids somehow find you in order to clean out their closets, so if you're not too gendered with your clothing options, you can easily find yourself overloaded with kid stuff. Our friends adopted a kid 4 months ago, and he's outgrowing his clothes at a ridiculous rate, so we practically have a steady stream of clothing coming our way every few months. My major dilemma with the clothing is how to sort it: size, function(pj or going-out wear), or preference(soft/fuzzy/adorable). Such a quandary!
Squeamish alert - more fluid talk starting. One of the moms in my group that has already given birth was telling me that when she was giving birth she had to pee so bad but couldn't, so the nurses catheterized her twice, and she was so grateful both times. At first I felt horrified sympathy, but now I totally understand why she was grateful. The more Baby-G drops, the harder it is to use the bathroom - think old man with prostate issues, and that's my at-least-5-times-a-night routine. I have much more sympathy for men with prostate issues now.
Ok, back to sorting.