There’s so much to talk about, and I’m already behind so let me just get right to it….

First, my baby is 36 weeks old.  And like I vaguely announced last week, I have the stretch marks to prove that this was the week little Mini Me decided that it was time to start growing!  I thank him for at least waiting as long as possible to make me fat and uncomfortable, but the result is the same.  In fact, I write this sitting on the couch in an awkward position because my belly now GETS IN THE WAY of everything and typing is hard (so please pardon any typos that are coming).  I didn’t even dare write this from my ipad because first, I can’t find it, and second because I don’t know where I would set it and still be able to type as much as I have to say.

I meant to type this all earlier, but in my first official day off of work, I’ve been busy doing I have no idea what.  Seriously.  I have no idea how it’s already 3pm.

So anyway, baby is still big, still moving, and still gaining weight.  All of which I hear are good things.  At the end of this week he’ll be considered full term and I’ll consider myself done and start answering with “any day now!” when people ask me how much longer I have left.  And then I’ll probably run away and secretly hyperventilate into a brown paper bag because he really can come any day and pending an otherwise healthy baby, will have lungs developed enough to function on his own and he’ll be leaving the hospital at the same time that I am.

Can we talk about false labor?  I’ve had it with BH contractions.  I feel like false labor should shut up, curl up, and die.  And then set itself on fire.  These contractions keep coming whether I’m sitting up, laying down, standing, walking, chugging water, or plowing my way through a bag of halloween candy and not only are they uncomfortable but they are starting to hurt.  In a way that almost has me calling Angel at work and telling him that it’s time to come home and freak out with me.  His daddy intuition must have known something was up because he showed up at lunch to stay home the rest of the afternoon to make sure the baby and I were both okay.  WE’RE FINE.  WE’RE SLEEPING.  RWAR!

I’m still convinced that Baby Rivas is coming early.  Anyone who disagrees with my mother’s intuition, I refer you back to the weeks that I was convinced that I was having a boy before it was confirmed that I am, in fact, having a boy.  So I’ll continue to march to the tune of a (roughly) 39 week delivery, and you can secretly continue to think that I’m crazy for thinking baby is coming early when I have no logical reason why he would.  Suck on that, science.

I’m pretty sure that he’s “dropped.”  I put that in quotes because in the off chance that you haven’t noticed that I’m only 5’2″, allow me to point out that I don’t have a lot of room for him to sit high or low.  He just….. sits.  The only reason I think he may have moved down is because my acid reflux has backed off enough that I stopped throwing up multiple times a day.  The last few nights I even dared myself to fall asleep without taking Tums to see what happened and I didn’t wake up in the middle of the night choking on my own vomit.  Success!  So either baby has all of the hair that he thinks he needs now, or my tummy finally kicked him out and forced him to take up residence further south.  Either way, I’ll take what I can get at this point.

This week I got this amazing package in the mail:

and in it was the BEST quilt!  My aunt (great aunt? cousin? My grandpa’s brother’s daughter-in-law who shares what used to be my last name.  Whatever that makes her to me besides “awesome”) made it!  To provide a little color, my grandma would make all of the new babies in the family a quilt before they were born, and my aunt (great aunt? cousin? Whatever, you get the idea) decided that she was going to step up to the plate.  I love her anyway, but I am extremely touched by it:

She also sent an adorable Christmas outfit that Mini Me is excited to wear.  I know this because he kicked like crazy while I was opening the package and I took that to translate into “I love it!”

All of this baby business wouldn’t be possible without my husband, so on to topic number two: today is our 2 year anniversary!!  I decided that today I would go ahead and like him so I’m planning to make an awesome dinner complete with wine (for those of the two of us who can drink. grrrrr….) and an artichoke crab dip that I’m excited to try.  Of course, Angel doesn’t know any of this is coming, just that I said I was going to make him dinner tonight and that he was forced to eat it no matter what it was.  When I asked him what he would like me to make, he suggested cheese meatballs (haha, take that, mom!)

Our lives are about to change just about any day now and I couldn’t be happier to be going through it with him.  Looking back, all of my best days have been since I met him.  So here’s to 50 more years together that are as exciting and loving as the first 2 were.

I have reached my nirvana:

I am officially being paid to stay home, nap, and do nothing.

Until February.

I interrupt the entertaining blog to bring you the following PSA: The fat lady has stretch marks.

This morning when I was getting ready for work I noticed red lines below my belly button (in the mirror, obviously, since I haven’t seen my belly button first hand in months).  It took me a minute to process what they were: “What are- wait- oh, hell”  Yep, that’s about the thought process.  35 weeks in, and stretch marks made their grand and not-very-graceful appearance.

I could blame the stretch marks on the fact that I ate both my and my husband’s dinner last night, but where’s the fun in that?  Baby was hungry.  How’s this for a typical pregnancy dinner: chicken fajitas, sliced apples, and artichokes.  Angel started laughing at me when I told him what was for dinner, but the joke was totally on him when I ate both artichokes.  In my defense, I did ask first and he was just too nice to turn down the larger-than-life hormonal wife who is carrying his baby.  He’s a very smart man.

So imagine my surprise when I woke up at 4am and my tummy hurt because I was starving.  This baby is packing on the pounds now and I have the stretch marks to prove it!  In nature’s cruel joke, I now wake up every 2 hours (exactly) to use the restroom.  Lovely, right?

In spite of this all, I got 10 hours of sleep and I’m ready for my last 3 days of work!

After last night’s debate, there’s an article on the local news website this morning discussing how marriages where the husband and wife stand on different sides of the political fence don’t work.  I would like to publicly solute that article with my favorite finger this morning as I take offense to the idea that I have to think like my husband for he and I to be happy and him to stay with me.  I would like to think that he stays with me because I don’t agree with what he thinks all of the time and sometimes I have very valid points that he hadn’t thought of.

When it comes to politics, Angel thinks that Obama is the best thing since sliced bread and I think that Angel is stupid.  We’ll never agree, we know that, and we’re okay with it.  We sat on the couch last night watching the debate, made a few generic comments every once in a while like “ugh, how stupid can this guy be?!” (sometimes talking about the candidates and sometimes about each other) and then we change the subject and move on.  We don’t need a live debate in the house as well because much like the presidential candidates on TV, we will never change each others minds but that doesn’t mean that we don’t agree on major decisions of our lives.

So suck on eggs, ABC.  The key to a happy marriage is knowing how to argue and knowing what’s worth arguing about.  He’s allowed to think whatever he wants to, and I’ll continue to think that he’s wrong and we will both choose not to argue about this and it appears that we have a happy marriage.

Commence one finger solute.

Welcome to Maternity Monday a la 34 week style.  I’m happy to report that last week’s panic has mostly subsided and been replaced with worse acid reflux.  Or maybe I’m just too distracted with the horrible burning throat and my focus not to puke to realize that I’m panicking.  It’s like trying to fight a forest fire with a garden hose at this point.  Last night we hit another pregnancy first that I thought was myth- I ended up sleeping on the reclining couch because I was hoping that staying slightly propped up would help me to stop throwing up.  This was all after I took 24 hours worth of Tums in a 2 hour period and was in tears because I was just so tired but couldn’t stop throwing up the nothing that was in my tummy.

If I thought I could actually show up at the hospital in the middle of the night in tears asking them for the love of God to just take the kid out already and they would listen, then I would be writing this from Scottsdale Osborn Hospital while holding my new bouncing baby boy.  But instead, I’m sitting at my desk at work, writing this while focusing on trying not to puke anymore.  So far, I’ve been unsuccessful.  I’ve bitched about Tums before, but ohmygod it’s so much worse when you’ve already taken the max dose for 24 hours and there’s nothing else that’s safe to take.

Oy, the heartburn. Nausea. Food aversions. All back in full force. If this keeps up until my due date, I’ll have had exactly three months of NOT throwing up or suffering major gastrointestinal problems throughout the entire pregnancy. That is backwards as hell, and I would like to officially file a complaint with someone.

But enough about my digestive system on the fritz.

This weekend we also hit a major milestone and sign that it’s fall: we turned our air conditioner off for almost 48 hours STRAIGHT.  This is the first time that I’ve turned it off since March.  We opened the windows on Saturday night and it was so nice outside that I actually slept with a blanket.  Of course, I didn’t get much sleep because I kept being woken up by the sound of my wallet rejoicing downstairs (or having to pee, it’s just so hard to tell anymore).  But then the cold front moved out and we’re back to a seasonal average high of 97 today.  Yesterday I was waiting as long as I could to close the house up hoping that it would cool off at night, but about 10pm while our neighbor was smoking weed and the smell started to come into our 85 degree home, pregzilla stormed around the house closing windows violently and complaining that the neighbor needed better weed that didn’t smell like grass fire before cranking down the AC and stomping up to bed.  Angel just silently watched the pregnancy storm from the couch and said that it smelled more like weed and less like grass fire and I yelled “agree to disagree!” and slammed the bedroom door.  Ironically, 5 minutes later the 10 o’clock news reported a hay fire burning less than a mile from our house, so naturally I had to yell downstairs that I was right and it did smell like grass fire.  My adorable husband was then forced to counter that he didn’t care what I smelled, the neighbor was still outside smoking weed.  The man had a point.  But whatever kind of smoke it was, the baby and I were not appreciating it and did not see the humor in the heated (literally) situation.

I took Thursday and Friday off of work to do nothing.  I was planning on cleaning the house and catching up on laundry, but come Sunday when nothing had been done and I was complaining about needing to pick up our filthy house, wash underwear, and being too tired to do any of it, I said “I have to clean the house but all I want to do is sleep.” Angel responded with a “No you don’t.  Just take a nap and go to bed early.”  And THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is what love sounds like.  Of course, that didn’t happen either so I’m forced to wonder what I spent 4 days doing…

Ladies and Gents, we have car seats installed in our child mobiles!

I’ve said it many times before, but I’m going to go ahead and say it again.  It’s adorable to me the ways in which Angel subtly shows his excitement with our coming son.  I told him that I wanted to go to the local fire department to learn how to get our car seats installed and use them properly and Angel was 100% on board (not that he would have had a choice, anyway).  While we were there, he was so focused on what the fireman was saying and showing and was asking questions that I hadn’t even thought of like “What if I wanted to install the car seat without the base?” “How do we know when our son outgrows this car seat?” “What kind of car seat should we get when he does?”  You go, Daddy!  I’m focused more on the basic workings of the car seat such as Am I really going to be able to reach him to get him in and out if it’s installed in the middle vs. the side? or Does the handle stay up when the car seat is locked in? And once again my adorable husband is all about the safety of the device- practicality be damned!

Speaking of adorable husbands, we went on a date night compliments of my boss on Friday night.  I’ve been working crazy hours on stupid things, and my manager’s manager sent an email to take my “significant other out to a nice dinner and expense it” for my work.  So hubby and I dressed up, went out to Benihana, and came home to watch a movie on the couch with the dog.  When he fell asleep on the couch cuddling with Molly I seriously almost started crying from overwhelming love for the guy and the life that we have together.

Which is a great transition into the main event of this post- our baby!  He’s supposed to weigh “as much as an average cantaloupe” or 4.75 pounds.  I haven’t gained a single ounce for 4 weeks, so I take it mean that he’s just sucking up some of my fat and turning it into his, and for that I love him already.

34 weeks is a big milestone for me being concerned about preterm labor as babies born at this stage do just fine other than a slightly longer stay at the hospital.  No long term health problems that prematurity causes!  That said, I’m not letting him get any big ideas about escaping just yet because more baby fat and mature lungs are going to make everyone’s lives easier.

Pregnancy books this week tell me that I need to make a birth plan.  I laugh at the idea because, much like I imagine motherhood will be, I can’t really plan for what’s coming without getting disappointed when my child has his own plan.  So therefore I will say that I would like to do what I can to avoid a c section and I would like to see how far I can go without drugs.  But I’m not discounting either if necessary, and I actually expect that I’ll be asking for an epidural at some point just maybe not as I hit the hospital door.  My “birth plan” is to have Angel holding a healthy baby boy while I bask in the first moments that I’m not carrying him.  If that happens while I’m strapped to a table in the ER getting stitched up from a c section or high as a kite (or both) then so be it.  They don’t give you grades.  While easier said before this all happens, I’m not going to be disappointed in myself for asking for medical intervention and ask you all to remind me of that if I actually am after the fact.  There is no “I avoided the episiotomy” wall of fame in the hospital and my baby won’t get a special sticker if I do it drug free.  So there’s my plan, you stupid pregnancy books.