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.