Am now home and still with child. While her lungs are indeed mature, my cervix hasn’t gotten the hint and I’m hoping to avoid a section.

If I can coordinate my big ass OB practice, I’m angling to try for an I induction on Monday. For the Crohn’s, not my ballooning legs.

I’ll be back online tomorrow to tell you the comedy of errors that was my hospital stay.

Big sloppy tongue kisses to you all. Oh, and any suggestions for getting some cooperation from my cervix, oh wise Internet?

Amnio a lot weirder than I’d thought.

Still stuck waiting for them to decide what to do with me.

May go home tonight to be induced this weekend if amnio is good.

Baby looks good, 7 lbs 8 oz.

My platelets are low.

Still haven’t peed out the 4,000 bags of fluid. Am now bigger than ever.

Can’t manage eating yet.

No access to email.

One word: amnio. Tomorrow. Lung maturity.

Also: scared.

Hold me Internet?

Still at hospital waiting on a GI consult. Swelling is no better but no one seems concerned. Will be home soon where no IV impedes my typing.

Until then Dave is entertaining me with his iFart application. God knows how we lived without it before.

I know, I know. 2 whole posts in one day! And none with pictures! Cats and dogs, living together, absolute chaos.

But yeah. Anyway.

As soon as The Daver gets home, I’m off to L and D to get checked out. Apparently, swelling up like a balloon even without other symptoms can be cause for alarm. And my legs and feet? Well, I’ll SPARE you the picture. I’ll take my thanks in the form of gifts and money and possibly a housecleaning. Or a foot rub.

Let me leave it at this: I have extreme doubts that I’ll be able to put shoes on. At all. And I wore them yesterday. I’ll be the freak in flip flops, if you see me out and about.

Man, I wish I could make ’em induce me now. Sadly, tho, I’ll be back later to tell you all about how it was somehow related to me peeing my pants or something equally trite and humilating.

*sighs*

Come on baby girl! Come on out!

First, let me say this: I’ve swollen up to sexy Michelin Man proportions (only sans “Man” bits) and am having a terrible time making my fingers properly work. My doctor seems to think this is No Big Deal, as my pressures have been decent, and I did end up swelling badly with Ben (read: I looked like a sausage bursting from it’s casing) but that was August. And this…is January. So, in the mean time, I’m watching my pressures and having a terrible time using my computer. But I heart My Internet so I will soldier on.

(cue Celin Dione music, Maestro) Somehow, my fingers will go on…

And Coco, you sexy bitch, you won my impromptu contest about passive aggression. No one can top faking a death. NO ONE. So let me use my 3 remaining brain cells to come up with something fitting to send you.

Moving on.

So, after Daver and I were dating for awhile, his lease was up on his place in the city and he moved to Oak Park, where I lived with him a couple days each week. When I was in nursing school, I had to do clinical time in the hospitals learning the ropes on Actual! Live! People. I’ll give you a moment to digest how scary that sounds for all those patients I cared for.

Better? Good.

But having chosen a school that operated about 45 minutes from my house meant that the hospitals that agreed to have us lowly students work on their patients (for free) were similarly far from my house. And not being exactly an Angel of the Morning, Dave graciously offered to let me stay with him on the nights before the clinicals so that I wouldn’t have to interrupt my beauty sleep in order to get to the hospital at ungodly hours (read: 6 AM).

Plus, we could bone. Which is always good.

One night that winter, we walked down to the downtown part of Oak Park to catch some dinner at the Indian place there and afterwards (since Ben was not with us) we popped over to the huge Borders there to browse. It was a favorite thing to do, going in there, grabbing a cup of coffee and listening to some of the CD’s they had out on display, and it’s something that a child and a half later, I miss doing.

But I digress.

So there I was, several aisles away from where Daver stood listening to his whiny Emo crap while I rocked out to the subtle sounds of the new Christina Aguilera album when I realized that I was not alone in my aisle. Being Oak Park, with it’s bazillion (read: 52,524) people meant sharing a ton of space with said people, so this didn’t even register on my radar besides noting the gigantic dent in this dude’s forehead.

After finishing that CD, I made my way to another aisle to listen to something different and after a few moments I noticed again that Mr. Dent In His Forehead was in my new aisle. Odd, but not entirely unlikely. I didn’t own the patent on the space between aisles, so whatever. About a half an hour after this, I saw that he was still in my aisle as I made my way to yet another aisle. This time, the one with my future The Daver in it.

I went up to him and teased him briefly about whatever he was listening to, he teased me back and we began to discuss what our next plans involved. Mainly, bed. Now, I noticed that Dent Face was not only in THIS aisle with us, but watching me intently. I tested my This Guy Is Following Me theory out by walking to different aisles, and I was now right: he was following me from aisle to aisle, not being even remotely discreet about it.

Now, as full of myself as I tend to be, I’d normally write this off to my glaring hotness, but there was something in the way that he looked at me that made me acutely uncomfortable. Kind of like he was imagining what my brain might look like smeared on the walls of his apartment.

I feel that I must add that I’m not an alarmist by even the remotest standards. I don’t have pepper spray, I rarely lock the doors to my cars and I don’t see Aspiring Murder/Rapist on every passing person. My parents were/are hippies and always taught us not to be afraid of people. Which I’m not.

Except for This Dude. Who had not only begun to make me sweat in my jacket, but fear for my life. Daver, God love him, isn’t a huge and imposing guy and this dude looked like he would have happily snapped his neck to get at me. I’ll never know why I reacted this way to seeing this guy, but I did. And I panicked.

What the hell is someone who is in a retail place only being stared at by some creepy guy supposed to do? Call the police? Tell a Border’s employee? What the hell are they gonna do about it? He was LOOKING at me, not shining a knife and pointing it at me.

And yet, and yet all of my hackles were raised and my flight or fight response began to kick into high gear and I was utterly stuck there. We had a car, mine, parked in the garage behind Borders, but walking there in the dark of night while some creepy dude made “I’m Going To Enjoy Killing You, Bitch” eyes at me? Didn’t sound appealing or bright.

But what choice did we have? None, really.

The entire walk/run back to the garage was torture: I honestly feared for my life, something I’d rarely done before, if ever. We hightailed it out of there, and uncharacteristically I made The Daver drive us home while I shook like a frail leaf in the passenger seat. I cannot honestly believe that I didn’t piss my pants.

It took the rest of the night and a large amount of Jack Daniels for me to calm down and not stare out the windows for Mr. Denty-Pants (although I do admit to doing that a fair bit), whom I thankfully never saw again.

I’ll never know if I was right in being fucking freaked the hell out by this dude, or if I was mainly being a damn pansy about the whole situation, but hell, even 5 years later, the whole situation makes me a little squiggly inside.

I’ve heard that we humans have a sense for this sort of thing, a vestigial DANGER, DANGER sense that will go off when something out of the ordinary is going on and you are in danger of something, but I never knew if it was true until then. I’m still not sure, I guess.

What do you think?

Firstly, I must thank all of you for your comments on my last post because, well, it’s not something I often talk about. My relationship with Nat is not an easy one and I’m apt to write off bad behavior because things have improved so drastically from where they had been. I’m lucky that he’s not always in such an cock-blast mood, just every now and again he decides to be a complete weenis.

And to clarify, he now does pay child support. This actually happened months ago before we’d ironed out an arrangement (before he used to pay for Ben’s Nut! Ban! school. Or someone did. All that I know is that I didn’t.) and he’s been decent since then. Not to excuse past bad behavior because that is SO not me, but it’s a situation that I never know how to handle.

My initial reaction, you see Internet is to scream and holler at him, but then it’ll escalate the situation and I’ve never wanted Ben to watch us scream at each other. I always thought that seeing that would be more damaging. But what do you think? I’m curious.

But my real reason for this post is this: I’m looking for some big brother/little sister shirts/onsies that are kind of rockin’. I’m not much into the schmaltzy cartoonish ones, because it’s really not my style, I prefer the funkier side of life, you know?

Oh, BONUS! I took some pictures to show you because apparently people like pictures in blogs. I always thought people would find them annoying, but shit, anything to keep my Internet satisfied. Now, before you point out that I only have one child pictured, Ben happens to not be here right now so I couldn’t take his picture. But rest assured, I will do so.

Here is my darling son doing the best kind of advertising I could find: free. BONUS! Also true. And yes, he does have a heart shaped tongue.

In the name of embarrassing myself in front of the entire Internet more than I already do, I conned Daver into taking a belly shot. It is here and it is frightening. Perhaps I should also include this picture in my dissertation upon why teen pregnancy is bad to scare them. As a bonus on this shot, you can clearly see how swollen I’ve gotten in my hands. It’s hot.

And lastly, Alex looking disbelievingly at the size of his mother. Because I am a whale.

(doorbell rings, a pair of dogs begins to bark. A woman hoists her pregnant butt off the couch while telling her young son to get his shoes on)

Woman With Pregnant Ass opens door and invites the person standing there inside.

WWPA (obviously trying to be nice and make conversation): “Hey, how’s it going?”

Man Standing With Sour Expression in Hallway: “Fine.”

WWPA: “Ben should be down in a second, he’s getting his shoes on.”

7 year old clomps down stairs with shoes on and says, “Hi Dad.”

MSWSEH: “Where’s your sweater?”

WWPA (genuinely confused): “What sweater?”

MSWSEH: “Why can’t you dress him for the weather? It’s WINTER.”

WWPA (looking incredulously at Man, then child, who is wearing jeans and a t-shirt): “Well, Nat, he DOES dress himself now. And he never gets cold. So why complain at him?”

MSWSEH now known as Nat: “It’s just that you never dress him for the cold, Becky.”

WWPA now known as Becky: “He dresses himself, dude. And if he’s not cold, why should I fight with him on it?”

Nat: “What, do you need me to buy him clothes now?”

Becky: “You’ve never bought him clothes in your life, Nat. We send him in nice clothes, he comes back in grubby clothes that are too small for him. If you want him to wear something particular, then buy him some clothes.”

Nat (becoming more and more hostile, to the point of sneering): “Is that why you send him in that stuff?”

Becky: “It’s the stuff that he has always come back from your house in. Maybe your parents buy it. Whatever. Hey Ben? Can you go see Dave now?”

Nat (bellowing): “DO YOU NOT HAVE ENOUGH MONEY TO BUY HIM CLOTHES?”

Becky (now furious as well, as he has never given her a dime in child support, nor has he bought anything Ben has ever needed): “You have a lot of nerve coming in here and demanding that I send him in ‘nicer’ clothes. This is my house, I take care of all that Ben needs INCLUDING clothes, while you pick him up to drop him at your parents house.”

Nat (now yelling): “Do you need me to buy him clothes? Because if it’s about clothes, then I can buy him some.”

Becky: “If you want him to wear something nicer than what your parents provide him with, then yes. Until you do that, you have no right to come in here and demand that I put him in the nice clothes I buy for him. I cannot possibly send him to school in the clothes you have provided.”

(A toddler has toddled up behind the pregnant woman and is indicating that he’d like to be picked up. She bends over, wincing and plucks him into her arms)

Nat: “It’s always about money, isn’t it?”

Becky (confused by his sudden change of tactic): “Whaaat?”

Nat: “You’re such a bitch. A money-grubbing, label whoring bitch.”

Becky: “You may leave now. You may not speak to me this way in my home or ever. Good-bye.”

(Nat slams door behind him, and stomps away. Becky shakes her head and sighs deeply)

Becky (softly to herself, staring at the just-slammed door): I guess this is what they warn you about when they tell you not to have sex with someone before marriage.

(End scene)

Your turn, kidlets. What asshole things have happened to YOU lately?

I’ve always wanted to be able to say the phrase: “Honey, I think it’s time” and then rush around off to the hospital in a blind panic lest my baby be born in my car or something. Sadly (or happily, however you look at it), I’ve never been able to go into labor on my own and have missed that step entirely. Since I was induced with both of my kids, the most I got to say was “hey, can you pack the camera charger?”

That phrase lacks….something.

But I digress.

Yesterday, at about 12:45 I began having some pretty bad contractions that didn’t abate when I rested, changed positions, or any of the other things you might want to do to see if This Was It. Turns out, at about 6 PM, I learned that this was NOT, in fact, it. Depressing, but true, Amelia stays put for now.

During those 5 hours of labor (it was just like labor, y’all) Daver was rubbing my back for me in the kitchen while our youngest ran up to him holding a coveted ball.

And just like our own personal America’s Funniest Home Videos, Alex winds up the small basketball and whips it as hard as he can at his poor father’s ball sac. BLAMO, he shoots, he scores.

Dave doubled over in pain, and being the good wife that I am, I immediately launched into a fit of giggles that doubled me over as best as it could, given the back labor I was in.

“Well, that takes care of the vasectomy, Daver. Looks like he just told you what he thought of having siblings.” I sputtered out like the juvenile wife that I happen to be. “Lookit it this way: he saved you the process of going to a urologist.”

And the Daver just glared and glared. Can’t say I blame him.

But here, I put some pictures up! I need to take some more and I will and then I’ll post them and cop out of a real post by putting pictures up and that will be awesome because I’m not so smart anymore which is weird because maybe I never was.

Kthxbai.

Hells to the NO, I don’t want a sibling, Mommy, you ignorant slut.

In light of a real post today, as my poor joints are getting so swollen that I’m having a terrible time typing (also: what the hell is happening to my body? Inquiring minds want to know), rather than complaining bitterly about annoying crap because as the name implies, is annoying, I’ve decided to make a list of things that are full of The Awesome.

*The kindness of (relative) strangers. In the past month or two, I have gotten some amazing baby stuff from my online home-girls , Miss Emily from Wheels on the Bus, DD, Guilty Noodles (no, it’s sadly not her real name), Rebel, and Shinny. And I’m telling you, I’m one lucky bitch.

*Emails like this:

Hi,
I love your blog and I think you would appreciate my sense of humor. If I link to your blog on my blog is there any way you could return the favor? I am trying to get more exposure.

(actual email).

And no, no I won’t return the favor. Especially since you don’t even use my name or my blog address. Because my blog is not your platform. But seriously, I have had more fun with this sort of email. Hilarious. Especially since the blog in question was not remotely funny.

Isn’t this sort of grabby behavior a blogging faux paus?

*Actual non-grabby emails from my readers always make my day, even though I often suck at replying to them. I’m crappy that way, and it’s not intentional and I’m trying like crazy to get better about it, because it’s rude to NOT reply.

And no, you’re not stalking me if you write me an email. Sadly, you’re not stalking me. I could use more stalkers, you know.

*Tyler Candles, which I discovered years ago while poking around some chic shops (obviously before Baby #2 was born and I was somehow outlawed from said shops, even if only by my own choice.Because babies do not enjoy chic shops, no matter how expensive or trendy.

But anyway.

So these candles beat the snot out of Yankee Candles, they’re affordable and they all smell fucking amazing. Seriously, if you like heavily scented candles, try some of these.

(This was a free! endorsement because I like them so much. The only real endorsements I get emailed are for things like sex toys. Which I will TOTALLY be reviewing once I’m not eleventy-hundred months pregnant. Because nothing screams “I don’t want to think about you in that way” like being gummy-bear shaped).

*The return of American Idol, partially because Simon makes me a little weak-kneed, and partially because when first pregnant, I remember thinking “When American Idol comes on, I’ll be almost ready to give birth.” Which made my then nauseous ass happy.

*Ickle tiny pink baby clothes in my own house. Because, obviously.

*Diet coke, o! sweet nectar of the gods, because coffee cannot be tolerated any longer by my pathetically delicate digestive system.

*The fact that it has snowed more to date than we here in Illinois normally see all year. Oh wait, this was supposed to be things that I was HAPPY about. Never mind. Scratch this one out.

*Reading the hilarious comments of my readers always brightens up my day. I’m sorry that I haven’t been able to comment as much on YOUR blogs, but my fingers and joints are unhappy as hell with me. And writing on the computer only exacerbates this. Damn you, late pregnancy weirdness (seriously did this happen to anyone else?)!

Your turn, fair reader! What is bringing you joy today (no matter how small)?