38w6d

Oh Vegas.  This morning, I woke up and thought, “I could sleep forever,” which almost never happens.  See, your mother and I wake up sometime around 6:30am every morning, and are out of the bed by 7:15am at the latest, even especially on weekends.  (This is a complete luxury compared to the 5:00am wake-up-calls back when we had a different life in a different city.)  If we wake up as late as 8:00am on a weekend day, the day is practically gone already, and we wake up immediately thinking of our lunch plans, it’s so late.  I secretly think that having a baby who is awake in the middle of the night and in the 5:00am’s is your mother’s ultimate dream, since we’ll finally be able to take advantage of all of the day’s hours that are wasted while we’re asleep.

But this morning, I wanted to sleep.  If I could sleep AND eat chunks of ice at the same time, I would be in heaven.  Alas.

Everyone has so much to say nowadays, which is to be suspected, I suppose.  It doesn’t help, however, that I’d like to crawl in a hole and not entertain a single conversation.  They all assume I’m having the worst sleep of my life.  That I “want this thing out.”  That I must be so miserable.  And sure, it’s fucking hot outside, but it’s June.  This just in – it’s fucking hot in June, folks.  Unless you don’t live in Virginia.  I’m not even sleeping poorly, unless people consider going to the bathroom every few hours “sleeping poorly.”  I get up, I go, I come back and fall back asleep.  Sure, it’s not the uninterrupted bliss of pre-pregnancy days, but this comes with the territory, right?

We’re 39 weeks tomorrow.  I’m still at work… working.  I can still make it up the hill and around the block with my wife and dog.  I can still pop out in the car and pick up a pizza from the place down the street.  I can still retrieve the dog’s ball when he loses it under the couch.  I’m trying to stay on top of doing laundry to the point where I’m washing things as soon as we take them off.  We don’t know when this is all going to start, which means every day I leave work as if I’m not coming back the next day.  I have my out of office voicemail and email responses carefully crafted and ready for updating.

Last night, I started playing a game called, “What if we went into labor right now?” in which my wife then explained to me in details what we would do.  I’m so so fortunate that my capable, level-headed, crisis-management-trained-and-certified wife is the non-birther.  I don’t think I could be trusted to not call 9-1-1.  My wife, though, is a crisis rock star.

There were more, still minor, contractions this morning, which feel a little like Freddy Krueger is trying to escape through my cervix.  I can’t wait until the ones that really hurt start, if this is the preview.  Otherwise, physically, I’m drinking a lot of water (and eating a LOT of ice), and experiencing a little heartburn for the first time.  I upgraded to some flip-flops about a month ago, which are the only accommodating shoe-wear for the impressively swollen feet that my equally impressive wife has been rubbing in the evenings.  That, folks, is love.