...And Waiting...

I certainly didn't guess we'd actually go to 40 weeks, but Peanut and I are still completely connected buddies.  I got a little excited yesterday morning when I was kept from sleeping at 3:00 in the morning by strong contractions occurring every ten minutes...then every seven minutes after a while...then five...

And then they quit.  It's been over 24 hours since they quit and I'm back to feeling not much activity at all except from Peanut trying to find somewhere he can stretch out.

I had false labor once before a few weeks ago, but I was starting to get a little excited this time because I did what I could to test labor (hot shower, moving around, drinking lots of water, etc.) and continued getting very regular contractions anyway.

Oh well.  Even false labor does SOMETHING, even if it's just to make all my muscles nice and strong and practiced for the real thing.

In the meantime, our house is very clean.  I even pulled the moldy caulk off our bathtub and re-caulked it the other day, one of those small projects that's been bugging me and I just haven't gotten to until now.  I guess people call this "nesting", but I tend to think it's more like I'm just hanging around waiting, I can't do anything outside (not even shovel snow, one of my favorite winter activities...), I can't really go anywhere, and I get bored sitting around in a chair all day.  My siblings will attest that this kind of project-hunting is not unusual behavior for Lauren-who-is-bored.  And it's not going to extremes, either.  I have yet to scrub and mop the garage floor.  Though that could be possibly because the water would freeze if I tried it.  Hm.

We've pretty much continued just staying quietly home with occasional trips to the grocery store.  Our freezers are definitely stocked, both with meals and with ingredients for meals; and I made various cookies and some sweet bread for having around in case of visitors.  Unfortunately, when I'm bored (and I haven't thought of a project to do) I start cooking.  I tried out a recipe for cinnamon rolls the other day that was terrific, though I made half a batch and forgot to cut the milk amount in half, so I had to do some serious amendments to the dough just to get it to roll out.  I gave one pan of them to my brother Aaron - who faithfully calls me every day and who has done all kinds of special things like coming over with lunch and taking care of little projects we didn't necessarily have the tools or pieces for - and there is another pan for my brother-in-law Benjamin, who also has done a bunch of special things like bring his cordless drill in and put up the shelf in our kitchen for our little appliances that we've been procrastinating about for a while.  We had just enough left over for us to have some for dessert and give some to Mom and Dad next door, which is good.  I do not need three pans of cinnamon rolls sitting over here calling my name.

Ben ordered two over-the-toilet cabinets for our bathroom and Grandma's bathroom and spent a few evenings putting them together and installing them.  They look great, but I'm still in the process of figuring out what to put in them that makes sense rather than loading them with odds and ends and turning them essentially into junk drawers.  I think ours is pretty much going to be holding books and extra towels, while Grandma's will hold the stuff currently in tubs on the bathroom floor like the cream for the sore on her foot and the lotion she uses after showering and so on.

We also have done a lot of talking, discussing things like what God's actual old and new covenants are (they seem to be the same covenant but sealed in different ways: ultimately, we believe the covenant is "You shall love the Lord your God and obey him; and if you do, you will be his people and he will be your God and his commands will be written on your hearts"), reading books like "The Secrets of Golgotha" (which was an absolutely fascinating book, though not nearly as sensational as the title might suggest), discussing how to make ethical insurance claims (Ben had his first meeting with an insurance adjuster due to a business computer job involving a power surge), and watching Deep Space Nine episodes.  Yes, I know the last doesn't really seem to fit the others, but...we're strange that way.

We read somewhere that babies who hear their father's voice reasonably often do tend to respond to their father as well as their mother at birth.  With all the talking Ben and I do, this baby ought to know Ben just fine by now.  It's funny because if Ben leans over and talks right to the baby, the little guy definitely responds.  He turns his head and moves his hands and stirs around even if he wasn't doing much beforehand.  I'm very pleased about that.  Babies should know their fathers!

All in all, right now our world is pretty quiet and secluded, which makes it a little tougher than usual to think of something to write about.  It's been kind of the same routine since Christmas and I figure not much is going to change until after the waiting-for-birth process is over.  Grandma asks almost every night, "Do you think the baby will be born tonight?"  She's pretty convinced she's just going to wake up one morning and there'll be a baby here without her knowing it's coming.  I guess that's how all her sisters and her brother were born and she often remembers her childhood clearer than anything else these days.  She says her mother never would say when a due date was and people didn't talk about other people being pregnant - she remembers asking her mom one day, "Mother, how come sometimes you're thin and other times you're fat?" and her mother laughed but didn't answer her.

I'm relieved that Grandma consistently remembers there IS a new baby coming these days.  Up until a few weeks ago she was still shocked every few days to discover that I was expecting.  Now it seems to have really sunk in and she has even been rubbing my stomach and saying, "Yes, there's a baby in there!"  In some ways, it must be really odd for her because she hasn't lived in a house with a new baby on the way for many, many years and she's still fuzzy on how she's related to us a lot.  I went through the whole birth kit with her and showed her all the different stuff we'd had to collect and she was very fascinated because she never saw that kind of thing when her mom was having babies and when she had Mom, she just went to the hospital where they drugged her enough that she doesn't remember the birth at all.  I think part of her would like to be around for this baby to be born, but she's probably going to be next door for that bit since she's going to need someone who can give her a hand with things and make sure she gets her meals and remembers her medicine and so on and I'm not sure I'd trust me and Ben with that responsibility during the labor and delivery.

One interesting thing is that people ask me all the time how I'm feeling and I'm having a ha.rd time figuring out how to answer that.  No one needs a catalogue of all the oddball little things going on that make me feel generally not quite up to my usual par, and in the long run I'm having a pretty complaint-free pregnancy anyway; but it seems a little boring to just say, "Fine" all the time.  I am fine.  But I also have pins and needles constantly in the tips of my right fingers, rolling over in bed actually hurts, breathing and swallowing don't feel exactly normal, I'm experiencing heartburn for the first time in my life, and for some reason I can put my left sock on just fine but it actually hurts to bend in a way that allows me to put my right sock on.  Plus my ankles swell up unpredictably, my legs get twitchy when I'm tired, I can't figure out how to carry a laundry basket properly, getting into the car is a really ungraceful procedure that I have to hold my breath to accomplish, and the baby has a stubborn fascination for keeping his knees and his feet pushing on a nerve in my ribs so that I often get a sudden sharp pain that makes me jump.

Now, would you really want someone downloading all that to you when you wanted to know how they were doing?

Of course not.  And like I said, if you look at that list, it's all picky little stuff that's dumb to complain about anyway.  But it does end up making me feel not quite myself most of the time even if essentially...I'm fine!  Just ultimately really looking forward to the baby being outside rather than in.  Even if being outside includes feeding, changing, and walking a no-longer-silent Peanut.

So that's what's going on over here.  I'm really, really hoping to post some more exciting news soon.  Wouldn't it just figure if after thinking the whole nine months that we'd have an early baby, we'd have a late one after all?  I remember being really scared at nine weeks that we were losing this baby and asking God very fervently to please let us hang on to this one.  I'm sure he's sort of gently chuckling about that right now...