Oh, Xiao Gou Gou

I met Xiao Gou on a cold, misty December morning in Sichuan, China. Mario and I were laboriously ascending the 300 steep stairs that spanned "The Hill" between our apartment on the XiNanKeJi (Southwest University of Science and Technology) Old Campus and the New Campus, on our way to conduct my final oral exams with our respective classes. All of a sudden, rapid movement caught my eye...a tiny ball of fur was catapulting down the stairs towards me. It was a puppy, probably no more than five or six weeks old. I caught him up, thinking surely someone would appear to claim him, but no one did. No one was around. No one came chasing down the stairs after him, and no calls echoed in the misty morning. The rest of the world was still and silent. It was as if he had sprung into being from a spiderweb, or fallen from the sky.

Now, I had never been a dog-lover. A lover of animals in general, yes, but cats had always been my forte. For some reason, no dog had ever been able to get its little pointy teeth into my heart. But then there was Xiao Gou (Little Dog, in Mandarin). He was so incredibly tiny. He would be roadkill or else dinner, I told Mario frantically, if we didn't rescue him. Making a quick decision, and ignoring my then-boyfriend's protests, I tucked him under my warm coat and continued up the hill to class, keeping an eye out for any sign that someone loved and wanted him back. There was none.

As he slept in the arm of my coat throughout my exams, I wondered what the heck I would do next. Aha, I thought--my friend EmilyPie, who was living and teaching in China at the same university with us, had been talking about wanting a dog! As soon as I was done with my students I hightailed it to her apartment to try to hawk my furry, snuggly wares. But, as cute as Emily thought he was, her husband had the final say. Now, you can always count on B to maintain perspective when the women around him are swaying like willows in fitful breezes of hormonal impulse. Wise to the enormity of adopting a dog in a foreign county, he put the kibosh on any idea of adoption.

Tragically, Mario and I had not such fortitude. We put up posters in Chinese looking for the missing owner, but with the passing days our hope that someone would call transmuted to relief that no one had. My family was amazed...I was falling for a dog. By the end of a week, Xiao Gou was Xiao Gou, and he was irrevocably ours.

Over the next 9 months we adjusted our lives to having a living, breathing creature with needs in our lives...stumbled down from our third-floor apartment for multiple midnight potty breaks, rushed home from dinners out to snuggle and take care of him, having him vaccinated and neutered (ugh, a god-awful experience in China!), arranged for doggysitters when we went traveling for extended periods. When it came time to leave our China life and return to the United States, there was no question of leaving him behind. With a ton of help from one of our students, Xiao cleared the extensive customs process and became certified to leave his mother country and become a US dog-izen. Enduring the sixteen-hour flight back, knowing our baby was kenneled somewhere beneath the plane in a dark hold, was probably one of the most traumatic experiences of my life, so I can only guess at how it was for him. But when we arrived at LAX, there he was by the oversized baggage claim, safe and sound in his kennel, yipping woefully for his mama and papa.

I don't know when the change occurred in his temperament. As a pup, Xiao Gou had always been a friendly if over-exhuberant dog who got super excited when people came over. But for some reason, back in America, he began to exhibit signs of aggression towards strangers in his territory, specifically lunging for and biting their ankles. It took Mario and I quite some time, and several bad situations, to adjust to the fact that this new side of the puppy we loved so much was real and dangerous, not just a fluke. While he has never, ever exhibited any signs of agression towards us or anyone he's familiar with, having people over has become something we have to be very careful about, either shutting Xiao away or keeping him on a leash until he's used to people. We never let him run free in a public place without a leash, and we never let strangers pet him. Unfortunately, several people suffered ankle bites, including Mario's sister and my friend Megan, before we realized exactly how much vigilance was required.

It's the weirdest thing, that he does this. At home with us, or with friends or family that he knows, he is the perfect dog, mellow and generally very obedient. When strangers appear on the scene, though, something snaps in his mind. I can see that he knows he's not supposed to bite, but where it's protectiveness or territorialness or both, something fierce comes into his eyes with the appearance of an unapproved party. We have always been well aware that this is cause for concern but have dealt with it mainly by trying to avoid the situations that provoke this behavior.

The other day, when my mom was over here babysitting Scarlett, Xiao bit her dog Whiskey. For some reason, Xiao has always had some issues with Whiskey, even though most of the time they play together fine. Xiao is usually either great with other dogs or disinterested in and fussily irritated with them, usually depending on their size, so the only reason I can think of for this is that Whiskey is the only dog he ever encounters who is not neutered. Whatever the reason, he has snapped at Whiskey multiple times both in his territory and Whiskey's, usually over cookies or food. 99% of the time, they are best buds. 1% of the time, Xiao has issues. Add this pre-existing problem to the disruption and displacement my dogs are already feeling because of the baby...not a good cocktail.

It was kind of a bad bite, and my mom dallied on taking Whiskey to the vet to have it cleaned, despite the fact that I begged her to go as soon as I knew about it. It got infected, as I predicted it would, resulting in him having to be rushed in the next day, and Whiskey almost lost his eye.

My family loves their dogs. Whiskey is my parents' baby, has been since my sister and I grew up and flew the nest. His injury has caused them to conclude that Xiao Gou is basically a threat to national security. They are leaving me intervention-style messages prodding us to get rid of him. I have been crying and stressin and not returning their calls.

I do not know what to do. On one hand, I am not trying to deny that Xiao's problem is real and dangerous and a possible liability. I really hate having to worry about having an aggressive dog. I adore having people over and would love, love, love it if Xiao could be the kind of welcoming sweet dog that my sister and my friends and my parents are fortunate enough to have. He has already caused problems with Mario's family--as I said, he bit Mario's sister, and she now (rightfully, I know) takes a "him or me" attitude which has spread to Mario's parents, even though Xiao is great around them, and they are constantly hinting about it, which in turn makes me defensive, and then I put out my lower lip and brattily tell my husband "I'd rather have him." (I will be the first to admit it--I am aggressive-aggressive, always have been, and passive-agressive approaches to things send me over the edge.)

On the other, Xiao is Mario and I's first baby. We have literally been across the world with him. He loves and trusts us. He is the absolutely perfect dog in our home environment--I have never felt threatened, for a second, by him. He has shown very little interest in the baby so far, much less than our other dog Nika or than Whiskey, and has not exhibited any sign of aggressiveness at all--and trust me, I've been watching. I do not believe that animals are disposable...I believe they are commitments for life. I would never, ever, for my entire life feel good about myself ever again if I just dumped him in a shelter or, god forbid, had him put down. And, not that I would ever encourage his behavior, but I do have to admit I feel safe at home alone, and especially now with the baby, knowing that if an intruder ever broke in, they would probably lose a limb.

Add this to the normal round of sore nipples and increasingly fussy baby and school starting and postpartum crap, and I am seriously in the dumps. I left a message at a local trainer to start arranging private sessions with us as soon as possible. Please everyone hope for me that training will help, and that the beautiful golden furball I have adored since puppyhood is fixable, because I will just die if having a baby means I have to break one of the innate tennets of my being, which is absolute love and commitment to my animals.

My Blown-Eyed Girl

Isn't she the bomb? And I'm not talking about her penchant for exploding in her diapers, usually right in the midst of a change!

(Blown, by the way, is blue+brown...daddy's brown eyes are slowing evicting her mom's blue, but the change is happening, so right now they are an interesting mix.)

Life with Squidge...

...is hectic, to say the least. Right now I am going to let what is very probably, by the sounds of it anyway, a diarrhea-stuffed diaper go for just a few minutes in order to get a little post up. That is, unless Squidget (my nickname for her, Scarlett + widget, after all she's not even six pounds!) has other plans. Am I a bad mom?

So, my daughter has now been on the planet for seven days. They have been seven days filled wtih joy and love and laughter, and let's be honest, more than a few tears (both on her part and on mine! Although Mario, rock that he is, has managed not to cry. I think he might, however, when he has to start working full time again next week! He is VERY in love with her and will use any excuse he can get to spend more time with her.) I feel great, now that my cold has mostly subsided, and feel pretty much 100% recovered. School started this week and I left my little Squidge for the first time yesterday for two hours for a meeting. I had to do it again this morning, and then my first class is this afternoon. My classes are four-hour seminars and I am not going to attempt more than half of each class this week. Maybe by next week, I will be ready to leave my baby for four hours....maybe now. I can managed two hours by feeding right before I leave and right when I come home, but four hours will necessitate a bottle feeding (I've already started pumping and building up my stock), so I'm a little nervous. Leaving's not as bad as I thought it would be, though, mostly because I get the thrill of showing off her pictures around my department.

(Booo-yah! My mom just came over and I've assigned her dirty diaper duty. Now I can post guilt-free!)

There's so much to say that I can't even think about how to focus, and what to write, so I'm just going to write about the status of two of my biggest post-baby fears, two fears that are not actually about the baby, but about my life. One is going pretty much as I expected: fear of loving my dogs less. I knew, because I'd been conditioned to know, that things would change for my poor little doglets after the baby arrived. They have been our children for so long, everyone told me, but suddenly they will be demoted to dog status. I made a vow that that would not happen, that I would not love them any less. And, I don't think I do. But it is definitely a challenge to make sure they get enough from me right now, and it's complicated by my fears of what their intense curiousity about/desperate fear of her could result in...right now Xiao mostly ignores her, but Nika tries to sniff her pretty aggressively, and even though I want to give them their space to get used to her, I can't help being protective, shoving them away. Yet as hard as it is to balance them and the baby, the other night I had a moment of profound gratitude for them. Squidge was screaming her little eyes out (evening and night are her favorite time for fits, surprise surprise!) and Mario was taking his turn trying to calm her. Xiao and Nika were laying on their beds, bewildered by the screams but behaving well, and I just laid down and snuggled them and thought, "Thank goodness for dogs...their love and their needs are so straightforward. Thank you for letting me love on you, silently!"

The other fear was my body. I have never had a "great" figure, so this fear was probably less than for many women who start from better positions! But, I had pretty much resigned myself to the fact that I would still look pregnant for a long time and might never be cute again. I don't know if I built it up so much that nothing could be as bad, but guess what...it's not as bad as I thought. It's not great by any means...I'm sure I'd be embarrassed if I had to wear a bikini...but, surprisingly, I already like my body again! This morning I was strutting around in front of the mirror and thinking, "I can deal with this!" So that's good news.

Okay, time to feed and get to class. More focused posts and more pictures, hopefully, soon...

The New Arrival

I'm finally getting around to posting, maybe...we'll see how many hours from start to finish that it takes me to get this post up....whoop, it is already ten minutes from the time I started, as Scarlett decided to have a little fit after the first sentence. Obviously, my new arrival is to blame! Well, her fault, and the fault of the many people that have flocked to see her.

So, the story of Scarlett! Rewind to four days ago, Tuesday. Just when I'd gotten myself resigned to the idea of the Thursday induction, leaving off bag-packing and other crucial errands until Wednesday, this little girl decided that it was time to make her appearance. I guess I should have figured that that would happen...but then again, I'm sure if I'd planned on it, it wouldn't have happened.

So, the night of Tuesday the 15th, my parents invited me to have Chinese food with them and my sister and her boyfriend. Mario was working late, so I headed to the restaurant by myself to meet up with them. I was just digging into my dinner when all of a sudden I felt something unpleasant...wetness. I stood up abruptly and rushed to the bathroom, wondering if I really had finally lost complete control of my bladder. No, I was pretty sure I wouldn't have had an accident of that magnitude in the middle of a Chinese food restaurant. The pregnant woman's worse fear had transpired: my water had broken in a public place. Luckily I was wearing black pants, and the lighting was dim...I really don't think anyone would have noticed if my uncharacteristically garulous father hadn't decided to announce it to the restaurant at large. (He still takes full credit for Scarlett's arrival, which he attributes to the ginger he forces me to eat from the sushi plate.

My mom drove me to the hospital while Mario left work to run home and pack my stuff. At first, even though I was PRETTY sure that this was it, I really wasn't ready to believe it, and until then I was preg-zilla about letting anyone know I was at the hospital, which is ALL that my immediate family wanted to do--start calling everyone they'd ever met. It pissed me off that we were getting phone calls before I even had my lab results. Maybe it was unreasonalbe, but I just wanted a someone to tell me it was all medically real...after so much hoping and waiting, I couldn't get my "this is it" mentality before someone certified confirmed it. And about an hour after I checked in, my lab results were back...I wasn't incontinent. My water was really broken, and I wouldn't be going home without a baby! Whoo hoo. We also had the same nurse we had when I was sick four weeks before, and we liked her a lot, so we were ready to go. (I was, of course, super nervous, but trying to act like I wasn't.)

I began having little contractions as soon as I got to the hospital, at first barely noticeable. They started me on pitocin (and I'm pleased to say, after my first wussy IV experience four weeks before, I handled it much better this time. Our nurse Leann, who'd watched my blood pressure plummet after the first one, was very relieved.) What surprised me was that immediately the hospital staff began pushing me to have an epidural! After my birthing class where the teacher told everyone to keep an open mind about needing pain meds, I wasn't expecting the nurses to be such pushers! Even before I started the whole thing really started, they were all "recommending" it. At first, I said I just wanted to wait and see how it went. By midnight, because I was reacting to the pitocin with high blood pressure, and progress was slow (3 to 4.5 cm in 6 hours), they began really pushing me, and the pain at that point was getting just bad enough that I caved. And, as awful as it was to have needles stuck in my back, I was glad I did it. It kicked in around 12:30, and the next two and a half hours were pretty much pain-free labor and fast dilation. Mario and I were even able to doze off, although the stupid blood pressure thing on my arm kept me awake by squeezing the crap out of me every ten minutes.

Around 3:00 am I started feeling things again...ouch. I eventually called my nurse and she hit me up with more epidural...but it didn't help. She tried again...it didn't help! I am sure it was helping some, but not only did the pain continue to intensify, I could feel my legs and feet just fine, so I know the drugs weren't quite doing the trick. Luckily, I didn't have too much of that to endure...around 4:30am I was pronounced fully dilated and ready to push!

The only scary thing, up until this point, was that the nurse was pretty sure the baby was in the wrong position..."sunny side up" as my dad calls it. She kept coming in to have me change sides, hoping that the baby would turn...if not doctor could try to turn her...if not, perhaps the dreaded C-s-word. I just tried not to think much about that. However, by the time I was ready to push neither Leann nor the doctor (not my own doctor, but one from her practice that I'd seen before) could tell which position she was in, and regardless, they felt that I could push her out. And I did! It only took about 20 or 30 minutes (about seven contractions, if I remember right) before she was out! Of course it sucked at the time, but from a grand standpoint it was all very bearable, probably even easy compared to what many women experience. Even though she was in the wrong position, she was very small, so that probably made it work.

Thus, Miss Scarlett Celeste made her appearance at 5:07 am, weighing only 5 pounds 12 ounces and 18 inches long. Don't ask me how monster me could possibly have produced such a small child. Mario, of course, was a champ throughout the entire thing. And he is already well on his way to being the best dad in the world!! He is absolutely, totally in love with her and it's the cutest thing in the world.

Anyway, back to the hospital...overall, the delivery was great, and I felt pretty great right away. I was ready to slough off all of my medical attachments and get out of bed the minute she was born, although the nurses were having none of it. We had a good first day with all tests going well, and we were home by the next day. So far, recovery, has also been fine...I had a minor tear with two stitches, but it's not bothering me much. I did come down with a cold the day we came home, which is a bummer considering, clearly, I won't be able to sleep it off. Breastfeeding almost broke me down the first night we had her...okay, I lied. It did break me down. I bawled my eyes out when we didn't have much success the first day, and we ended up having to use formula. I felt like a failure, despite the fact that I've heard the advice a million times not to panic when things don't go smoothly at first, but now I understand why people DO panic. However, thanks to a handy dandy little device called a nipple shield, both Scarlett and I have decided that we can do this breastfeeding thing.

My house has full of relatives (Mario's family is here), so it's hard to get enough time with my girl! I'm trying to be generous with holding time. But it's hard. Right now, I'm still counting how many hours she's been on the planet (just under 83), and every minute is still a miracle.

Okay, three hours later (lunch, feeding, several bouts of tears, and a couple of needling comments from my father-in-law about mommy things I am not doing right)...this post is done. More good stories, less information dump, to come.

Holy Stitched Up Hoo-Ha Batman

EmilyPie here...

Baby Scarlett was born early this morning! Crystal's water broke around 7pm last night (I'll let her tell the whole story) and she's been at the hospital since.

Both baby and & mama are healthy! Mario has a grin plastered to his face. One that I have only seen him wear before proposing and at their wedding.
Here are a few pictures to tide you over until Mama C can get around to posting her brith story...
at a mere 5lbs 12oz .......

A Dish-astrous Dog-tastrophe

So, this last week has been rough on my poor dishes. My whole family has Sango dishes...I have Nova Brown, my mom has Nova Black, and my sister has Avocado. We are rather fond of them. But we've had a run of bad luck in the last few days...the handle broke off of my one of my soup bowls with a mere tap in the dishwasher, a tea cup cracked when I filled it with hot water...but last night was sheer devastation in Nova Brown Sango world.

It was about 10:30 and I was laying in bed sulking, as has become my wont when it hits me each evening that another day has come and gone without my daughter making an appearance. My husband was in the kitchen doing the dishes, because in my sulky fit I had complained about how they were stacking up. However, I had also taken my complaints back, because I knew he was tired, and told him several times to leave them for the next day. He insisted on doing them. (Which, of course, gave me the right to say "I told you so" when the impending disaster transpired...)

All of a sudden, the peaceful silence of my sulk was disrupted by the most horrific scream I have ever heard from my husband's mouth...although in real life it probably lasted ten seconds, it seemed to go on forever, and the scream was my dog Nika's name sevearl times in this terrified and panicked voice. To make matters worse, the scream was accompanied by the violent and protracted sound of things crashing and smashing and breaking and splintering...and I'm not talking about one little breaking noise. When I say protracted, I mean it went on AND on.

I leaped from bed, my heart in my throat, and ran out to the living room much faster than I thought I could propel my body these days, only to encounter a scene straight from the post-party hotel room of a rowdy rock band. Thankfully Nika was okay (I had honestly thought I might find her seriously injured or worse, the way my husband's voice sounded) although she was cowering in absolute panic as my husband tried to calm her. The kitchen and living room floors were covered, COVERED, with smashed dishes and reaking with a terrible odor. It was a true household apocalypse.

What had happened, apparently, was that Miss Nika (we don't call her Sneaky Neak for nothing) had decided it would be a good idea to sneak a lick or two off of the dirty dishes my husband was loading, and somehow had gotten her collar stuck on one of the plastic prongs that hold the dishes upright. When she went to pull back and realized she was stuck, she panicked and tried to run, pulling the ENTIRE FULL LOWER RACK out with her, breaking it and nearly every dish in it as she tore in terror across the kitchen and into the living room with the rack still attached to her neck, slamming into and dislodging the table and her kennel, and the whole while spraying (my husband assures me the correct verb was spraying, not dripping) anal leakage across the walls and linoleum and carpet. For those not in the know with canine secretions, anal leakage is not the same thing as poop. It's a glandular fluid of a particularly foul, pungent, and lingering odor. If you haven't ever smelt it, be thankful.

Needless to say, the clean-up process was intense, involving sweeping, mopping, vacuuming, carpet cleaning, and wall and window scrubbing...but my sweet husband took charge of it while I took charge of calming down poor Nika, who's skittish at the best of times, not that this was one of them. I think we're lucky our little girl puppy didn't have a heart attack.

Anyway, I'm hoping that breaking dishes doesn't have any of the same significance as breaking mirrors, because if it does, my household is in for it. I'm also thinking that if hearing that kind of screaming and breaking, and my subsequent panic, couldn't put me into labor, then there's not a thing on the planet that will.

On the upside, I have a new task with which to occupy myself: looking for replacement dishes.

Nest-peration

I have to admit it: one thing no one would ever call me is a big neat freak. What's funny is that I used to do much more cleaning; I always helped around the house growing up, and kept my own places fairly neat...but then I met my husband. Somehow the rhythm we settled into included me doing most of the shopping and cooking and bill management, and he sort of naturally took over the cleaning. And after more than five years of this rhythm, my cleaning impulse has majorly atrophied, to the point that, other than laundry and putting things away, I depend on him for almost all housework. I think I've gotten so out of doing these tasks that now they seem rather monumental, instead of routine, and I get irritable when for some reason or other, I have to take care of them. I'm guessing that's not entirely healthy. But at the same time, I am endlessly grateful to have a husband who contributes so much to our domestic life, consistently, thoroughly, and without complaint. (Thank you, honey, for being so wonderful!)

But yesterday I woke up with energy to burn! And it was sunny and beautiful outside! After a six-mile walk with my mom (which left me embarrassingly, unreasonably sore!) I ran a few errands which included stopping at WalMart for a plastic drawer tower, whereupon returning home I (drum roll please!) cleaned out my den closet and organized my art supplies. I am a craft-rat, constantly gathering supplies for projects I usually don't have enough time for; I own more tubes of glue and glitter, more pads of scrapbook paper, more spools of ribbon than one women who is NOT a proprietor of a Michael's or Joann's should be proud to admit. And the beads, OH the beads! I am incapable of self control when it comes to those sparkly little objects. I literally own pounds upon pounds of them (ask my poor husband...I insisted on dragging them with us when we lived and traveled overseas for two years, and guess who ended up carrying them more often than not!) And until yesterday they were haphazardly scattered in multiple boxes in our catch-all closet. Accomplishing this task with my aching legs and back and monstrous girth was nothing short of ponderous. But I did it! And now I have a neat tower of easily accessible supplies (insert proud chest-puff here!)

Now, I know that many would label this odd behavior nesting, this phenomenon that's supposed to happen in the week or so before the baby arrives. However, I'm pretty sure no mere piddly hormones could encourage me to take on such a task. I'm kinda thinking that what people call nesting is actually just, pure and simple, desperation and boredom. I mean, I have exhausted the resources I have to keep insanity at bay. I've watched every movie I own, read until my head ached (guilty admission: but not, however, my books for school this semester, which I keep vowing to get a head start on), eaten at every restaurant I can think of, been to the theatre multiple times (including to see Juno last night, which I HIGHLY recommend! It was possibly the best movie EVER)...I mean, I am out of ideas here. At a certain point, there's just really nothing left for a girl to do to keep her mind off the stubbornly stuck baby and impending labor and the enormity of being a parent, except turn to the most abhorrent of household tasks (okay, maybe not the MOST abhorrent...I made my husband clean out the refrigerator last week!)

In the meantime, I'm trying every cocktail of make-baby-come remedies that I can. Thursday was sex, spicy Thai food, raspberry leaf tea, and an hour of the elliptical. Friday was the aforementioned 6-mile walk, sex, tea, and "nesting" tasks. (In a deep movie voice-over: What will Crystal do today? Can she find the right combination before INDUCTION this coming Thursday? Her desperation has already driven her to profuse sex and spicy food, but not to castor oil... YET! Stay tuned to find out how far she'll go!)

And let me just add that the news that BOTH Christina Aguilera AND Nicole Ritchie had their babies yesterday did NOT improve my morale.

On a Scale of One to Ten...

I'm a THREE! Dilated to three that is!

Now, I know this is nothing to jump for joy about...many a woman is dilated to 3 and doesn't give birth for 8 years and 6 days or whatever...but right now, in my world, something is something! It's a great little "happy due date" present for me just to know that my body is at least pondering releasing this child! In other news, Scarlett's doing well as always--my doctor said her heartbeat sounded "happy." And, I have a slightly better "drop-dead" date than I did before--the 17th instead of the 18th. If I don't go into labor before then, I will be reporting to the hospital at 5 a.m. (!!!! ouch!) one week from today to be induced.

Above is a great visual from my wonderful friend EmilyPie to demonstrate my progress! (Ha, my first visual, and my first hyperlink too, hope it works!)

Getting my kicks where I can!

5.5 Hours to go until it is officially January 10th...The Due Date. I fear it will pass without any sign of baby... SIGH! But I have vowed to fill it with as many tasks as possible to keep my mind off of what ISN'T happening. If only I didn't have a doctor's appointment tomorrow! For the last three weeks, even though I already KNEW it myself, just hearing my doctor's official pronouncement that no progress is being made has been enough to reduce me to tears (not in front of her yet, thank goodness, but each time I've had to make a quick pit stop in the bathroom for a few quick boo-hoo's before scheduling my next visit! Oh the joys of being a sappy, piddly pregnant lady!)

In the meantime, I have been extracting amusement where I can. Yesterday I was in a crowded elevator and someone asked me when I was due. I answered "Two days!" and everyone almost fainted! People literally backed up against the elevator walls and looked petrified. They all looked so scared that I had to rush to reassure them that the baby was not likely to slide out into my slacks anytime in the next few minutes. I suppose their heads were filled with the whole pregnant woman giving birth, trapped in an elevator scenario. Today it happened again at babiesrus; when a lady waiting behind me in line asked when I was due, and when I replied "tomorrow!" she literally took an involuntary step back away from me, looking petrified. The rest of the people in line looked none too at ease either. It was actually pretty funny. To her credit, when I was leaving the lady said "I hope you go into labor tonight!" She probably didn't realize that that is the nicest wish anyone could make for me right now!

So, I guess in order to take my mind off of the baby wait I should just start going around town and enjoying people's reactions when I tell them I am PAST my due date--as I will have to start doing the day after tomorrow! Apparently people see a 40-week pregnant woman as a ticking time bomb! Actually, I guess that's an apt metaphor. But really, do all of these people think I'd be traipsing around town if I were IN labor, for petessake?

At any rate, January 9th is almost over and the wait continues. I could well be imagining them, but I've been experiencing a little cramping today, more twinges than anything, and hardly worth mentioning in terms of pain, but hey...when you're in my boat, just about anything seems like a sign of progress!

Sad state of affairs...

I haven't been blogging much because, and this is slightly shocking for me, I just can't think of anything new to say. The baby is still not here and still not giving me any hope that she's planning to come any time soon. And it's like waiting for her is sucking all of my brain cells along with all of my motivation and any ability I have to create humorous situations out of every day life. And every day, as we creep closer to the BAD TIMING side of things, I get less excited and more stressed about how I'm going to handle full-time (actually overload) doctoral coursework AND an infant who just couldn't be a LEETLE early to make my, and her own, life a tiny bit easier.

Okay I know that's a bad attitude. I want this child so much I would welcome her anytime. But this is such a depressing time, this waiting period, days with nothing to do (and where people keep calling and asking if I'm in labor...NO DAMMIT!) that I was really hoping could be special, unshared time with my little Scarlett. Instead these days are passing in this haze of unproductivity that I can't seem to break out of, time closing in on a new semester where my baby won't and can't be the only thing on my plate, where she will have to share space with commitments and responsibilities I just can't set aside...

I am trying to think positive, I really am! I've even been spending a few minutes meditating every day, and every night before I go to sleep I say to myself, well, at least I get one more night of good sleep! (That was like when we were trying to conceive...every time the test came up negative I would say, well, at least I can have a few more drinks!!) But I am bored, bored, bored in my house all day. I miss the social contact of work, and the enforced productivity it engenders. At the same time, I can't make myself leave the house. I've watched every movie I own and read multiple novels and napped and taken baths and exercised for an hour every day on my elliptical, but instead of feeling pampered and relaxed, I just feel lazy and headachy and lonely (and the lonelier I get, the less I want to talk to people!). I am surfeited with my own company. I want to get out and go for long walks but the sidewalks are icy and the weather is rotten. It looks like Siberia out there today...close white clouds and heavy winds blowing the snow everywhere!

This whole thing is making me realize what a creature of timing and schedules I am. I've lost my excitement because I can't sustain it for indefinite periods of time! I need a concrete event to direct my energies toward.

So here's hoping my concrete event will happen soon, and I can get out of this funk, and come up with something better to say!!