Still Here (35w4d)

Still pregnant.

Ever since I passed the 34-week mark, I've found myself selfishly impatient. Now, at 35 weeks and with my high-risk OB telling me "You're totally off bed rest and I'm fine with you going into labor at any time now; you could go for a run and go into labor if you wanted to," I'm pushing the "but it's only 35 weeks!" voice to the back of my head and diving full-force into the world of spicy foods, nipple stimulation, exercise-ball-bouncing and "seriously, what other things are safe to do to encourage the girls to come on out now?"

I am so, so ready. It's not that I'm even all that uncomfortable-- I am at night, when trying to sleep, and in the morning when trying to get up/roll over, but the rest of the time I generally feel pretty good. I have moments, of course, and sometimes getting up from sitting means my pelvis threatens to split in half, but if I forgot about my huge belly right now and closed my eyes while just sitting here on the couch, I wouldn't really feel all that pregnant.

It's just that... I want my babies. I've waited a lifetime for them, and more recently, I've waited about three years for them, and some of the days in those three years stretched out to feel like months. I want squishy baby bums and soft baby hair and baby sneezes and did I mention tiny little squishy baby bums??? I want to put my face in their necks and nuzzle them. I want to stop worrying if they're still okay in there every five minutes. I want to be done with kick counts, which I firmly believe were invented by someone who wanted to panic all gestating women just to keep us on our toes.

This feels like limbo. Not the same limbo of infertility, but a way to draw out that feeling, like, "You waited so long to be pregnant, and then you got pregnant, and now your punishment is to be pregnant forever and never have any actual babies, sry." Cue frustration.

I've eaten so much spicy food... Husband made us some delicious chili, some of which is hanging out in the freezer for postpartum "oh crap, we still have to feed ourselves, don't we?" moments, and tonight I ate my weight in spicy calamari, including nearly all the banana pepper rings... nothing. Come on, uterus! Maybe you just want some more raspberry leaf tea?

I know the girls might not be ready yet. But hear me out... Husband normally has classes Monday through Thursday nights, which take him away from home for a good four hours when you count in public transit travel time. Mondays also include some earlier classes, so he leaves the house around 11am and my mom picks me and the dog up, then Husband comes to get us around 10:15pm from my parents' house. On top of that, Husband had a meeting scheduled for this morning at 11am which would have had him out of the house for a few hours.

But then-- Husband's Thursday night class (from yesterday) was canceled. And his Monday night class. And then his Monday daytime class, and the meeting with his supervisor that follows it. And then, last night, his meeting for this morning was canceled.

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of this week were all so busy for him that I was at my parents' house three days in a row. Wednesday he dropped me off there at 8:45am and didn't come back until about 10:30pm, and he was at school working on a case almost the whole time. But now? Now, suddenly, in one weekend, he went from having a normal full schedule to having nothing between Thursday and Tuesday.


Doesn't it seem a bit fated that we have the girls this weekend? Because holy crap, if we did, it would be kind of awesome.

I know that means they'll show up next time we're really busy and nothing will happen this weekend at all, but man... it would be so perfect. We'd be able to relax a bit at the hospital, knowing that Husband wasn't missing anything important at school and/or not needing him to be running around between hospital, home and school trying to make all the important/hard to reschedule appointments and classes...

I know you can't schedule birth (unless by c-section, of course), and ours isn't coming any closer than November 15th (did I mention that was our scheduled c-section date? I can't remember what I last posted about) unless it happens on its own. I just hate situations where I can't have any control over what's happening in my life, especially with big things like this, and the whole "sword of Damacles" thing with feeling like it could happen at literally any second is just infuriating.