w.i.f

wow. hi! so it's been awhile. according to the subject of this post, i am forty weeks and five days pregnant. i don't know how much you know about babies, but there's this rumor that they're supposed to show up around forty weeks. i was due on monday. when i go out in public, people ask when the baby is due. i say he was due on monday, and they look confused. you mean babies don't always come on their due date? but it's the date that they were due! something does not compute.

well, this baby is apparently rebelling already against the insane compulsion i have to be on time for everything in my life, and he is teaching me patience from the womb. i get the last laugh, though, because we're evicting him via induction tomorrow morning. ha! so at 10:00 am i'll be in the hospital getting all pitocined-up and making this guy get the hell out of dodge.

it's been what i can only call an amazing 40+ weeks, and i already feel so lucky to have been through this experience. we had a few issues here and there, but i mostly loved every second of it. you don't realize how much you can love someone just for punching your hipbone and kicking your rib at the same time. you don't realize how awesome it is to feel a hiccup so close to your cervix that you're wondering if you're going to see a head next time you sit down to pee.

i can't explain how much i already adore this little person i've been growing inside of me all this time. and how anxious i've been to finally meet him. i doubt you'll believe me, but he really is the cutest, most precious baby in the universe. i'll provide photographic evidence as soon as he get out of there. i really can't wait.

and growing

as of tomorrow, i am seven months pregnant. i have twelve weeks left to go. i am not ready to be this far along, but i want this baby to come out and this pregnancy to be over. obviously, pregnancy brings out a lot of conflicting emotions in me. and a lot of other weird things.

my sister-in-law had another precious baby girl on wednesday. when this little guy is born he'll have two cousins already. but they live 250 miles away, so i don't know how much he'll get to see them. i so want him to have a wonderful, close family like i had growing up. surrounded by cousins and aunts and uncles. but my family (and jared's) seem to be moving farther away every year, and i'm scared that he won't have the family i wish for him. how can i get everyone to quit moving away?

I tried to keep coming back. I really did. But every time I open this page I'm in Safari, and then I remember that if I want to compose an entry I really need to be using any browser BUT Safari. And rather than open a new browser I just close the whole thing and forget about it. Crappy.

But just to make us both feel better about the whole thing, here is my just-under-six-month-belly:

Who are the last five people you called on your cell phone?

My husband and I are the only two people on the planet who don't have cell phones. We used to, but we decided we didn't need them anymore and we've never looked back. People ask us all the time how we "live without them." This is seriously ridiculous. As Jared points out, people lived for thousands of years without cell phones. Why are they so vital to life now?

Now that we have a baby on the way, we acknowledge that it will probably be more convenient to have one. But we're also looking into good old fashioned pagers, just to be able to get a hold of each other. We'll see what happens.

What is the most interesting class you have ever taken? 
Submitted by Melissa. 

I'm actually in a class right now that ends on Thursday. It's US History from 1492 until the present, although we only made it through the 70's. I've really enjoyed this class and found it incredibly interesting. The main reason, I think, has been my professor's obvious passion and the fact that I'm old enough now to realize how well-founded that passion is. I tried taking this class a few other times, right out of high school, and never gave a crap about any of it. Now that I'm just taking the class for fun, I've gotten a kick out of all of it. It doesn't hurt that our text book is A People's History of the United States, which suits my left-leaning sensibilities perfectly. 

Who is your Alert In Case Of Emergency person?  

what the hell kind of question is this? it's my husband, or my mom, but who cares? are you planning on murdering me and aren't sure who to break the news to? seriously lame, vox. pull it together.

well, whaddya know. i've been gone for two months. so. my belly has gotten bigger and we're looking forward to finding out what we're having next friday. we've heard heartbeats and felt movements and all manner of exciting things. i'm hungry all the time, and tired, and mostly tired. and then i have some energy and it wears me out until i'm tired.

kurt vonnegut up and died.

he was one of my favorite writers, a man i greatly admired. i read about it on yahoo news, and then again on wikipedia news. and when i went back not an hour later, both sites had removed it from their top headlines. i guess it wasn't as important as the broken leg of new jersey's governor, or some kid named sanjaya's hair.

vonnegut probably expected as much, so i don't know why it made me so sad.

but i've got a mid-term to take, and a baby in my belly to take care of, so i musn't dwell on the loss of a literary icon or the indifference of our news media. i hope you all are having a lovely thursday. thank you so much for your kind words and congratulations. i had almsot forgotten why i used to come on this vox thing, and your comments were fantastic reminders.

i just had one of the loveliest easters on record. the whole weekend was wonderful. best of all, we finally got to tell both sides of my huge, extended family our fantastic news:

we're having a baby!

and now you know too. i am so unbelievably happy and silly and tired. ten weeks down and thirty or so more to go!