8 Months Pregnant #2

Here is the second of a few day-by-day accounts:

Monday, December 3, 2007

I worked at my main job from 6 a.m. until past 11 a.m., primarily dealing with end-of-the-weekend accounting, but also running several loads of laundry, cleaning and stocking exam rooms, checking out and handing off all the patients, faxing a zillion records, and doing inventory and ordering for office supplies and the next week of in-house groceries.

It had been a crazy busy weekend with lots of money changing hands, and this morning, my job was particularly hard because we had some new folks on staff. That translated into lots of totally-understandable, but still time-consuming, mistakes to clean up. To add to the difficulty, I had hardly worked over the weekend, on account of Baby Daddy (BD) being in town, so I had to call co-workers individually to get to the bottom of several financial mysteries. Some mistakes had gone unnoticed by their committers, so tracing who I even had to call proved difficult in some cases.

All in a day's work, and yet, advanced pregnancy and my lack of sleep over the weekend had combined to make me exponentially slower, duller, and more exhausted. The morning crept.

After all that, I got home and really just wanted to curl up and sleep, but my sister came by the house around eleven and wanted to take me out to lunch. I weakly protested, but then consented, wanting to spend time with her. We were in a bit of a rush since we had to pick up my niece from preschool a short while later, so we ended up in downtown Evanston hunting for food. She suggested Potbellys and I'd never been before, but I was game. I knew my friend Steve was a huge fan.

OH MY LORD!!!

I never knew heaven came between two slices of bread until that day when I sank my teeth into The Deliciousness.

I remember every detail about that lunch -- that's how you know I was pregnant, ha ha ha! I remember I was wearing my black maternity jeans and I remember I was wearing my itchy (but very warm) cable-knit maternity sweater with its cozy, floppy turtleneck. I remember how we reminisced about the old Chandlers school supply store that used to be in the same building, and I even remember where we sat (it was busy and crowded so we took two barstools and looked out through the big picture window at Jamba Juice across the way).

It was a wonderful outing, not just because of the mouth-watering meal, the first of many I continue to enjoy to this day (which by the way, and unlike some foods -- Taco Bell's quesadillas come to mind LOL -- did not stop being delectable once the baby was born), but primarily because of the company I was keeping. It was just a lovely, sweet, sisterly, laugh-filled lunch together.

Then we went by my niece's preschool to pick her up. Her music teacher was waving goodbye to Sophie but she kept looking at me, and I looked at her, and suddenly she said BD's name in a questioning tone. Turns out she is the mom of one of his sometime fellow athletes. She was surprised to hear about the baby, and very excited. We commiserated over her wild new pup, whom her son had told me about when I saw him in Milwaukee in the early part of the summer.

Afterwards, my sister, my niece and I ran a couple of quick errands together, but it started to snow heavily so we headed home.

It was too cold out to do much, and I was too tired and too happy about having the rest of the day off to want to do anything more than put my feet up and massage my swollen ankles. I'd recently gotten my beloved Macbook so I was thrilled to have some spare time to play around on it for a bit.

But just when I'd settled in for the afternoon, my mom came home, waving a Blockbuster movie at me excitedly. It was (literally) a Hallmark holiday movie called The Christmas Card, and from the looks of it, it was an awful piece of smarmy fluff worthy of the Lifetime Movie Network.

I groaned at my mom's terrible taste (usually she chooses fantastic foreign films) and she couldn't help but echo my sentiment. "I have no idea why I chose this crazy movie," she confessed, embarrassed. "I just thought it would be fun to watch together if you were off work some night this week, with all the snow falling outside and our Christmas tree being up now and everything."

I told her I was actually off this night, then consented -- reluctantly -- to watch the movie. And oddly enough, that evening has remained in my memory as one of the most special moments of my entire pregnancy. Dad was napping upstairs. Mom and I each took a comfy chair in front of our old TV, and I propped my aching feet up on a little ottoman. I made myself a hot chocolate and covered myself in my cozy old Pokemon raggedy comforter and snuggled into it luxuriously. The snow fell outside and the sky grew dark at an absurdly-early hour.

The movie was totally the melodramatic piece of maw that we had anticipated but it proved to be great entertainment as we shouted catcalls at the awful acting and giggled each time we correctly predicted an actor's line or a (cue dramatic music) kissing session.

I hadn't noticed, until my mom pointed it out to me, that I was slowly returning -- like a bladder boomerang -- to the same frequent pee breaks that had been the hallmark of my early pregnant days. I'd just thought it was all the hot chocolate I was drinking LOL.

Then, towards the end of the film, as I paused the movie to waddle yet again to the facilities, Mom gave me such a strange look. I did the deed and returned, and as I settled myself back in my big wing chair, I saw she had the same look on her face.

"What?" I asked. "Gonna point out again that I'm a pee machine??"

"No, no, it's not that," my mom said, and then she looked at my baby belly with tearful eyes and said, "It's just that...I'm so excited to meet the little grandson you're carrying around in there. I mean, it's really starting to feel so real now. He's coming so soon, and I just can't wait!"

"Really?" I asked, cautiously. I suppose this was the first time I'd ever actually discussed the baby in terms of being "on the other side", at least in a concrete way, with someone very close to me. But also, I guess -- in a selfish way -- I just really wanted to hear her affirm what I'd just heard her say. I'd be lying if I didn't say that it just felt so goddamn good to hear those words.

I mean, of course I knew, everyone know, how much grandmothers love their grandkids, and of course I already knew she was excited about the baby-to-be; once she'd recovered from her initial shock, she very sweetly had been the first to buy the baby something when she lovingly chose a neutral white-and-yellow newborn sleeper with a little downy duck embroidered on it. But still.

Being on the brink of having my own baby, I was suddenly acknowledging anew the amazing ties that family enables, and whether it was the "Hallmark effect" of this sappy tearjerker, or whether it was true emotion, or whether it was Ayize's abrupt "response" to my mom's comment (he started swimming around like crazy right afterwards, much to her delight), or whether it was even some combination of all three -- well, regardless, it was just such a lovely moment.

Me, my mom, and the wee one sitting snug in my tummy, my hot chocolate in hand, the snow swirling outside the glass panes, the Christmas tree twinkling in the background, and the conclusion of this maudlin movie just a pause button away. A winter's womblike paradise!