37 Weeks

The little girl is officially ungrounded today, now that I am at term. We were playing video games last night (involving a zombie apocalypse) and my stomach was moving so much it looked like I had something inhuman in me. So we ungrounded her and told her she could come out of her womb whenever she would like, but she has to play nicely. Both of us are getting more and more eager for her to be here already, especially now that our friends who were a month ahead of us had their baby on Monday (a week and a half late.) It has been nice to go through my first pregnancy with someone so close in age, due date, etc., but now that she has her baby, T and I are jealous that we don't have ours. Won't be too much longer, hopefully. We have our next OB appointment tomorrow, so we will see how much progress has been made, if any. Although I know that none of it (the dilation, effacement, etc) is an actual indicator for due date, especially after our friends had been showing favorable signs for over four weeks and she still had to be induced and labor was 14 hours.

I did have a funny thing happen to me this week. I went to the post office to mail out the Christmas presents to various family members (before it got too late.) There was the normal line you would expect at a post office, so I stood there with my wheely cart full of boxes and several in my hands, belly sticking out for all to see. A woman ahead of me in line was complaining about how long the wait was and how she hates just standing there cause it makes her uncomfortable and tired. Now this woman was in her early thirties max, normal build, and with no visible disability or health issue that would make her incapable of standing for the five minutes it took to get to the front of the line. Regardless, that didn't stop her from whining.

When she finally did get to the front of the line, she was called to one of the counters in the back. She had 78 letters that needed to be mailed, and she wanted the postal employees to stamp them for her. At first I thought that maybe she was thinking they had one of those electronic stamp things many offices have where you can set the price and just whip them on through, but no she wanted to buy paper stamps and have them put them on for her. Of course they wouldn't do that cause that isn't their job, but that didn't stop her from trying to debate the issue for two minutes. The employee made the mistake of saying to her, "We can't do that, and if you had just stamped them yourself, we would be done with this transaction already." Of course that made this woman go into a tailspin and she yelled at the postal employee for a bit about customer service, all while not doing anything to further the transaction.

Finally they get her all settled down, given the stamps, and then when they went to run her card it wouldn't read. The other counters were not having problems, so the employee said that she would have to go to the other counter to use her card. He walked her over to the counter and explained to one of the other postal employees about what needed to be done and walked away, leaving her to wait until that postal employee was done with their transaction and could run her card. Meanwhile the grumpy lady stood way off to the side putting the stamps on her letters, complaining loudly about how long this was taking and how tired and sore she was from it all. When the employee finished, she saw that the lady was putting stamps on her letters and simply said, "Can I help who is next?" That just happened to be me, so I started to waddle forward with my cart and packages, and the lady ran in front of me, bumping into my belly on the way, and starting yelling about how she was next. The postal employee tried to explain that she thought the lady would like to finish stamping her letters first so they could take them from her when the transaction was complete, and that she was trying to be nice to the poor pregnant woman who had been standing patiently in line with all those packages. The lady would have none of it, and just went about her business. While we all waited for her to be done with her transaction, this little old lady behind me in line asked me how far along I was, to which I replied that I was nine months pregnant. To which she said, "About ready to give birth, carrying all those heavy packages, and yet you still have a sweet smile on your face and haven't complained one bit about this line. Just goes to show you how good manners haven't been lost." Everyone smiled at that jab, well everyone but the cranky lady.

The other thing that happened this week, that made me feel less than stellar, was when I went to get lunch at a fast food drive through. The gentleman who was taking my money looked down at me in the car and said, "You must be having twins." Nope, not even close. I remarked that I was just due really soon, but he just shrugged it off. This is the second stupid comment from a male at a drive through I have had this month. The other was when I went to get a milkshake for T when he had the flu and didn't want anything else for dinner. I got a large for T and a small for me, and the man made a comment about the large being for me and it not being very healthy. I guess it serves me right for eating fast food, but honestly I have only had it a handful of times the entire pregnancy, and each time I try to stick with kids meal size proportions to keep the calories down. I do love though that each time it was a male who made a comment, cause no female in their right mind would ever insult a pregnant woman.

UPDATE: At Thursday's appointment I had made progress, 1cm and 75% effacement.