15 Days Away

V experienced her first real contraction yesterday (Friday). In a word... painful. It came out of nowhere, stopped her right in her tracks,and basically made a mockery of everything she thought was pain before then. What's comical is that, as most of you know our goal is to have a natural childbirth (i.e., no induction, epidural, etc.) ... but when that first contraction hit on Friday night, I think V would've let me give her an epidural right here at home if I had one.

But once it passed, we laughed about it, and of course I made fun of her for being ready to punk out after the first contraction... but all jokes aside, I still trust 100% that she'll be just fine. My guess is that, more than anything else, she was caught off-guard by the unknown. All of the Braxton Hicks contractions before then made her think that she was actually getting a preview of something. To get a better picture, imagine going from playing high school basketball to playing in the NBA overnight: After a few games, you might catch on eventually, but that first one will definitely throw you for a loop and makes you question everything.

But now that we know what we're working with, she has already turned it around and been rolling thru them like a veteran. The contractions are still pretty infrequent... but frequent enough to give us hope that the birth is truly just around the corner. Like I was telling my mom earlier today, the looming anticipation that's involved easily makes the last few weeks of the pregnancy the longest. Now that we've got everything layed out and are feeling pretty secure in our readiness, the waiting game has quickly gone from super exciting to terribly torturous. I feel like we're standing in the dark, hiding behind furniture, waiting to jump out and shout "Surprise!!!" ... but the birthday boy (girl?) is like 2 hours late.

That's a long time to stand in the dark and hide behind furnitiure. My knees are getting stiff and I'm ready to go home.

With that said, I can't imagine what it feels like for those people who go past their due date. We've got 15 days left, and I already feel like our baby is delinquent with it's tardiness.



In other news, I also got an early Fathers day gift... which was V's obvious attempt to make me look even worse for my Mothers Day faux pas. Anyway, my printer has been "semi-broken" for a while now; bleeding ink all over my printed pages like somebody stabbed it. I say semi-broken because the printer still works fine if you ask me... it just takes me about 20 minutes and a dozen q-tips to clean it out every time I want to print a single page (anything to not spend money!!). Well evidently I was using up too many q-tips, because she bought me a new one. And anyone who knows me knows that I am not an easy person to shop for... especially when it comes to photo related stuff. But I have to say that V definitely did her research and came thru like a trooper. The printer is fantastic, and exactly the one I would've ordered if I hadn't been too frugal to buy one. I know she had to read a lot of reviews and printer specs to get that one right.

OK, so I officially suck for not coming thru on Mothers day. Thank you, V, for the confirmation.